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Funky Winkerbean, 5/1/15

Guys, I did not have a particularly fun time socially for a lot of high school. At one point I got voted out of my lunch table. Once I did start making friends, as a senior, many of them were kids I met through debate who went to other schools. When I was 28, I got an email via Classmates.com (haha, remember Classmates.com?) from my graduating class’s power couple, who were somehow still together and organizing the 10-year-reunion; even though I didn’t have any interest in going, my girlfriend at the time told me to write back and ask to be put on the mailing list in order to get all the good gossip. Despite my request, I was not, in fact put on the mailing list.

So you’d think I’d be primed to identify with Les in the current Funky Winkerbean storyline, in which the most popular girl from his graduating class is skipping town and strong-arming him into taking her place and organizing a reunion for a bunch of people who used to hold him in contempt. The fact that I feel not an iota of sympathy for him is a testament to his true unlikeability as a character. Even if this today’s strip is your first exposure to him, I think you can get a sense of this. Look at that face! That face is a smirk so intensely smug that it’s crossed the line into full-on muscle spasm.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/1/15

Seems that today’s Snuffy Smith was determined to do its own version of the classic “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” gag, only to end up grappling with the fact that the only job in this impoverished subsistence-farming community that requires any degree of formal training is the lone clergyman’s post — and sadly, the current parson is a theologically unlearned grifter.

Mark Trail, 5/1/15

Oh, hello nice bureaucrat lady! Did you think you could defeat nature with some well-meaning government programs? Well you can’t. Nature is full of floods and flames and it will not obey you.

Wizard of Id, 5/1/15

Meanwhile, in the Wizard of Id, the king is going to fuck some money.

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Dennis the Menace, 4/30/15

I was going to make some kind of joke along the lines of “the divide between rewarded and unrewarded work under capitalism is still gendered and that’s the TRUE menace” here but then I noticed that Henry doesn’t even have a keyboard for his computer, just a mouse. What does he do for a living, like … click on things? Jesus, I hope he isn’t getting paid much for this.

Hi and Lois, 4/30/15

“How can a box ring a doorbell?” asks Dot, watching the Amazon drone buzz off. “How can we call a company a job creator when it works harder and harder to replace all its employees with robots? What good will my inefficient fleshy body be in the post-human future?”

Pluggers, 4/30/15

Pluggers know that chickens can perceive a much broader range of colors than dogs can, and divide fashion responsibilities accordingly. Do you think those pants look blue, with your human eyes? The dog knows better. The dog knows chickens see what we can’t.

Marvin, 4/30/15

Look, it’s not like King Features wants to publish a comic where every punchline is about a baby shitting himself, OK? It’s just … it’s Marvin. He can’t be stopped. He can’t help himself. Look, he’s seized control of the comic and is now penning his own “diaper diary.” “Today I had a conflict with my mother,” he writes. “And I got revenge by shitting myself.” Presumably this same joke-form will be repeated daily for years, for decades, while the civilized world begs for some kind of sanity to no avail, until the Earth is a burnt-out cinder.

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Hi everybody, I am back! Thanks to Uncle Lumpy for his fine fill-in work! And thanks to all of you who participated in the spring fundraiser to help keep the lights on around here! You’ll be getting personal thank-yous in the next few days, plus links to a fancy-schmancy Google Forms questionnaire that will make it hopefully easier for me to get rewards out in a timely/organized fashion. BUT FIRST: BACK TO THE COMICS!

Apartment 3-G, 4/29/15

Hey, guess who else is back? Gabriella’s mother, apparently! Gabriella, your mother isn’t sick any longer — she’s a foul, undead abomination, shuffling from the graveyard towards the still-living family that her rotted brain just barely remembers, moaning with a hunger that can never be sated. It’s the best news of all!

Speaking of the undead continuity strips: Uncle Lumpy tends to pay Newspaper Spider-Man exactly as much attention as he deserves (none), but I can’t look away from it, and I feel compelled to share with you another great example of Newspaper Spider-Man’s Spider-Powers Being Real Crappy, from last week:

Panel from Spider-Man, 4/22/15

Oh, Spider-Man, your spider-sense is literally of no use to you in situations where more than one person is around! It’s a good thing people generally dislike you and try to avoid you!

Anyway, after a little light breaking and entering and security-guard-webbing, we arrive at today’s strip:

Spider-Man, 4/29/15

Haha, the potential for super-heroic combat has quickly withered away, and now we’re just left with Spider-Man arguing with the pajama-clad heir to an industrialist’s fortune about the mental health professionals he’s consulting. I love how quickly this strip finds its level in every plot!

Hagar the Horrible, 4/29/15

I’ve often wondered when exactly the action in Hagar the Horrible takes place vis-à-vis the conversion of the Norse from paganism to Christianity. Well, fun fact: when the Vikings became Christian, they started burying their dead instead of cremating them. So, does today’s installment definitively place this strip in the age of Norse paganism? Not necessarily: perhaps Attila, still loyal to a polytheistic pantheon, is taunting Hagar, whom he knows has converted to the faith of the “civilized” world and, by implication, has gone soft, by sending him an object to remind him of his pagan warrior past. Quite a sick barbarian-on-barbarian burn, eh? I mean yes, the pagan Huns didn’t practice cremation themselves. Also, Attila lived a solid four centuries before the Viking Age. Look, just let me have this, OK?

Dennis the Menace, 4/29/15

Whining to the neighbors and asking them to call for help because you got stuck up a tree? Not menacing. Making your neighbors, who probably hold you in justified contempt for your irritating antics, question their own moral worth as you force them to confront the fact that, in their heart of hearts, they value the life and safety of an animal over that of a little boy? Extremely menacing.

Herb and Jamaal, 4/29/15

Herb’s expression of evil plotting as he contemplates an extremely minor transgression against conventional morality is definitely the funniest thing in the comics today. “I’m pretty bad at golf … but based on this scorecard, the world will think I’m only mediocre at golf! None will be the wiser! All will tremble before me! MOO HA HA HA HA HA HA HA”