Judge Parker, 3/31/16
It’s Sam’s smug little smile that really sells this strip for me. “These plebes are crushed by medical debt and they still can’t bring themselves to grift my family, the most unlikeable group of rich assholes in town! The revolution is still years off.”
Marvin, 3/31/16
or maybe
just pee literally anywhere you want
you being a dog and all
Crock, 3/30/16
Crock may be the only comic that I’ve antagonized so much that they felt a need to do a genuinely mean-spirited strip about me, but at least I am familiar with long-running Crock jokes and traditions, which is more than I can say for the people paid actual money to help produce it for publication. Captain Preppy, for instance, is an egomaniac who likes to gaze at himself in a handheld mirror while talking about how great he is. This is well-established Crock canon. Yet somebody looked at a black-and-white version of today’s strip and said, “He’s a holding a corndog, right? Looks like a corndog. Let’s check out the dialogue in panel two. ‘Boy, am I lucky.’ Yep, that’s the sort of thing that someone holding a corndog would say. God, I wish I had a corndog right now! Anyway, paintcan tool, pick corndog brown off the color chart, bloop, bloop, bloop. Done! On to Curtis! Wonder what he’s eating.”
Judge Parker, 3/30/16
Haha, Mrs. Chubb folded immediately after like 30 seconds of fairly mild questioning from Sam. Just goes to show that if you’re going to run a sordid fake-accident-injury scam, do not enlist as your accomplice a woman for whom pearls are part of her casual, lounging-around-the-house wear. She will be far too classy to commit.
Archie, 3/30/16
Jesse Ventura ran for governor in 1998, which I guess offers some solid evidence for when the current run of Archie strips were originally written. I certainly hope that nobody was misled by this strip into thinking that Greco-Roman wrestling was a flashy, high-profile road to fame and eventual political glory.
Mary Worth, 3/30/16
“Hmm, what should I wear for my first day of class? I know: pants, a suit jacket, and a vest, all precisely the same shade of green!” –A guy who thinks about art and aesthetics, like, professionally
Family Circus, 3/29/16
I’m usually pretty meh on the art in the Family Circus. Still, the trailing shoelace in today’s panel is a nice idea, despite the fact that those shoes look to be loafers and the lace is sort of emerging out of nowhere. It gives a nice air of childhood whimsy and innocence to the drawing; it also gives hardcore Billy haters like myself hope that he’s soon going to trip and break a tooth, or, even better, his watch.
Crankshaft, 3/29/16
Tom Batiuk famously writes Funky Winkerbean almost a year in advance, which I assume is also true for Crankshaft. So it’s actually just a total coincidence that this storyline is running the same week a guy in North Carolina was stopped because he had a broken taillight and then literally handcuffed and taken to jail for not returning Freddy Got Fingered to his local video store in 2002. (The local video store, I think it goes without saying, closed down years ago.) Anyway, if we live in an absurd world where decades-old civil judgements for very small amounts of money can lead to actual arrest, maybe you should be careful, Lillian! The cops in the North Carolina case were nice enough to let the guy drop his daughter off at school first, but they didn’t have to! Probably they could just drag Lillian off to jail and leave the twins in the car, miles from anywhere. (Is Lillian even supposed to be driving these kids around?)
Looks like Dawn’s starting to make a bolder personal effort at school! Step one: just don’t do things you don’t want to do! If she were being a little bolder, she just would’ve said “Nahh, not my scene. Later, blondie!” But this is definitely an improvement over signing up and pretending to enjoy it.
Funky Winkerbean, 3/29/16
“…what if I looked him up … on the Internet? And so I did. He’s got a Wikipedia page. Turns out he’s dead! Cool story, huh?”