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Dick Tracy, 11/26/19

Oh, wow, a couple of beloved comics characters from a cancelled strip are being revived, in … Dick Tracy, what an extremely surprising development! I won’t deny you the pleasure of taking your own journey through Steve Roper and Mike Nomad’s Wikipedia page, in the course of which you’ll learn that it was originally a wacky Native American minstrelsy strip called Big Chief Wahoo that morphed into a hard-hitting adventure strip starring two white guys, written for decades by Allen and John Saunders, the father-son team who also wrote Mary Worth for most of that stretch. I’ll only note that we seem to be out of the strip’s original continuity — its run ended with Roper and Nomad in their 60s and Roper standing over the grave of his dead wife, who divorced him from an insane asylum and gave birth to a daughter she never told him about — and that Proof Magazine (which does investigative reporting and not, like, articles about geometry, I think) must have a rental insurance premium as high as Woods and Wildlife’s if Steve’s extremely chill reaction to his car getting blown up is any indication.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 11/26/19

I always find it funny when repeated tropes/running gags with some basis in reality just drift further and further from their original germ of truth until they veer into truly nightmarish territory. Like, dogs are territorial animals and sometimes distrust strangers coming onto their turf, which is why they can be aggressive towards postal workers, meter readers, and other outsiders who have reasons to visit hundreds of homes a day; but the form this conflict has taken in the world of Mother Goose and Grimm is that Grimm, a sapient dog who can think in English sentences, hungers for mailman flesh.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/26/19

“They’re all exceptional — in the sense that we had to make exceptions to our policies to hire them, because most of them did very poorly in medical school. Ha! I’m kidding, of course. Fully two-thirds of our patients survive surgeries here, probably you’ll be fine.”

Six Chix, 11/26/19

Oh, this is nice! This lady’s friend is a ballerina and got a high-profile role, so she’s coming out to support her and watch the big performance! If anyone knows what the “joke” in this strip is, I’d love it if you could shoot me an email explaining it to me.

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Mark Trail, 11/8/19

Sorry I haven’t kept you up to date on what’s been going on in the month since Mark and Dr. Camel and their crew got attacked by a rhino, but honestly trust me when I say that it hasn’t been that interesting! There was an elephant ride but even that was more boring than it sounds, and as you can see they’re still in Nepal’s semi-tropical lowland zone and not in the rugged, mountainous region, which I assume is infested with yeti. Sorry, Mark Trail, you can’t promise me yeti and then just show me a bunch of boring-ass animals I can see in any zoo and expect me to remain engaged! In today’s strip, Genie desperately tries to liven things up by giving everyone cholera, but Mr. Mark “No Fun” Trail is gonna put a stop to even that.

Mary Worth, 11/8/19

An underrated thing about human beings — which is often borne out by, say, the oeuvre of Sacha Baron Cohen — is that we try our hardest to maintain illusion that everything is going fine and normally even when one participant in a social situation is behaving bizarrely and inappropriately. I both appreciate and find it fairly realistic that Zak, Estelle, and Iris are cheerfully going around the table saying what they liked about their meal while Wilbur is literally smearing himself with noodles. It’s magnificent.

Six Chix, 11/8/19

Sorry, I refuse to believe that this supposed slacker would have a framed picture hanging at a weird angle but then leave his cans neatly placed upright on the floor. And what are you going to stain your shirt with that’s grey? I feel like he’s protesting a little too much, like he wants a girlfriend who’s going to whip him into shape, literally, as part of some slovenliness dom/sub play.

Dennis the Menace, 11/8/19

So … instead of pretending to do yard work, you’re instead going to pretend to have a big dispute at the condo board meeting about the various estimates on what it’s going to cost to fix the elevator? I think we can agree both of these games suck ass.

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/17/19

Oh hey you guys, do you remember, how, way back in 2013, Lisa’s Story, Les’s sad-ass misery porn book about his dead wife, Lisa, got optioned for a movie deal? And Les got a huge check for it? But then he had a hard time writing the script, and then he did manage to write the script, but it sucked? And then he went to LA and the people who paid him enormous amounts of money to write the movie wanted to make it entertaining, and Les moped around the fancy hotel they put him up in, and Mason Jarre, the dumb idiot they cast to play Les who at that point was supposed to represent the worst of empty-headed Hollywood, didn’t even realize who Les was, and then Les was weird and condescending and gross to the actress cast as Lisa, and then Les exercised his right to get his “kill fee,” which in the Funkyverse is apparently the payment you get when you bail on the people who hired you and were counting on you, and finally the the whole production collapsed, and Les was thrilled about it? Well, it’s 2019 now, and it seems Mason Jarre, who is now one of the “good” characters in the strip, finally read Les’s terrible book, the one that was supposed to be adapted into the movie where he was going to play the main character! And now he wants to make a movie out of it! But this time he’s going to make it right, by which we mean it’s gonna be depressing as hell and suck ass. I’m very excited about this!

Crankshaft, 10/17/19

Meanwhile in Crankshaft, by which we mean ten years earlier, Pam and Jeff’s son and daughter-in-law have thrown a surprise birthday party for Pam, which has also doubled as an announcement that they’re having a baby, which has led Pam and Jeff to remember that birthday party back in college where the two of them had sex, a process which, under the right conditions, is ultimately what produces babies. Do you think they just went at it in front of everyone else at the party, or was Jeff the only one who showed up?

Six Chix, 10/17/19

This is it, guys. It’s the perfect comic strip. Start with the phrase “The pioneers of television,” the common saying we all know and love, and then draw some pioneers next to a sign that says “Television.” BOOM. PERFECTION. SHUT DOWN THE INDUSTRY, IT’S ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE