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Funky Winkerbean, 10/6/15

Welp, I guess we’re done with Lisa smugging from beyond the grave and have moved on to … Cindy’s love life! Did you know that Cindy was supposed to be significantly (?) older than her new hunky Hollywood boyfriend, Mason Jarr? I sure didn’t! I mean, I guess her whole shtick is complaining about getting old, but the narrative time jumps haven’t transformed her into a stooped, balding potato-person like her fellow main cast members, and honestly I have no read on how old Mason is supposed to be anyway, so I sort of figured they were roughly in the same ballpark. Anyway, I kind of enjoy how Cindy starts off in panel two making a dumb Funkyverse-typical metaphor about, like, tires, I guess, but immediately gives up and just starts talking about how pretty soon nobody’s going to consider her attractive anymore, haha, the patriarchy, amiright people? Mason’s last-panel smirk is pretty great too. “That’s right, babe! The inevitable passage of time brings death to us all, and we think we’re ready for that, but first it takes away the good looks on which we’ve founded our entire self-image.”

Family Circus, 10/6/15

The “Billy, age 7” panels of the Family Circus definitely present some of the most complex layers of narrative and metanarrative in the comics today. You have the strip being drawn by the real-life Jeffy, but deliberately done all crappy so that it can be credited to a seven-year-old version of his real-life older brother who in this fiction is filling in so his real-life deceased father can watch baseball. The look on Billy’s face really says it all here. “Please,” he seems to be thinking, “release me from this convoluted web of puns and artifice. It’s exhausting.”

Apartment 3-G, 10/6/15

“You know, I’m one of Margo’s best friends and know her parents pretty well and also am part of the team responsible for her care, so they’re definitely not going to want to hear this from me. Why don’t you, a total stranger, go over to their place in the middle of the night and tell them about it? I’m not going to tell you anything about their weird family backstory or dynamic, but you should definitely fill them in about how you used to be Margo’s boyfriend but then let everyone think you were dead for five years while you hung out with some Tibetan nuns, they’ll love that.”

Marvin, 10/6/15

This is 100% the facial expression of a woman whose grandchild has stolen her credit card and gone on a spending spree at a toy store.

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Slylock Fox, 10/5/15

Sapient animals: they’re just like us, except in the sense that they had to piece together the fundamentals of an entire civilization in a very brief period of time, mostly using the wreckage of the culture they destroyed during their quick and presumably violent uprising. They’ve done pretty well for themselves, having managed clothes and boats and such; but, unlike humanity, they haven’t developed the elaborate legal theory that would allow ownership of this treasure chest to be awarded on a basis a little firmer than whose footprints were on top of whose. Anyway, the first sentence of today’s solution tells us that the animals are already imitating our worst mindsets.

Hi and Lois, 10/5/15

Hi and Lois is part of a longstanding American tradition of gentle humor about the lives of our relatively affluent middle class. Anyway, in today’s strip we learn that those lives are rife with anxiety, all the time.

Six Chix, 10/5/15

Speaking of animal uprisings, I’m not really sure what’s going on here, but to me the most unsettling thing is that these dogs are in a bed. Do you think these perverts were doing it “human style”? Disgusting.

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Judge Parker, 10/4/15

Oh, hey, I guess we’re turning back to some actual Parker family dynamics in the strip ostensibly named for them! April has just fallen seventeen notches in my esteem for using the perfectly gross phrase “give her a grandchild,” though I’m sort of impressed at how sure she is that she’ll be able to overcome the uncertainties of the human reproductive process within a set timeframe by sheer force of steely will. Of course, we should note the way April artfully deflects Abbey’s assumption that she was going to the Balkans on World Bank business. April is of course a CIA operative and knife-weilding killer, so presumably in a few weeks reports will emerge from Montenegro of an isolated mountain village, the entire population of which was found murdered in their sleep, with the only inhabitant missing being a single newborn baby. Katherine will have her grandchild within the year, all right. Katherine will have it in record time.

Six Chix, 10/4/15

This poor woman is addicted to tops! She must fight this addiction by purging all tops from her life. There will be no tops, only bottoms. Every object will have a lower half but no upper half, an undersurface but no covering. How is this possible? What nightmare of madness-inducing, unnatural geometry is she unleashing on the universe? We will all be collateral damage in her terrible battle against her addiction.