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Beetle Bailey, 3/8/18

I really appreciate General Halftrack’s heavy-lidded expression in panel two here. Without this cue, we’d interpret “Egad!” as being an indicator of genuine shock. But looking at him, we know it’s muttered under his breath with mingled contempt and disgust. He’s horrified by the deviants and weirdos who serve under his command, but he’s no longer surprised by them.

Blondie, 3/8/18

Today is International Women’s Day, and a bunch of comics did strips observing it in various ways! Blondie didn’t do an explicit shoutout, but we can see that the creators have really focused on important women’s issues, like the fact that they’re terrible drivers, amiright fellas?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/8/18

“Of course, what with th’ terrible poverty an’ awful state of education in Hootin’ Holler, none of you girls are can grow up t’be lawyers or really much of ennythin’ else that call for book learnin’! That’s why yore feminist analysis has t’ take socioeconomic class into account!”

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Mary Worth, 3/7/18

Mary has tossed Ted Miller and his unpleasantness down the memory hole, and it seems that none of her supposed friends are going to really press too hard to get to the bottom of what happened. Certainly not Toby! Toby frankly doesn’t care about Ted Miller, who she can barely be bothered to remember as “Jeff’s friend.” Toby doesn’t care about anything that’s not a delicious muffin. “I guess it wasn’t meant to be,” she says dreamily, staring at the muffin in her hand with an expression of erotic languor that Ian has never seen over the entire duration of their marriage, not even once.

Shoe, 3/7/18

I’m pretty sure in Treetops the vultures are generally depicted as owning the town mortuary? This guy has a different name — “Dooley” instead of “Mort” — but it’s enough to establish that the corrupt Senator Belfrey is in the pocket of Big Death.

Dennis the Menace, 3/7/18

Usually Dennis’s parents are nothing but embarrassed when he perpetrates his menacing antics in front of other adults, but today they seems slyly pleased as he wreaks havoc all over the fancy tablecloth at this snooty restaurant. Maybe they’ve decided to weaponize their son’s bad behavior to strike a blow in the ever-running battle between snobs and slobs? “These assholes are gonna make people put on ties and they aren’t even really French?” the Mitchells think. “Fuck ’em.”

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/6/18

Here’s a fun fact: I’ve been running a comics blog for a 14 years now, and so a lot of people assume I’m a “comics guy,” but what they mean by “comics guy” is someone who has lots of opinions about comic books, especially superheroes and such. And I don’t, really! I was never a big comics book obsessive, and the comics I did read were some of the squarest ones around — Superman and the Flash were my favorites. And truth be told, there are very few specifics I even remember about the stories or characters in those books (unlike, say, Mary Worth, where I could go on in great detail about plotlines from more than a decade ago).

But one thing I do remember very distinctly is the process by which I bought said comic books. I got a $1 a week as a comics allowance, and the corner store up the street sold comic books in two forms. On the one hand, I could get a new comic book for 75 cents, choosing them from a rack that had all the latest issues prominently displayed. On the other, I could get three for a dollar out of the box on the floor next to the rack. The ones in the box were anywhere between a few months and a couple years old, and had the covers torn off. I always went the latter route: I was a quantity over quality guy, plus the $1 allowance vs 75 cents mismatch was too much for my little brain to handle. (Now I see I could’ve gotten a second new book every third week, but I guess we hadn’t gotten to that chapter in math yet.) This meant that I generally read random comic books that were in the middle of multi-issue arcs that I never got to see begin or end, which honestly really prepared me for the present day, when I’ve been able to enjoy Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther despite not having seen the previous 17 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies.

Anyway, I was always vaguely aware that these coverless comic books were somehow illicit, but I guess I have to give thanks to today’s Funky Winkerbean and the Funkyverse’s comics obsessiveness in general for finally teaching me what the scam they were pulling was. Anyway, we’re about to be treated (?) to another Funkyverse time-jumping crossover, where presumably we’re going to learn that one of the Funky Winkerbean’s more unpleasant characters is the way he is because of a childhood encounter with Ed Crankshaft.

Mark Trail, 3/6/18

“Now, Wilhelm was of course already disoriented and injured from having been involved in a traumatic train wreck. Probably he should’ve received medical attention right at the site of the accident, but it was in such an isolated, rural area that he and his friends had to wander through wilderness just to reach human civilization. And then the first people they saw fired a gun at him! It was loaded with rock salt, so it would just scar Wilhelm for life, not kill him, but of course he had no way of knowing that. He almost certainly thought he was going to die! We can all laugh about it now, of course. Well, not Wilhelm, he’s still a little steamed about the whole situation for some reason.”

Beetle Bailey, 3/6/18

Shout-out to Beetle Bailey for giving Plato the names of three real ancient Greek philosophers. I actually love Plato’s facial expression here; it’s exactly what you’d expect from a guy whom everyone just calls by the name of the only Greek philosopher they can remember or pronounce.