Post Content

Hey, everyone! Before we launch into this week’s comics, I want to draw your attention to the Mary Worth And Me blog, where faithful reader Wanders has this year’s Worthy Awards nominees up! You get to vote in a number of categories, including Best Storyline, Outstanding Performances by Guest and Recurring Characters, Outstanding Panel, and, of course, the most coveted Worthy Statuette of all, Outstanding Performance By A Floating Head. Vote early, vote often!

Beetle Bailey, 12/19/16

One of my less favorite Beetle Bailey running jokes is the “troops dress up in wacky outfits and call it ‘camouflage’” joke that pops up on the regular. Obviously an army has to learn how to blend into the natural environment, but I’m reasonably certain that nobody has gone into either combat or an army training exercise dressed as either a bipedal, armless sheep or a bale of green hay with a visible face and limbs. In this lineup of madness, Beetle’s disguise actually seems most grounded in reality: after all, the history of soliders who have defected to the enemy when expedient — and indeed become their former opponents’ biggest cheerleaders — is as long as the history of warfare.

Shoe, 12/19/16

I spent an entire lifetime of comic reading getting accustomed to a world where sapient bird-people engage in journalism and live in a tree-city where certain architectural elements resemble those developed for human civilization, but today I feel like I’ve had a pretty important additional element — that said bird people are slightly more sophisticated than us technologically, and have access to near-future innovations like self-driving cars — dumped on me with little warning. Anyway, it’s good to have my fundamental pessimism confirmed here: even when the cars drive themselves, the rest of life is still going to suck.

Post Content

Funky Winkerbean, 12/1/16

Oh, so, if you’re curious, serial star Cliff Anger did time in prison because he tangled with Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare! You might be tempted to read something into this regarding Current Political Events, but in fact Funky Winkerbeans are written a year in advance, so it’s really just a chance to say “What if this cranky ancillary character who seemed like a loser … were also a martyr?” Anyway, Cliff took a job on tramp steamer in the summer of 1940, and that tramp steamer heroically sailed right through the Atlantic and the Baltic when those seas were an active war zone just so that Cliff could hang out with his good buddy and political idol, Joe Stalin. Unfortunately this was a full 18 months before Stalin became a stalward ally in America’s war against fascism, so Cliff had to pay the price.

Shoe, 12/1/16

What’s hotter than bird-on-bird sexual encounters initiated by sad drunks in a depressing fern bar? Bird-on-bird sexual encounters initiated by sad drunks in a depressing fern bar that make up part of a satanic ritual, apparently!

Post Content

Shoe, 11/19/16

Wait, if Punxsutawney Phil really had Secret Groundhog Powers letting him know about the coming rise in global temperatures, wouldn’t he have bought some nice little place in Canada, miles away from the ocean? No, I think this is evidence that the whole Groundhog Day business is corrupt, and Phil is retiring with his ill-gotten gains from Big Winter.

Spider-Man, 11/19/16

I see two ways this storyline can go. MJ might use her break from acting and her vast wealth earned from Broadway stardom to take her and Peter on a lovely two-week vacation somewhere nice, where he spends his time sulking about the fact that his wife makes more than him until he’s forced by circumstances to fight crime, at which point he starts sulking about that. Or she could just wax rhapsodic about the repairs! She already looks pretty dreamy about it in the final panel, to be honest. “The roof! Oh, Peter, they’re going to fix the roof!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/19/16

Welp, this Rex Morgan plot wrapped very quickly and without much conflict or action, and thank goodness! Who needs that kind of overstimulation from the funny pages? Certainly not me! Anyway, I appreciate our victorious cop putting a dramatic pause before saying downtown in panel three. Really lets us know that this whole things is wrapping up, right? If you want to imagine that the action freeze-frames and then Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” starts blaring out, I think that would add to the experience.