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Funky Winkerbean, 12/1/16

Oh, so, if you’re curious, serial star Cliff Anger did time in prison because he tangled with Joe McCarthy during the Red Scare! You might be tempted to read something into this regarding Current Political Events, but in fact Funky Winkerbeans are written a year in advance, so it’s really just a chance to say “What if this cranky ancillary character who seemed like a loser … were also a martyr?” Anyway, Cliff took a job on tramp steamer in the summer of 1940, and that tramp steamer heroically sailed right through the Atlantic and the Baltic when those seas were an active war zone just so that Cliff could hang out with his good buddy and political idol, Joe Stalin. Unfortunately this was a full 18 months before Stalin became a stalward ally in America’s war against fascism, so Cliff had to pay the price.

Shoe, 12/1/16

What’s hotter than bird-on-bird sexual encounters initiated by sad drunks in a depressing fern bar? Bird-on-bird sexual encounters initiated by sad drunks in a depressing fern bar that make up part of a satanic ritual, apparently!

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Dennis the Menace, 11/30/16

I’m a little concerned about why Henry looks so very miserable in this panel. I’m wavering between “He secretly can’t get enough of Dennis’s humiliations of various adults and is profoundly sad that without his glasses he can’t make out the expression on this optometrist’s face” and “Dennis is cracking wise to cut the tension after the optometrist just sucker-punched Henry for no reason.”

Hi and Lois, 11/30/16

Somewhere deep in the HQ of Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC, a cigar-chomping executive is growling angrily at various cowering hacks. “Boys,” he says, “we used to own the comic-strip baby thing. Everyone loves Trixie, and she gets a solid 20% of the jokes in Hi and Lois. But have you seen this?” He waves multiple printouts of Marvin strips aggressively. “This little bastard is the only baby in his family. And he just makes poop jokes nonstop. I thought people loved Trixie’s sweet relationship with sunbeam.” He sighs heavily. “But I guess it’s a new world now.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/30/16

Wait, Sarah is taking the bus now? Like a common poor? I know it’s awkward being dependent on violent gangsters to transport your child to and from her elite private school, but it seems like some extremely hasty decisions have been made here.

Mary Worth, 11/30/16

The best part about today’s Mary Worth is that Zak thinks this date is going great.

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Dick Tracy, 11/29/16

You have to give the new-ish Dick Tracy creative team credit for bringing the strip into something that’s semi-recognizable as the modern era. I mean, the strip’s trademark bit of gee-whiz futuristic tech is now on sale and really something of a niche market, which I’m not sure if that makes their job easier or harder! Anyway, today’s strip shows that Neo-Chicago’s Major Crimes Unit is really getting with the times; they’re less likely to get information by building long-term trusting relationships with street-level informants or via brutal beatdowns of suspected criminals, and instead are just trolling Instagram for pictures of people who seem reluctant to be photographed. Thank God Dick, at least, reacts in his usual inscrutable and incorrect fashion. “This is great. I want you to have the boys in the photo darkroom print up a blown-up version of this — obviously there’s no other way to get a better look. But that’ll take hours, so let’s the two of us head down to the zoo and start shooting first and asking questions later. Hopefully that blown-up photo will count as ‘probable cause,’ retroactively.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/29/16

I was going to go into a riff about Sarah making fun of her one-year-old brother for not having any friends, but then I realized that Sarah doesn’t appear to have any friends either, especially now that the Morgans have abruptly cut off contact with her mobster patroness. Like, who would Sarah have at her fantasy birthday party with the clown and the bounce house and so forth? Would she invite the kid who made fun of her paintings, just so she could keep him on the other side of a velvet rope and make him watch her frolic, by herself?