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Slylock Fox, 5/23/16

I’m not sure what’s funnier about this scenario. Is it that the Count has the awe-inspiring capability to build incredibly lifelike androids but only uses them as decoys when he’s on the lam? Is it that Deputy Duck lassoed this machine-man while it presumably stood there whirring and grinning like a moron? Is it how darn happy Deputy Duck looks to have finally achieved something, and everyone else looks very grave, aware that his sense of accomplishment will soon vanish? No, trick question: the actual funniest thing is that Deputy Duck isn’t wearing pants.

Crankshaft, 5/23/16

Good news! Jeff didn’t get a chance to tell his mother he forgives her, which, since she definitely didn’t think she ever did anything wrong, is a scenario that definitely would have involved her mustering her last shred of strength to say something incredibly cutting and cruel that would have left him even more emotionally torn up than when he started! See, sometimes good things do happen in the Funkyverse.

Mary Worth, 5/23/16

“Incidents lead me to believe too many people are lacking in some way! Incidents, Mary! Incidents! Lacking! This is how I talk, all the time! I don’t understand why I have problems making friends!”

Pluggers, 5/23/16

Pluggers are tired. So very, very tired. When will death finally come for pluggers? When will they finally be able to sleep, forever?

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Crankshaft, 5/22/16

The Funkyverse seems to have taken my proclamed indifference to its chrono-narrative shenanigans as some sort of challenge. “Oh, Mr. Fancy Comics Blogger Man, it doesn’t bother you that Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft take place ten years apart, and yet both also take place in an eternal Comic Book Time present, which right now in both cases is a recognizable 2016? Well, what if we do a fractured-time narrative around Rose’s death in Crankshaft, and we keep prefacing every strip with narration boxes like ‘One week ago…’ and ‘Three weeks ago…’, but we do it over the course of nearly a month, so it becomes increasingly muddled what the chronological reference point is? How about that, huh?” Well, OK, fine. That would bother me. That would bother me quite a bit, actually!

Funky Winkerbean, 5/22/16

Funky Winkerbean, meanwhile, presents me with a simple pleasure: knowing that, while Les thinks he can glimpse daylight at the end of the decade-long hell-tunnel that is his chosen profession, he’ll actually be stuck in place spinning his wheels endlessly until this strip hits its next time-jump, which will no doubt catapult him past his brief joy upon retirement and straight into whatever his next depressing life stage is (old age and death, I would hope).

Mary Worth, 5/22/16

Oh, look, it’s Mary Worth’s first appearance under the new Sunday strip artistic regime! I give her two thumbs up; the cowl-neck sweater is a particularly appropriate choice. Less appropriate is Dawn’s assertion that obviously she’s not in love with Harlan, but if she were, would that really be so bad? After all, Cher once fell in love with a bitter, sullen Nicolas Cage in a movie, and that worked out fine!

Judge Parker, 5/22/16

Since Neddy abandoned her old person sweatshop idea, the world has clamored to know: how will the Spencer-Drivers get rich now, at taxpayer expense? Well, it looks like this is how!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/22/16

Congratulations to the animals, for finally figuring out how to drive the Morgans out of the countryside!

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/21/16

When I was in DC for my book tour last month, at one point I found myself downtown-ish with time to kill, so I looked up the nearest Starbucks with the intention of parking myself there and soaking up the free wi-fi. It quickly became clear that I had in fact selected the Starbucks closest to the White House, and had to walk right in front of the White House to get there! Anyway, here’s some news if, like me, you haven’t been in that part of town since the mid-’00s: they’ve totally rebuilt Pennsylvania Avenue in that section as a very pleasant pedestrian mall, and you can actually get quite close to the White House now, at least as close as you could get in the ’80s when I was a kid, if not closer. Far be it for me to imply that Funky Winkerbean didn’t do the research here, so I’m instead going to assume that Toque Boy is just being extremely sarcastic, and Les’s look of crushing self-loathing at having just been publicly owned by one of his students is the real punchline.

Gil Thorp, 5/21/16

Hey, so, it looks like the girls softball team has been forced to play their games wearing their basketball uniforms! Clearly better funding is in order, by which I mean both better funding for high school athletic departments so that athletes can wear sport-appropriate uniforms and also better funding for comics so artists don’t just say “Enh fuck it” and drop in some clip art from three months earlier into their strips.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/21/16

Ha ha, it’s funny because the Smiths are so poor that not having the kids at home means they won’t go hungry for once!