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Crankshaft, 8/19/22

“Slight markup” is my favorite part of this. Crankshaft isn’t doing this for the money! He’s doing it so he can make a big show out of being an asshole.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/19/22

Hey, remember how, at Les’s suggestion, Lisa made a bunch of videotapes before she died for Summer to watch over the course of her adolescence? Well, this week in Funky Winkerbean we learned that in fact, it was Crazy Harry’s idea! Pretty wild, huh? Does this upend everything you thought you knew about this strip? No? You say you actually don’t spend much time thinking about Funky Winkerbean, and while you vaguely remembered the whole videotape thing, you didn’t actually remember that it was supposedly Les’s idea and don’t really know why you should care that it wasn’t? Interesting. Interesting.

Marvin, 8/19/22

Look, I know the question of “what mental age is Marvin, the title character in the comic strip Marvin, supposed to be” is a muddled one, but this is still a kid who pisses and shits himself on the regular. He’s not thinking about the future at all! He’s never thought about anything but the present.

Six Chix, 8/19/22

Oh, sorry, are Marvin’s piss jokes too “basic” for you? Well, check out Six Chix, where the piss jokes are extremely baroque.

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Blondie, 7/20/22

One of my least favorite running bits in this strip is when Dagwood and his work friends enact some elaborate scenario to match up with whatever pan-cultural event or sports championship or anniversary is on the big calendar hanging on the wall over at Blondie HQ. But I really appreciate how this strip subverted my expectations: I genuinely thought the final panel would be some dumb scene with people in homemade spacesuits or whatever but instead it’s just Dithers saying “Get it? He’s a big lazy dipshit! Just look at him. Doesn’t really have anything to do with the moon, I just wanted an excuse to point that out.”

Six Chix, 7/20/22

I genuinely appreciate the scenario being laid out here: that this is a sophisticated vampire bar where humans are killed and drained of their blood (presumably not in that order) in the kitchen so that the clientele can just enjoy their sustenance in a civilized way from glassware without having to fight for it for once, but Vlad and his newfangled vegan vampirism is so repellent to the proprietors that they just threw coffin full of oranges at him and were like “Here, you figure it out, you sick freak.”

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Six Chix, 6/11/22

It’s not quite “guy in a gimp suit gets eaten alive by rats” but “guy in cargo shorts gets eaten alive by [squints] giant mosquitos, I think?” is pretty good. I’m kind of interested in how they’re methodically devouring him from the top down, leaving him only a pair of disembodied legs by the point we see in the second panel. I’d object that he should be gushing blood from the waist, but these are mosquitos we’re talking about; I assume they drained the body of blood first and now we’re just watching them consume the husk somehow.

Family Circus, 6/11/22

I feel like Big Daddy Keane’s utterly affectless face is a great counterpoint to Dolly here. Daddy stopped feeling an ache in his heart — or anything else in his heart, for that matter — years ago. At least he can still feel his head. It hurts like hell, but he can still feel it.