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Crankshaft, 11/30/11

Once upon a time, the Funkyverse strips were actually whimsical and funny and not at all depressing, and you can find evidence of this embedded in some of the strips’ running gags, which now seem deeply horrible wrenched out of their original context. Remember how teenage hall monitor Les used to guard his station with a machine gun? In the old days that was just cheery absurdism, but now it would probably set up a story about a Columbine-style massacre — or, no, that’s too flashy, it’d probably actually be about how the gun went off accidentally and hit an innocent student-athlete in the leg, ending the Scapegoats’ chance for a championship and the poor kid’s promising career, leading to a downward spiral into alcoholism, suicide, etc.

Anyhoo, Crankshaft constantly destroying mailboxes out of some combination of incompetence and spite and Lena’s inedible and possibly poisonous brownies both had a similar sort of innocence about them back in the day, but in the modern Funkyverse we get to see the emotional devastation that they cause. Ha ha, that man is legitimately furious because Crankshaft ran over his mailbox, and neither Crankshaft nor the bureaucrats who employ him care, which just makes him madder! The best part of today’s strip is the expressions of genuine horror on the ’Shaft’s fellow drivers’ faces, as if somehow they’re only now realizing what a colossal dick he is.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/30/11

Speaking of the Funkyverse, today’s second panel could pretty much be its mission statement.

Six Chix, 11/30/11

It probably says something about me that this is a cartoon featuring the evil queen from Snow White talking about freezing her eggs and the thing that most baffles me about it is the setting. Is she on a date? Isn’t this talk a little heavy for a date? Or has she replaced her magic mirror with a nebbishy personal assistant, and this is the two of them unwinding after work?

Spider-Man, 11/30/11

“Yes! I finally got a staff job in the lucrative, growing print media business! And all I had to do was give my tyrannical boss a picture of my superhero identity consorting with a known criminal! I’m a genius!”

Archie, 11/30/11

Archie’s I Love The ’90s week continues! Today’s flashback memory: Remember when they started giving talk shows to ethnic people?

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Mary Worth, 11/29/11

So, whatever the Mary-gets-her-purse-stolen plot lacked in action or interest of any kind, it made up for in brevity. Mary gets her purse stolen, Mary and Toby prattle on about fraud alerts and lists of credit card numbers for a few weeks, and now we’re apparently done. The whole thing only took a month! Remember, a month in real time generally covers a period of Mary Worth story time so short that it can only be detected with extremely precise scientific instruments.

And now we’re on to a heartbreaking missing child plot, as Mary stares at poor Emily’s poster, heavy-lidded and smug (“Well, at least I didn’t have my child stolen. Really, these Smith people ought to have been more vigilant”). Personally, I’m hoping very strongly that the purse-snatching was just the set-up to the real action. What if Emily has been kidnapped by the thieves who stole Mary’s purse, because they’re assembling a Dickensian child-pickpocket ring? That sounds pretty dastardly, but you have to admit that people who dress like this are capable of anything.

Archie, 11/29/11

Oh, man, I sure hope that these ’90s Archie reruns continue to be our window into the sort of things out-of-touch adults thought kids cared about, in the ’90s! Yesterday it was teen pregnancy, and today it’s parental advisory labels on music. Just as young people say “bad” when they mean “good,” they also take warning labels as an indication that music is worth listening to! Also big with the youth in the ’90s: mullets, and t-shirts that use transitive slang verbs intransitively.

Six Chix, 11/29/11

Ha ha! It’s funny because these birds will freeze to death, because they’re poor!

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Six Chix, 11/8/11

I’m a little puzzled by the visual messaging going on here. The icon of the culty robed figure, standing on a public street and holding a sign, is well established in the cartoonist’s vocabulary, if not in reality. Usually these people are bearded old dudes, and I’ll accept the divergence from the type here to accommodate Six Chix’s lady-centric mission, but the placards they carry generally offer dire warnings of impending apocalypse, and so I don’t buy the slightly too wordy (is “Hugs Not Drugs” trademarked?) anti-drug PSA this woman is perpetrating. I do like the sassy pill-popper’s response, though. “Oh, honey, I can go days and days without physical contact with another human being — let’s be honest, most of them smell bad or linger too long or both — but it’s been four hours since I took my last Vicodin and I’m really starting to miss it, you know?”

Mark Trail, 11/8/11

I certainly hope that Kelly Welly’s article is just an expansion of what we see in panel three, which is to say that it should be page after page of closeup photos of her eyes and bangs overlaid with free associated noun phrases. It will win every single Pulitzer Prize available.

Apartment 3-G, 11/8/11

Meanwhile, the Apartment 3-G writer and artist are in the middle of one of their “you are going to draw things if I have to kill you” spats. “What will it take to get you to draw clothing that is not boring? Lu Ann’s breasts? Is that what it takes? Fine.”