Post Content

Funky Winkerbean, 10/3/16

I make fun of the Funkyverse visual convention whereby flashback panels are depicted as sepia-toned photographs that look like they’re supposed to be in a photo album, but really, that’s perfectly fine as a quick signal of what we’re looking at, even if, since most of the time periods being flashed back to are well into the era digital photography, it doesn’t really make literal sense. It’s like Microsoft Word using a 3.5 inch floppy disk as a symbol for “save to disk,” or your smartphone using an outline of a classic bakelite phone handset for the app you actually use to make phone calls: sure, it’s kind of goofy, but everyone pretty much knows what it means, and it’s not like I have any ideas for how to do it better.

But unless today’s strip is the result of a complete brain fart over at Ol’ Daily Comics Coloring Central, I’m really at a loss to understand what’s supposed to be going on here. My first thought was that maybe the Starbuck Jones movie is being shot in black and white, for nostalgic purposes, or maybe because it seemed to work for Schindler’s List. But then I realized that of course we’re not looking at the movie itself but the process of filming said movie, so, like, I dunno. Maybe they think this is how you make a black and white movie: by putting all the actors in grey makeup and shooting them against a grey background and grey props. Everyone on set needs to be made up, too. Not a single speck of color can be even accidentally visible!

Pluggers, 10/3/16

Things pluggers don’t have access to, as near as I can tell from today’s Pluggers:

• Computers or Internet-capable cellphones of the sort that could give a complete list of football scores at a moment’s notice.
• A television that might recap those scores (I guess we already knew this)
• Friends who might be up on what happened in this week’s games
• Any sense of community or connection to society at large
• Even extremely small amounts of money

Beetle Bailey, 10/3/16

Guys, have … have we considered that Beetle might be dead?

Post Content

Funky Winkerbean, 10/2/16

Funky Winkerbean has been mired in an extremely tiresome plot where Cindy is jealous because her hunky actor fiance Mason has to kiss a younger non-Cindy lady as part of his hunky acting career. I’m intrigued by today’s panel, though: since the young lady is question is playing the character Jupiter Moon, I suppose that means that in this comic book scenario, Cindy is “Queen Morphine?” Shoutout to Funky Winkerbean for besting Mary Worth and going right past mere opioids and straight into real opiates for its next depressing storyline, is what I’m saying.

Crock, 10/2/16

In the mid-20th century, there were two near coups against the French government that were launched by military leaders based in Algeria, so this strip isn’t that far from reality! I’m kind enjoying my new imagined alternate history in which Vermin P. Crock is installed by the forces armées françaises as the first president-for-life of the Sixth Republic.

Shoe and Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/2/16

The Perfesser is terrified that he’s going to be condemned to bird hell; meanwhile, Grimm has learned to his horror that in the afterlife dogs are not restored to their healthy form, and if they die rabid they writhe in awful, violent madness eternally. It’s a bad day in the comics for dead animals!

Post Content

Mary Worth, 10/1/16

OH MY GOD (literally): Iris is going to cure Tommy from his pill addiction, through Jesus. Remember when Tommy was in prison, and Iris went to visit him, and he waved a tiny, tiny bible at her? It seemed unlikely to me at the time that Tommy had truly turned to God for forgiveness of his various meth-dealing sins, and while his bible was far too small to hide weed or a shiv in, I assumed he was using it to distract Iris while a confederate picked her pocket or something. But no, apparently he had turned to it for “help,” but once he got deep into the endless laws about diet and ritual purity in Exodus, he “couldn’t keep up with it.” Thanks to his more studious mother carefully marking all of the passages in scripture that deal with opioid abuse, Tommy will soon be on the road to recovery and won’t further burden our tax-funded SAMHSA facilities, unlike some atheist pill fiends we could mention.

Mark Trail, 10/1/16

Meanwhile, our heroes in Mark Trail are about to solve their problems by recourse to a much more ancient deity. This ruined temple to a long-forgotten Polynesian fire god is now infested with ants that are foreign to the island and must be removed. The god can only be awoken with a sacrifice, though. A virgin sacrifice. We now know why Abbey was so keen to get Mark over here.