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Funky Winkerbean, 10/13/14

Guys. You guys. To make up for the fact that Les forgot their anniversary last year — which anniversary, apparently, was also their first anniversary — he’s making it up to Cayla by writing a graphic novel about finding a new life and new love! You know, a new one, after his first life/love died. (That part takes up the first 40 pages of the book, probably.) If you squint, you can tell that the title of this masterpiece is The Last Leaf, which definitely doesn’t imply the end of summer’s vibrancy and the coming of a long, cold winter at all.

Crankshaft, 10/13/14

Say what you will about Crankshaft, but as Funkyverse protagonists go he’s not very complicated, emotionally. “Wait, I can’t have this specific thing temporarily? But I want this specific thing! And I’m going to make your life unpleasant by complaining about it!”

Gil Thorp, 10/13/14

Sorry if this is Too Soon, but my first thought when I saw panel one was that Gil was looking at a stylized depiction of an airplane crashing into the Twin Towers, which to me just instinctively made sense. “I do understand, but for now, that’s all I can tell you on that subject. But if you’re interested in talking about the melting point of steel and how burning jet fuel couldn’t possibly have — hello? Hello?”

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Better Half, 10/12/14

Like the Lockhorns, the Better Half just churns out a bunch of individual panels to fill its extra allotment of Sunday space. Unlike the Lockhorns, the Better Half attempts to link the panels together; they never create any coherent storyline, but rather present disconnected moments that circle around a few linked themes like some kind of avant garde non-narrative film. The sense of psychic dislocation this produces is really ramped up today, as all the jokes center on teeth, and dirty teeth, and tiny magical beings who come to you in the dead of night while your spouse is asleep and want to take your teeth.

Mark Trail, 10/12/14

“There are thousands of kinds of snakes, they are everywhere, and lots of them are poisonous and one kind can just straight up strangle a crocodile, as depicted in this nightmarish drawing. Also, about a third of people have this weird, irrational fear of them for some reason!”

Momma, 10/12/14

Welp, looks like the Hobbes family is about to be conquered and enslaved, assuming they survive the devastating diseases against which they have no immunity! Everyone is right to look horrified, in other words.

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Mary Worth, 10/11/14

So it seems that Ian never confronted Hanna afte all, which explains why poor Toby was on the receiving end of his grabby, sweaty vitriol. I’m trying to focus on how glowing and ecstatic Mary looks in panel two on being given official permission to meddle in Hanna’s life (by someone who doesn’t really know and isn’t authorized to speak for Hanna, but whatever), but to be honest I’m terribly disturbed by the quote marks Toby’s put around “talk”. I guess we should just think of Ian and Mary as engaged in a long-term game of good cop/bad cop with the outside world, with the thought of Ian’s chinbearded visage twisted in rage being enough to get you to conform to Mary’s vision of how your life should be.

Pluggers, 10/11/14

Longtime Pluggers watchers know Reed Hoover as the strip’s most prolific contributor, who once got a whole week all to himself with his folksy down-home ideas for drawings of mutant beast-men. (This 2006 Dallas Morning News article serves as Reed Hoover: Origins, and also the final paragraph is amazing, so please read all the way to the end.) This is all well and good, of course, but I’m a little disturbed that Reed’s name has worked its way into the panel itself, which apparently features the Pluggers chicken-lady actually reading Pluggers in her daily newspaper. Probably the best thing about pluggers is what I’ve always assumed to be their instinctive disgust towards post-modern self-referential narrative, and now even this has been taken away from me.