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Judge Parker, 9/16/19

OK, let me let you in on some “Hollywood insider” information: I’m afraid that spending three days telling a couple of unrepped aspiring screenwriters your convoluted life story of spying and betrayal does not mean that the movie that’s going to exonerate you will be opening nationwide in time for awards season. I’m not sure how often along the long, winding path to production April’s gonna need to blow back into town to threaten someone with a gun: when our gals try to get an agent? At meetings with Netflix execs who see it more as a series? When they get the first round of producer notes telling them the protagonist needs to be more likable? This could be a lot more work than she’s bargained for, and she might want to look into getting an apartment in LA.

Six Chix, 9/16/19

I honestly appreciate to work put into actually making the grawlixes look like real physical objects, but to me it has the downside of trying to read them as a rebus and figure out what the swear word is supposed to be. “Screw poop”? “Screwy shit”? “Screw turd”? I feel like I’m so close, but not quite there.

Hi and Lois, 9/16/19

Hell yeah, Trixie feels good about how she looks and does not feel constrained by the gender binary. You go, kiddo!

Shoe, 9/16/19

It took me a few seconds to see the flowerpot that Biz is holding in panel two here, and so I parsed “bouquet” in the sense of “odor” or “smell” and assumed that the poor old man had the literal small of death on him. Like, just the odor of an embalmed corpse that he couldn’t get out of his nose. Anyway, let’s all have a fun week, everyone!

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Funky Winkerbean, 9/10/19

Hey, everyone, did you catch the fun comics news in the Grey Lady yesterday? It turns out that this week’s strips, in which a CTE-addled Bull obsessively washes the family laundry over and over again, isn’t just another round of the usual CTE-addled laffs that we’ve come to expect. Nope, according to a big, spoilers-heavy article in the New York Times, it’s just the setup for a month-long storyline that climaxes with … (wait for it) … (stop reading now if you don’t want to learn the extremely predictable denouement to all this, I guess) … Bull’s suicide! Did you worry that Lisa’s demise, being brought about more or less by random chance, wasn’t bad enough??? Well, good news, the character deaths in Funky Winkerbean are just going to get more grim from here on in, and will continue until all the demands are met.

Mark Trail, 9/10/19

Fortunately Mark Trail is a tragedy-free zone, which means that Mark probably isn’t going to be eaten by a yeti. I do enjoy that Doc has stood up in the background between panels; perhaps he assumed that, having managed to survive a desert flash flood, he’d proven his mettle and would now be Mark’s permanent companion on adventures. His facial expression in panel two indicates that he’s terribly disappointed to be displaced by some kind of freakish camel-scientist hybrid.

Shoe, 9/10/19

Shoe of course is a leader on the funny pages among strips that telegraph to us how little any of the characters want to be there or to be participating in the “jokes” or “wordplay” therein. We’re all familiar with the Patented Shoe Goggle Eyes Of Horror, but I’m fond of today’s more subtle offering, in which the Perfesser leans away from Roz between panels, as if to get as far away from this “punchline” as possible without actually getting up.

Gasoline Alley, 9/10/19

The Gasoline Alley characters, meanwhile, are proud of their punchlines! So proud they need to explain them to one another, at great length, to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/16/19

I’m not sure what it is Jughaid thinks will be “gross”. It could be the process of transformation by which an amphibian becomes a man, which will no doubt involve skin stretching, bones snapping and mending and snapping again, and the strange, chimeric creature bellowing out in pain as every single cell transmutes into something different, on fire from whatever cursed witch’s magic turned him into a frog in the first place; on the other hand, it could just be Mary Beth kissing a frog, I suppose. Either way, he’s right to think that Jamey would want to see it! Not a lot by way of entertainment available around these parts.

Shoe, 8/16/19

Ha ha! It’s funny because the Perfesser will soon find himself both humiliated and impoverished by our medical system!