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Funky Winkerbean, 8/14/15

Oh, hey, I didn’t mention it the other day, but Darrin got offered a job helping Mopey Pete on the comic book movie he’s writing, and Jessica immediately agreed to move to Los Angeles with him, which Darrin treated as if this were some great favor she was doing him! Which seems to imply that someone, anyone, might want to live in the eternal Vale of Sadness that is Westview, and specifically the apartment above Montoni’s that presumably smells like mediocre pizza and depression all the time; it also ignores the fact (just like Funky Winkerbean the strip has been mostly ignoring the fact) that Jessica is in fact an aspiring documentary filmmaker so maybe … Los Angeles … might a place she’d want to live? Just a thought.

Anyway, clearly Montoni’s needs somebody paying rent on the apartment upstairs to supplement declining pizza revenue, and clearly Montoni’s needs someone in charge to make sure the giant barrels of low-grade pizza sauce shipped in monthly haven’t spoiled, and it looks like Wally is next in line for both positions! Wally already has a perfectly nice house that he and his wife live in, of course, but the needs of the pizza collective outweigh any rights he has to choose where he lives, as his look of stone panic in panel three makes very clear.

Mary Worth, 8/14/15

Thank you, Hilton Berkes: “I see enough of you on campus, Ian” is a sick burn for the ages. When I am cold at night, I will bring this strip up on my phone and bask in its cruel, warming glow.

Crankshaft, 8/14/15

Here’s today’s Crankshaft! It’s about uncontrollable pooping.

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Mark Trail, 8/13/15

OH MY GOD

MARK TRAIL HAS BEEN EXPOSED TO RADIATION

WILL HE BE MUTATED INTO A NEW SUPERHERO FOR A NEW AGE????

Let’s see, Spider-Man got all the powers of a spider when he was bitten by a radioactive spider, and Mark’s been irradiated by a bunch fo radioactive rods, so … he’s going to gain all the powers of a rod? Or maybe a guy named Rod? Rod-Man, Rod-Man, does whatever Rod/a rod (A-Rod?) can? This seems like an extremely boring angle on superheroic origins, but I’m willing to see where the strip goes with it.

Mary Worth, 8/13/15

This dinnertime conversation is in fact surpassing my wildest expectations for hypnotically fascinating dullness. Damn it, Ian, this poor man has already debased himself by taking a job at your pissant little university — don’t make him live in one of the little shitbox apartments in this crumbling late ’60s condo complex too! Leave him the scrap of dignity that living in a real house represents! Meanwhile, Toby is squeezing her eyes shut and thinking about her tiny sculptures as hard as she can, which I have to imagine is her strategy for sex with Ian as well.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/13/15

Boy, Lukey sure looks awfully sad. You don’t suppose Elivney … ate the goat? Right in front him? I’m pretty sure she ate the goat, guys.

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Blondie, 8/12/15

The structure of the joke in this strip is straightforward enough: Dagwood feels good about himself, a state of affairs that will soon be undone by his abusive rage-monster of a boss. But something about the way that everyone around him keeps shouting “Dag swag!” at him seems profoundly off. Are we to view the entire strip as a dream sequence, in which Dagwood’s exaggerated sense of importance and centrality will soon be inverted into persecution at the hands of a cruel father figure? Or is this catchphrase intended to establish the name of a line of Blondie-branded menswear, in a second and hopefully less disastrous attempt to cash in on the strip’s intellectual property?

Pluggers, 8/12/15

You’re a plugger if you’re a hideous man-beast who, despite walking upright and wearing clothes and owning property, still has the unshakable urge to establish dominance within your kin-group by aggressively urinating in your offspring’s newly established territory.