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Funky Winkerbean, 8/26/13

Oh goodie, it’s been far too long since the main characters in Funky Winkerbean have faced an existential threat that will provide them with an opportunity to wax self-righteously! Since many of Westview’s teachers depend on these subjects’ funding for their livelihood, we should be treated to a delightful melange of “Our children won’t receive the cultural education they need” and “We will be forced to beg for change and live in a cardboard box under the elevated highway on the outskirts of town.”

Much as I support full funding for arts education, I do feel it necessary to point out that lunch is somewhat more important in the hierarchy of needs than the other subjects facing the axe. Don’t worry, teachers, they’ll be enough cash to restore your classes, once the weaker students have been strategically starved to death!

Gil Thorp, 8/26/13

Sorry I sort of dropped the ball on the end of the Gil Thorp summer wrestling storyline, everybody! Gil and Herk had their wrestling match and everyone had a good time and then as he headed out of town Herk called Gil by his real name, implying that his tragic dementia was actually just a wrestling angle and thus bringing the blurred line between artifice and reality out of the squared circle and in to everyday life. But now summer’s just about over, and two local gals are on a mission … a mission for man tip. Haha, just kidding, I’m deliberately misconstruing the dialogue in the third panel so it sounds like they’re talking about a penis, but really if you give your kid a name that is or can be shortened to “Tip” you need to be prepared for this sort of outcome.

Slylock Fox, 8/26/13

Slylock Fox has never been a more shameful and transparent shill for the universal surveillance state than it is today. Remember, everyone, evil-doers might be holding adorable penguins captive in horrifying basement freezer-prisons! That’s why the staff of utility companies need to monitor everyone’s energy usage and pass any anomalies on to meddling fox-cops and/or heavily armed SWAT teams, for freedom.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/26/13

Ha ha, it’s funny because Hootin’ Holler is so impoverished and isolated from mainstream American life that its residents are wholly ignorant of basic civic infrastructure that most of us take for granted!

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Mark Trail, 8/12/13

No use denying it any longer. Mark Trail has taken Rusty fishing — it says so right there in the strip. A treasured Comics Curmudgeon article of faith — that Mark never, ever takes Rusty fishing; that such an event is not physically possible — lies in dust and ashes. Can you imagine how the Seekers felt when their prophesied flying saucer failed to show up back in December 1954? You can? Well, this is nothing like that — this is how the rest of us would have felt had the saucer arrived right on time, picked up the Seekers, and left us all to die in the flood.

It’s hard to feel too bad about it, though. I mean, look at the little scamp so darn happy there in panel two. You just want to give him a big hug, never mind that he’s hideous, fictional, and holding a fish.

Slylock Fox, 8/12/13

As is widely known, Count Weirdly genetically engineered animals into sapient bipedal monsters in a deranged effort to replace humans lost to an unnamed apocalypse. Here we see the horrific cost of his obsession: the graves of a century of victims from his early, failed experiments. None tears at the heart more than poor Rita Rabbit, doomed by ruined DNA to live her short life backwards, dreaming only of the chance to savage her insane creator/tormentor one time before her teeth recede into their gums and she is deconceived forever.

Beetle Bailey, 8/12/13

Sarge deadpans a perfectly symmetric, perfectly ambiguous punchline: at once, the pillow is insufficiently firm to meet Army regulations and Army regulations insufficiently rigorous to ban the pillow. From the depths of his forbidden/permitted pillow, Beetle grins directly at his audience: See? We can do irony as well as the next guy — but as hardened warriors, we just don’t go in for all that postmodern self-referential bullshit ;-)

–Uncle Lumpy

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Slylock Fox (panel), 8/11/13

In a neglected roadside nature museum sits a dusty diorama labeled “The Eagle.” But there is no eagle — just the shattered skeleton of a fox lying on a patch of bloodstained dirt near a few tufts of reddish fur and what might be part of an ear. The yellowing card reads, “The diet of the American Bald Eagle is almost entirely fish. An eagle will not attack a fox unless it competes for the eagle’s food or otherwise provokes it.”

What I’m saying is don’t piss off the eagle, Sly. I mean just look at him, Jeez.

Beetle Bailey (panels), 8/11/13

Oh look, it’s Beetle’s Dad! Did you know he’s also the father of Lois Flagston from Hi and Lois? His wife starves him until he completes the work she’s assigned! Just like in the Army!

Hi and Lois, 8/11/13

No starvation for Hi — Lois keeps meat on those bones with a steady diet of nutritious soups. But his family’s relentless petty demands give him no peace, and drive him by degrees to the farthest margins of his home. Lois is blind to his suffering — this is just the way families are, isn’t it?

Judge Parker (panel), 8/11/13

I’ll spare you the cheesecake, money porn, and blocky “romantic” banter (well, most of it) in today’s Judge Parker, but floating there in the final panel is proof that Randy’s fianceé is an original badass. That’s right — the minute she and Randy split up to evade the mystery woman in the floppy hat, CIApril confronted her and stone-cold threw her hat in the water. Final warning, too: if she stalks them even one more time, April will tell all the girls in homeroom Mystery Gal’s a total skank.

— Uncle Lumpy