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Funky Winkerbean, 10/1/19

Welp, it’s looking more and more like Bull really did do a suicide by cliff, or maybe he just has dementia and it was an accident, and we’ll never know one way or another! There are a couple things we know for certain, though: he certainly died in agony trapped in the twisted metal of his car, and Linda really should’ve hidden those keys better, if she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life obsessing over this. Funky Winkerbean, everybody!

Six Chix, 10/1/19

There’s a lot I don’t understand about today’s Six Chix. Like, I’m not a tea guy, but I’ve drunk enough to know that it’s perfectly possible to do so without experiencing happiness, especially if you’re a board-certified grouch. Meanwhile, the lady in this strip seems to be way into this dude’s negativity, like it’s their weird version of S&M. “Yes, Harold, deny yourself pleasure, wallow in crankiness, my goodness.” Also, is having a tiny little plate for a single fried egg really a thing? Those are the high points, those are three things I don’t really understand about today’s Six Chix, but I think it’s a good jumping off place for discussion.

Crankshaft, 10/1/19

Man, if you had asked me what awful conspiracy theory bullshit Crankshaft would’ve gotten into, I definitely would’ve guessed QAnon, but the anti-vaxx stuff tracks as well, honestly.

Blondie, 10/1/19

There are obviously any number of ways this strip indicates a near-total ignorance of how Uber, a ridesharing service that’s been around for close a decade, works in practice, but I think an underrated one is the guy saying “Here’s the Bumsteads’ estate, sir!” as he pulls up.

Zits, 10/1/19

ME: Ugh, I hate how in so much of pop culture, but especially comic strips, people who are parents of teens and little kids are matched up with Baby Boomer cultural signifiers like Woodstock and disco, even though that’s completely wrong here in the year 2019. This is one of my pet peeves! Please be more accurate, comics!

THE COMIC STRIP ZITS: Fine, we’ll do a strip about Walt, the dad in Zits, and we’ll have him discussing recognizable cultural touchstones from your youth, and also the joke will be that this demonstrates that he’s incredibly old, like literally a dinosaur.

ME: Noooooo … not like this. Not like this.

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Dennis the Menace, 9/24/19

Dennis not understanding common English turns of phrase is a key part of the Dennis the Menace mythos, but it seems the current strip creators have forgotten why that is. The point is that Dennis is supposed to use his (feigned?) ignorance as an excuse to reveal that something shitty his parents have said about one of their acquaintances in private, e.g., “You said there’d be an old battle axe coming over but all I see is this late-middle-aged woman with a bad personality.” All today’s garbage joke does is make it clear that Dennis is stupid, and somebody needs to take it over to the Family Circus where it belongs.

Family Circus, 9/24/19

The Family Circus really needs that joke, to be honest, because I have no idea what’s going on here. Who is this random teen, and why is Billy hanging around with him talking about math? And why are he and Ma Keane giving each other a knowing glance? “It’s algebra,” they’re saying to one another, wordlessly. “He doesn’t know the word for it, but we both know he’s talking about algebra.”

Zits, 9/24/19

So it turns out the terrible thing Jeremy learned yesterday was that he has to repeat freshman P.E., and I know I almost never talk about Zits here so it’s weird that I’m talking about it two days in a row, but I think it’s kind of interesting that a strip that used to get in trouble with the syndicate for using the word “sucks” can now do jokes where the punchline is that Jeremy is mad because his dick isn’t getting any bigger as his adolescence progresses.

Hagar the Horrible, 9/24/19

Hagar and Lucky Eddie can’t bear to look at themselves in the mirror, probably because of guilt from all the horrible murders they’ve done.

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Dick Tracy, 9/23/19

Guys, I finally decided to dig into the deep lore to figure out what exactly the hell is going on with the new Dick Tracy plot, and I’m so glad I did, because the Dick Tracy Wiki’s Sal Monella article is truly a journey. It starts in 1998 with our man Sal creating cheap snacks out of garbage for a discount airline (with the help of his food scientist “Runs McGoo”), which gave Dick temporary amnesia, an episode that wildly I’ve had reason to discuss here before; that plot ended with Sal falling into a trash compactor and presumed dead, but in fact, in early 2004, he reappeared in the strip, now looking like this, due to the compactification process:

Anyway, this was the Dick Locher era of the strip, during which it had become barely concealed reactionary agitprop, so naturally Sal used his ill-gotten money to buy instruments for a band called “The Municipal Slime,” made up entirely of homeless people he hired; for their first concert he filled a stadium with garbage trucks and “the cacophonous music, foul smell, and anti-establishment nature of the event appealed to the city’s youth, and the concert sold out.” Sal now wanted to go legit as a concert promoter, but he was ambushed by Detective Frisk, who had been tracking Monella but kept his whereabouts secret from Dick and the rest of the cops because she wanted all the glory from his arrest. Frisk tried to ambush Monella at the concert; I’ll let the Dick Tracy Wiki tell the rest of the tale:

Monella was handcuffed, but his slimey hands were able to slip through the cuffs. Grabbing a gun, Monella escaped with Frisk in pursuit. Monella jumped into a passing garbage truck and Frisk followed. Additional shots were fired before the truck’s contents were dumped onto a scow on the river. The scow then dumped its load before Tracy could arrive and learn Monella and Frisk’s fate.

Anyway, I have no idea if Sal Monella is going to reappear in this storyline, but I am amused that Staton and Curtis have retconned him into just a guy with a classic mobster-lookin’ squared-off head, and not, you know, a head that was literally crushed into an unnatural cube shape by a trash compactor. I’m also amused that Dick greeted Detective Frisk, a former police officer who everyone assumed was dead, by saying “Oh, hey, we thought you were dead, by the way” and she replied, “Yeah, because I faked my death, I thought that’d be a pretty cool way to quit my job” and everyone’s just super chill about it.

Zits, 9/23/19

At one point the whole deal with the Zits guidance counselor was that Jeremy was horny for her, but I don’t think that’s involved in this intriguing plot setup. Probably he forgot to take the right classes or is failing or there’s some other problem that’s going to jeopardize his graduation (as if this strip, in which the characters never age, was ever going to let him graduate! ha ha!) but it’d honestly be funnier if he were being very literal and it turned out he was dying or something. “Have the guidance counselor tell him,” the doctors and his family decided. “She’s got a great way with kids and he finds her so arousing that maybe it’ll soften the blow.”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/23/19

Sorry, Linda, this is the CTE support group, I guess you might’ve mistaken it for the “CTE magically solving all your problems” group, jeez.