Hello everyone who donated to my Fall pledge drive! You should by now have received an email from me thanking you and, if you donated enough, providing a link to the form you need to fill out to get your handsome tote bag. So far significantly fewer forms have been filled out than there are eligible donors, so if you didn’t receive the email with the link for some reason, send me an email at jfruh@jfruh.com and we’ll get this worked out.
Mark Trail, 11/2/16
Mark Trail UPDATE: in addition to rickety log bridges and enraged wild boars and freakishly huge ant mounds, Mark and Abbey now also have to deal with an earthquake, or maybe a volcano, or maybe an earthquake caused by an erupting volcano, which is undeniably exciting! The tangle of flailing limbs in today’s final panel also reminds of an earlier vision of Mark tackling a person, which makes me wonder if Mark Trail isn’t secretly catering to someone’s very specific fetish.
Curtis, 11/2/16
Ha ha! It’s funny because Curtis is just old enough to know he needs to hid the bleak reality of adulthood from his younger brother, for just another few years!
Hi and Lois, 11/2/16
Ha ha! It’s funny because Trixie is a preverbal infant but she’s already being driven into a spiral of anxiety by the thought of her own inevitable death!
Mary Worth, 11/2/16
Yes, let’s spin the wheel of fate, shall we? Who will be lucky enough to be the next person who has to make polite talk with Wilbur about his travel plans? Will it be Dawn? Will it be Iris? Will it be some other person who has even less reason to care? Ian, maybe? Will Wilbur run into Ian in the hall and babble excitedly about his new adventure, with Ian’s contempt growing more and more visible all the while? That sounds great! I vote for Ian!
The Phantom, 11/1/16
Hey, so remember how Kit, the Phantom’s son, journeyed to a Tibetan monastery to receive his Phantom training, which the Phantoms go back to Tibet to get every few generations? Remember how Kit had to study a bunch of old-timey bullshit history facts so that he could hoodwink the Tibetan monks into believing that he was the reincarnated soul of the man they had taught centuries ago? Well, turns out that last part was a bunch of hooey. Turns out the monks know what’s up and are happy to play along so long as the Ghost-Who-Pays-The-Bills deposits hard currency in their tax-sheltered savings account. What are we going to learn next? That the word in the Bandar tongue we’ve been translating as “ghost” all this time really just means “white dude with a pistol who wears spandex for some reason”?
Spider-Man, 11/1/16
I admit to laughing aloud at “we’ve no defense against Starr’s bug-bomb!”, because he’s saying it like the bug-bomb is a high-powered super-weapon developed by an evil genius, and not, say, an ordinary pest control product you can buy at any store over the counter. Anyway, we appear to have gotten to the point in the story where things have gotten quite silly enough, so thank God the original Ant-Man brought his canister of Undoing The Central Problem Of This Plot Potion.
Funky Winkerbean, 11/1/16
Coach Bushka, forced into retirement by incipient dementia caused by the very nature of the game he loves, about to leave for the last time the job that feels like home for him and go off into the gathering twilight of his life, pauses as he remembers his predecessor’s mortal remains, which have been sitting in a darkened corner for years and have been so thoroughly neglected that they’re covered with dust and spiderwebs. I don’t want to say “peak Funkyverse” but I feel like we’re at least on the slopes.