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Crankshaft, 7/15/16

The punchline to today’s strip, in which Crankshaft responds to an church volunteer’s innocent attempt to play-act as a carnival barker by pointing out life’s essentially random cruelty, is par for the Funkyverse course, so instead I’d like to point out that our hero is just straight-up covered with filth here. This is actually some admirable continuity from earlier this week, where the jokes were about how Crankshaft is incapable of eating fair food without soiling himself, but it gives a nice touch to today’s strip, where it looks like he’s wandered out of a scene of unspeakable carnage. He gets to lay down this truth bomb on poor straw-hat-boater guy because he’s seen some shit, man.

The Lockhorns, 7/15/16

I guess Leroy’s supposed to have a black eye here, indicating that once again a potentially pleasant evening has ended with him getting punched in the face? But all I can see is the eye makeup that Alex wore in A Clockwork Orange, so I’m assuming that the argument was over whether it’s socially acceptable to cosplay as literary characters when you go over to someone else’s house for drinks.

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Pluggers, 7/14/16

I’ll say this for today’s Pluggers: it’s managed, without having heard of any of the bands, to put together an actually realistic summer concert series lineup, in the sense that it runs the gamut from relatively popular, relatively current acts (Animal Collective) through jam bands that had a minor mainstream breakthrough years ago but have been touring the festival circuit more or less nonstop both before and since (Rusted Root) to bands that were popular in the early ’90s and subsequently broke up but then a subset of the original members gained legal control of the band’s name and now are cashing in with a bunch of new people (Color Me Badd). We’ve rounded out the list with two separate bands who were apparently mistaken for one (Slightly Stoopid and SOJA, who are touring together this summer) and, apparently, just to stick it to know-it-alls like me, the truly obscure “Kongas,” which as near as I can tell was the name under which Marc Cerrone, an “Italofrench disco drummer, composer, record producer and creator of major concert shows,” released a couple of albums in the late ’70s. I guess it’s probably more likely that this is a mistake for Kongos, a band that’s in that first category with Animal Collective, but I want to believe that we’re talking Italofrench disco drummer here.

Mary Worth, 7/14/16

Oh man, it looks like Tommy’s upcoming opioid addiction’s going to arise from a bad interaction between a lower back injury … and broken heart. I guess this is why you shouldn’t start dating someone before you start growing your hair back out. The relationship begins under false pretenses. They won’t know the real you.

Family Circus, 7/14/16

Mommy’s grim facial expression tells us exactly what she thinks of the MPAA’s censorious reign of prudery and its effect on film as an art form. “More like a Profoundly Grotesque stifling of cinema’s ability to shock us out of our comfort zones,” she thinks, glowering at her hopelessly middlebrow children.

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Mary Worth, 7/13/16

The Sad Story Of Tommy’s Back Problems could’ve gotten into some interesting socioeconomic territory, examining how someone who works as a janitor at a small business, almost certainly without employer-provided health insurance or sick days, deals with an injury that, while not permanently debilitating, would keep him from working for a period of time. Instead, we’re real concerned about how this will affect Tommy’s relationship with his coworker/girlfriend, who apparently only sees him at work, and who will quickly forget he even exists if he doesn’t show up, so I guess we’re going to get some comical scenes of Tommy trying to operate a mop while doped to the gills on Vicodin. “I don’t want my girl to forget what I look like!” he says, while staring into the mirror, determined that he won’t forget what he looks like either. Poor Tommy seems to think he has a very forgettable face.

Marvin, 7/13/16

One of Prague’s biggest tourist attractions is the New Synagogue, so called because when it was built in the 1270s it took over the position as the city’s main synagogue from other, even older houses of worship. Now I’ve encountered (and even perpetrated) some ugly-American-abroad-isms in my time, but I’m willing to bet that exactly zero American visitors see the place and say “Whoa whoa whoa, this place is super old. I want to see something new, like the name implies. Gimme some poured concrete, an injection-molded facade over over plywood frame, the whole nine yards. I didn’t come all the way to Europe to see something historic.” And yet we are meant to believe that Marvin’s family is reacting exactly thus! Each strip seems intent on making sure we understand that Marvin isn’t uniquely terrible, but instead comes from a deep and ancient lineage of badness.

Spider-Man, 7/13/16

Despite the fact that he’s being played by known Briton Benedict Cumberbatch in the upcoming film, good ol’ Steve Strange is in fact 100% American, as he seems to be going out of his way to make clear here. “Yep, those Yankees, they sure play in the World Series a lot! The World Series is the championship of Major League Baseball, a sport that I, like most ordinary Americans, enjoy following. Please do not hunt me down and burn me at the stake due to my practice of sinister witchcraft, the techniques of which I mastered in the mysterious Orient.”

Curtis, 7/13/16

At first I assumed “demon” was just another cute pet name Greg uses for his eldest son, but no, check out the devil horns Curtis is flashing in that last panel. I think we need to make our peace with the fact that Curtis created a flash mob using the demonic powers granted to him thanks to his allegiance to the Lord of Lies, the King of Hell, whose affection for millennials is well known.