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Guys, I have been remiss in keeping you up to date on important news in our beloved soap opera strips! First off, Paul Ryan, who’s been the artist on the Phantom since 2005, sadly passed away earlier this month. The new artist for the daily strip will be Mike Manley, who you may recognize as the artist for Judge Parker. Meanwhile, Terry Beatty, who draws the Sunday Phantoms and also Rex Morgan, M.D., wil be writing Rex Morgan as well! This is the first shift in writer in that strip over the whole time I’ve written this blog, and it will be very interesting to see what new directions he’ll come up with. Woody Wilson will still write Judge Parker, so we won’t have to deal with too much change at once. The new strips from everyone should start showing up in May.

But your comment of the week is available … right now!

“Yeah, Andy was just at the funeral of the man he mauled to steal that suit. Bears, man.” –Steve S

And the runners up! Very funny!

“I’d desperately love to see the next panel, since Rex has no concept of irony or sarcasm and would likely try to come up with a sincere answer to Milton’s bitter rhetorical question. ‘Um … bad, I guess?’ Milton would then use his last bit of strength to cover his own face with his palm.” –Joe Blevins

“I guess Loweezy and Elviney are backwoods goths, judging from their ‘tomato beset by acremonium mold’ and ‘Manic Panic in the exact same color as my collar and cuffs’ looks. Mabel should know that there’s no room for preps in THIS town!” –letsmoveourbootybutts

“Come on, Milton, tell us how you really feel. Oh, you already are? Well, I guess Heather doesn’t have to try so hard to stop you, since it’s not a board meeting.” –Artist formerly known as Ben

“Why is it a bogus brew? Probably because a mix of ‘mushroom spores’ (i.e., psilocybin mushrooms), ‘honey extract from flowers’ (morphine) and ‘cactus juice’ (mescaline) isn’t going to give you a rush of happy feelings so much as a wild journey into the darkest regions of your own soul. Hope none of you animals have any unresolved feelings about any petty crimes you might have committed in previous strips, because that shit is about to get real.” –pugfuggly

“Rex consults the laminated picture of an ox he carries in his wallet for reference. It is the only diagnosis he knows.” –Uncle Lumpy

“Today’s Gasoline Alley is clearly the setup for a porno that I am not in the target demographic for.” –Doctor Handsome

“You want to talk menace? Whose tongue is Wilson carrying around in his back pocket?” –Dood

“I love Rex’s clenched jaw in panel 2. ‘Must … maintain …pleasantries…'” –The Might Untrained FOOZLE

“I’m really hoping for a ‘gaslighting Milton’ twist here. He’s not losing his mind — he’s being slowly poisoned by his wife. Nobody knows how to slip barbiturates into mush like a former nanny!” –Fritz H.

“Funny that Dennis’ dad’s boss looks a lot like Henry, except with a squarer jaw, more determined expression, more modern hair and glasses, and multiple degrees on the wall. This is the life Henry thought he would lead when he married gorgeous Alice, only to be dragged down into psychological defeat by his stinker of a son.” –BigTed

“A library book!? My one weakness!” –Peanut Gallery

“Haha, Dawn is doing that thing where when you haven’t been listening to someone you just repeat the last phrase they said as a question so that they will carry on talking.” –Currer Bell

“Lilian knew this would have to end in death; her death, or the library’s death. She’d seen things in her long life, things that books only hinted at. Panic drained from her body, replaced with grim determination. ‘You girls go finish all the sodas in the fridge,’ she said with false gaiety, ‘Grandma needs the bottles!’ There would be gas in the garage, and plenty of rags to turn into fuses. And tonight, purifying fire at the library would destroy all records of late fees. Yes; this was the easy way out.” –Voshkod

“This is like an industrial safety training pamphlet, only somehow more boring.” –Vulcan With a Mullet

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Crankshaft, 3/25/16

Oh, hey, whoops! It turns out Crankshaft wasn’t being coy at all about the year in which takes place yesterday. Crankshaft happens in 2016, which means Funky Winkerbean happens in 2026, which means that the next ten years are going to pass by in escalating gloom in order to achieve the full-on miasma of despair that permeates the future-strip. Lucky for Lilian, she’s suffering a massive heart attack in the final panel here, and so won’t have to live through any of it.

Judge Parker, 3/25/16

Call me a big government liberal if you must, but I think if you’re going to build your business model on squeezing the last drops of usuable labor out of the old and feeble, you should at least make a good faith effort at keeping them alive.

Crock, 3/25/16

Good to see Crock has given up on jokes entirely and is now just focusing on characters staring out at the reader while sassily spouting nonsense. He gave him the hump, if you know what he means! Do you know what he means? You don’t. Nobody does. But you can tell it’s supposed to be funny, from context.

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Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, 3/24/16

Unlike what appears to be a surprising number of you, I don’t care much about the weird chronological disconnect between Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft, where both strips take place in the present (as near as can be determined by technological and social details) and yet Funky Winkerbean takes place ten years after Crankshaft. I really don’t care at all! It’s just Comic Book Time, y’all, and unless you’re dealing with For Better or for Worse or Doonesbury, you just accept that the characters all stay the same age more or less while the universe ages around them. The Funkyverse seems to want its readers to care about the discontinuity, though, which is strange because literally the only forms of “caring” anyone could have about this are “confusion” and “irritation”; still, what other explanation is there for the slo-mo crossover details that would only be of interest to Funkyverse obsessives? Like those twin girls who recently surfaced in Funky Winkerbean as teens are now back in Crankshaft, teasing us with potential clues about their birthdate! (Jokes on you, nerds: October 1995 is before they were born whether Crankshaft takes place in 2016 or 2006.) Meanwhile, in Funky Winkerbean, the gang is visiting the Valentine, presumably to show us that Max and his girlfriend have managed to run it for a decade without going bankrupt. I guess that’s supposed to be Max? Or some other bearded dude? At least he’s making a dumb play on words based on a phrase nobody ever uses. At least something makes sense.

Mary Worth, 3/24/16

Is there a phrase more emblematic of Mary Worth’s ethos than “Mary explains what Dawn is feeling”? Anyway, now that Mary has successfully annihilated Dawn’s emotional autonomy, she’ll be ready to force her puppet to make a “bolder personal effort” for “in-person connecting,” which probably will entail an assassination attempt on a senator or businessman opposed to Mary’s interests.

Crock, 3/24/16

Normally I would just pass over this incomprehensible punchline like so many others in Crock, but the title character’s knowing glance in the final panel is really forcing me to dwell on it. “Eh? Hairy backs? Get it? His back? It’s hairy?”

Herb and Jamaal, 3/24/16

You know those Slylock Fox puzzles where the solution revolves around someone making a technically true but misleading statement to beat a lie detector test? This reminds me of a particularly pathetic version of that. “Heh heh,” thinks Herb smugly in the final panel. “I sure gave her a piece of my mind, in a way that guarantees that she’ll never notice! That’ll show her!”

Judge Parker, 3/24/16

WOW, when is BIG GOVERNMENT going to get OFF THE BACKS of JOB CREATORS who want to MAKE THINGS IN AMERICA by HIRING OLD PEOPLE and NOT PAYING THEM ANY BENEFITS because they’re ALREADY ON MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY????? Man, whichever local state legislator had his or her last campaign entirely financed by the Spencer-Driver SuperPAC is going to hear about this.