Post Content

Apartment 3-G, 8/20/15

Welp, looks like I was right! Eric is indeed Margo’s long-thought-dead almost fiance. This is a potentially fascinating plot point from 2009-era Apartment 3-G, which is too bad because this is 2015-era Apartment 3-G so it’ll just lie there like a dead fish and go nowhere. Probably there won’t be any details revealed! Why did Tim grieve for Margo? Did he live in the avalanche but everyone else in the world died? It would explain a lot about the ghostly, dream-like quality of life in this strip.

Mary Worth, 8/20/15

Mary Worth, though! Mary Worth is a strip that continues to fire on all cylinders, awesome as ever. Behold, Toby sullenly dumping milk onto a plate full of Splak® brand breakfast slurry! Gasp as Ian appears to absent-mindedly wrench the refrigerator door from its hinges with the strength of his lowland gorilla kin! Ahhhhh yeah, that’s the stuff.

Spider-Man, 8/20/15

This dialogue could be construed as light-hearted teasing but, the facial expressions make it clear that this is some high-level spider-dickery going on right now. “I’m disappointed about how foolish you were to be jealous of the Black Widow. Your failure to trust me totally absolves me retroactively of any guilt I should feel over all the times I had sex with her!”

Post Content

Hi and Lois, 8/19/15

As a baby, Trixie is just learning how the world works. This is what she’s learned today: anything made of organic matter eventually dies and rots. There’s only one friend that will last long though to meet Trixie’s emotional needs: the sun, an incomprehensibly vast ball of atomic fire that will sear our tiny world for billions upon billions of years.

Blondie, 8/19/15

Haha, yes, remember recently when Facebook implemented this extremely brand new feature? You know, back in April of 2013? I’m not sure what’s the saddest backstory for what happened here. Did the Blondie creative team just now noticed that they could add these dumb little things to their Facebook statuses, months after everyone else got bored with them? Did this joke only now occur to them, and they felt a need to call Facebook emoticons “new” so it would still seem relevant, somehow? Is the strip written and queued up more than two years in advance, and no variation in order is permitted, not even to keep topical jokes topical? I prefer another explanation: Blondie is created by a cabal of Old Ones, who have always existed and will always exist Beyond Time. To them, two years is but an infinitesimal instant, less time than it would take them to blink, if they had eyelids, if they had eyes.

Beetle Bailey, 8/19/15

We’ve never seen General Halftrack’s office from this angle before, and now we know why: it’s depressing as shit. Just blank walls, no furniture, no art, and a bunch of scattered golf balls. No wonder he drinks.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/19/15

♬ Hey Cayla ♬ I know when that’s gonna happen ♬ It’s neveeeeerrrr ♬

Post Content

Funky Winkerbean, 8/18/15

Back a couple of months ago, when Darrin suggested to Les that he should “write about how you met my mom … how you met Lisa,” this is what I had to say on the subject:

What you should do with your next book is write about how you met and fell in love with Cayla, your current wife, and how that new relationship helped you move forhahahahaha obviously I’m kidding, write about Lisa, always Lisa, write about meeting Lisa and it will seem exciting and romantic at first but a miasma of despair will always be floating over it, always, because Lisa is dead and Lisa is always dead and you’re going to write about Lisa’s death forever and ever.

I’m ashamed to admit that at the time I had forgotten that Les had already written that book about Cayla, two years ago, and had promised to turn the trip to micromanage the vanity press that he would pay to publish it into a fully tax-deductible Hong Kong vacation. Except … that never happened? And now Les’s “publisher” has decided to not publish that book, which I’m sure Cayla enjoys thinking of as a “sequel,” until it can be integrated into the Lisa Trilogy of which it is obviously an integral part.

Anyway, Cayla’s been spending a lot of the strip lately staring dead-eyed and silent at Les as he douches it up, and I’ve been wondering: what if she decides to divorce him? At first, this seems extremely likely, as it would no doubt up the misery quotient for the strip. But I don’t think any character has actually received a deserved comeuppance for their terribleness in this strip since Cindy left Funky when his drinking got completely out of control. The pain people in the Funkyverse suffer is capricious and arbitrary. An arc where they experience negative repercussions as a result of their conduct would require someone to acknowledge that there was something wrong with their conduct in the first place.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/18/15

Meanwhile, in Rex Morgan, gold-digging former nanny Heather Avery is still young and vital, making it all the more tragic that her older, wealthy husband is sliding into dementia. I’m not sure if she’s coming on to the hired help here or just engaging in her right as an aristocrat to imperiously dissect her servant’s personal life in front him.

Mary Worth, 8/18/15

My questions as to whether the participants in the latest Mary Worth dinner from hell recognize it as a dinner from hell have now been answered. Look at Ian’s expression in panel two. That’s the face of a man who’s seen some shit, by God.