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Funky Winkerbean, 5/27/19

Oh, hey, remember how Cindy decided her next big project should be a documentary about silent movie legend Butter Brinkel, who I guess is supposed to be a thinly veiled Fatty Arbuckle, which is definitely a subject the youth-obsessed audience at Buddyblog will be into? To track down the “real story” on this disgraced movie star, she’s talking to Cliff Anger, former HUAC Blacklistee and the subject of her last documentary, which was nominated for an Emmy, thank you very much. Since Cliff was in the Merchant Marine and/or the Communist Party USA as of 1940, that puts him in his late 90s today, at minimum; but since Arbuckle’s big scandal happened in 1921, that still makes Cliff too young to have known him at the height of his career. But I guess in a world where the Brown Derby continues to be a going concern decades after the last one went out of business in real life, we can’t expect the flow of history to match up with reality as we know it. Anyway, I’m hoping “he was my kemosabe” is coded silent era slang for gay stuff, but it’s probably just a reference to a wildly racist costume Cindy is going to find photo evidence of soon enough.

Hi and Lois, 5/27/19

Not sure if we’re meant to read Lois’s statement in panel two as “I feel bad for Thirsty and am not going to go along with Hi in freezing him out” or “I actually find Hi’s cooking unappetizing and can barely scarf down half of one of his burgers, so why let it go to waste” or “I’ve been ‘sharing’ my ‘burger’ with Thirsty for a while now so I suppose it’s time all the men in my life were updated on the situation,” but I appreciate the way the kids are staring at the adults gobsmacked, waiting for the drama to fully reveal its details.

Slylock Fox, 5/27/19

Count Weirdly has blown it again, but you have to give him credit: “Oh, he was just here, because, uh, the ice cubes are still in his drink,” is exactly the sort of bullshit Sly thinks is like DNA-level case-solving evidence.

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/13/19

“Yeah, Summer! Remember Summer, my daughter, your stepdaughter, who’s also best friends with your daughter? I get how I threw you by looking at the calendar so you’d think I was talking about summer the season. Also, it’s easy to forget about Summer my daughter because she’s not in the strip much anymore. She only seems to call me late in the semester, probably because she really doesn’t like talking to me, and, honestly, can you blame her?”

Slylock Fox, 5/13/19

Slylock has apparently solved all the Forest Realm’s mysteries, because now he’s putting his patented powers of ratiocination to use on solving puzzles like “who dumped trash on the side of the road?” The mess he and Max are making in the process actually offers a good glimpse into how his legalistic mind operates: for Slylock, once he’s spotted a crime, he must immediately work to find the perpetrator by any means necessary, even if those means actively make the litter problem, and the lives of the citizens whom he’s ostensibly working to protect, demonstrably worse.

Mary Worth, 5/13/19

I honestly really respect that Mary is keeping her eyes on the prize here, and that prize is not Estelle’s tender heart or her future ability to trust others or whatever, but is rather the ten large that she Venmo’d to @artherzero7. Hearts heal on their own, with time, but bank accounts do not, and that’s why we’re gonna get Interpol involved in this damn thing!

Mark Trail, 5/13/19

That is going to leave a mark, Mark: A Mark-shaped mark! Ha ha, get it? Anyway, Mark just shattered his pelvis.

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Family Circus, 3/11/19

Look, I long ago gave up on trying to figure out how exactly the process operates behind the scenes of long-running legacy comic strips, so I’m not sure why we got two Family Circus panels in the last three years with different art but essentially the same joke. Is this just a case of someone unconsciously coming up with the same joke twice and then redrawing a Dolly-praying-before-bed panel, or, perhaps more likely, pulling out a different entry from the presumably fairly sizable collection of Dolly-praying-before-bed panels? Or are the two panels meant to be companion pieces? Back in 2016, Dolly said the pledge because she couldn’t think of any “new” prayers. Today, she couldn’t even remember the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps the most important in the Christian canon, because all the space in her mind dedicated to devotional rituals is now occupied by nationalistic display. Truly, the Keane Kompound is under seige!

Dick Tracy, 3/11/19

The joke here is that Joe Sampson, the detective who came to town last week with lurid tales of gym teach murder, is Dick’s daughter Bonnie’s ex. But if you didn’t know that, you might think that Dick is just furious that Bonnie isn’t hanging on his every word. “Bonnie? How dare you be distracted, a man is talking.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/11/19

Hootin’ Holler is grindingly poor, with an economy revolving around subsistence farming, moonshining, and chicken theft, and it’s an open question as to how the various outsiders who come into town to serve professional roles eke out a living. Parson Tuttle makes it work with relentless and unapologetic grifting, but Doc Pritchart has it easier: his practice is just a front for nonstop Medicaid fraud.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/11/19

“That would mean someone might want to spend enough time with me to have a sexual relationship some day, and, really: have you gotten a handle on my personality over the past few hours? I don’t think that’s in the cards.”

Slylock Fox, 3/11/19

“Ha ha, it’s a baby! A baby was born on board! Pretty wild, huh? Now everyone calm down and let’s figure out which one of us has to drown. Should it be the baby?”