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Crankshaft, 4/9/17

So, today’s Crankshaft only makes sense to people who understand all the weird nooks and crannies of the Funkyverse’s decades-long chrono-disjunctive narrative arcs, and, due to my many sins, I am one of those people, and as a punishment I guess I’m going to explain it to you? See, this takes place a decade in the past compared to Funky Winkerbean, and so Les is still hawking Fallen Star, his book about the murder of John Darling, who was the father of his soon-to-be-in-this-timeframe-dead wife’s biological son’s future wife. He spent years researching this book, which revealed that John Darling was killed by Plantman, as depicted in the final installment of the failed Funkyverse strip John Darling. The book was a financial failure! But Lillian, who has gone to this seminar on how to write a book only to encounter an author so unaccomplished that he held a book signing in the illegal bookstore she runs in her attic, is full of reassuring sentiments. Don’t worry, she says to Les: someday you’ll write something special, once your wife dies of cancer — like, I don’t know, the very book that appears in the first panel??? Anyway, the lesson here is that if you want literary success, you can’t write about just anyone dying, it has to be about someone you really love.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/9/17

Meanwhile, in the Funkypresent, it turns out Les is spending the energy he’s supposed to be channeling into yet another book about Lisa into primate-terminology-banter with his current, alive wife. C’mon, Les, the misery porn’s not going to write itself!

Mary Worth, 4/9/17

You know, the thought of going on a cruise has never really appealed to me, but the first couple panels here show me some of the charm. Who hasn’t wanted to yell at Florida from a safe distance away? “FUCK YOU, FLORIDA,” is what I’d shout. “YOU FUCKIN’ SUCK.”

Meanwhile, Toby is getting awful philosophical in the last panel. It’s true that you never know what tomorrow may bring! Maybe it’ll bring some guy out of his mind on nicotine withdrawal, just stabbing everyone who gets in his way on the no-cigs hell-cruise that destroyed his will to live! Who can say!

Shoe, 4/9/17

It turns out Roz, a major character in the long-running syndicated comic strip Shoe, is bisexual! This is an intriguing revelation, but it’s not an excuse for running a strip without a punchline of any sort?

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Shoe, 4/2/17

Phil Vittles died in the midst of an act of monstrous cannibalism, his love of fine food having twisted in on itself until he lost all sense of ethics and became a creature of pure appetite. Did his victim’s family stumble upon the scene of awful carnage and strike him down in revenge? Did he fall ill because, of course, no health-department-inspected restaurant would serve the criminal meal he craved, and so his nightmare-dish was unsafely prepared? Or did he finally have a moment of moral clarity as to the murderous act he’d committed, and drop dead of shock?

Pluggers, 4/2/17

Pluggers may not spend a lot of time typing on one of those new-fangled computers like one of those hacker fellas, but they’ll tell you one thing they like: watching some god-danged television. You know how many channels they got these days?

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Slylock Fox, 3/15/17

Wow, some hard truths about animals being laid down here, including the hard truth that owls … are actually kind of dumb? I bet the post-animalpocalypse regime will come to feel bad staffing its entire legal system with owls, then. Just another human superstition they should’ve rejected! Also, it mysteriously seems that the very smart crows never appear in Slylock Fox, at least not in any of the strips in my archive. We can only assume that the Event that granted all the animals sapience made the crows super-intelligent, and they all built spaceships and went to a different, better planet, or maybe transcended their physical bodies and became creatures of pure mind.

Shoe, 3/15/17

Ha ha, yes, it’s funny because Loon’s butt froze, but I have to question what prompted the question in the first place. The Perfesser is just reading the financial section of the newspaper, and thinks, “Huh, you know who seems like a criminal who probably had a warrant taken out against him to ensure that he couldn’t use any of his ill-gotten resources to continue his illegal activities? My friend and co-worker over here!”

Mary Worth, 3/15/17

Dr. Jeff has been taking some time off from his busy schedule of going to the Bum Boat with Mary and trying and failing to get her to marry him to nurse his bad knee at his daughter and son-in-law’s house, so surely he’ll understand when Mary decides to take time off from going to the Bum Boat with Dr. Jeff and rejecting his marriage proposals to go on a fun, sexy cruise with Tobey! And screw the column! Nobody gives a shit about the column! Let nothing stand in the way of this glorious plotline!

Blondie, 3/15/17

Neither Alexander nor Cookie know what “flash in the pan” means. Sad!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/15/17

[long, increasingly awkward silence]