Comment of the Week

Is Dr. Jeff's 'again’ meant to indicate that he's already (willfully?) forgotten what Mary's told him, or does it display his belief that Wilbur's life is a karmic circle of disasters that are superficially varied but basically the same thing happening to him over and over?

Pozzo

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Crankshaft, 5/16/14

So Crankshaft got a smartphone this week, by the way! I would have settled for some smartphone-themed puns, but I will very much accept Crankshaft being a snarling dick to his best friend, for no reason other than to cover up his own feelings of inadequacies and helplessness, and there’s not even a hint of a joke or wordplay or anything like that, just the main character of this strip salving his own emotional wounds by making everyone around him feel miserable and shitty. Crankshaft, everybody! The “fun” Funkyverse strip!

Heathcliff, 5/16/14

Why don’t the inhabitants of Heathcliff’s leafy suburb ever use garbage bags? They just empty all their waste directly into metal cans, where it putrefies into a more or less homogeneous brown goo. Now Heathcliff and Sonia are painting the town, if by “painting the town” you mean “smearing the streets of the town with the lumpy brown goo that is apparently the end product of rotting garbage.”

Apartment 3-G, 5/16/14

At last, thought Jack, my plan has come to fruition. He had known it wouldn’t be easy to find a suitable partner and then convince her to willingly join him inside his meticulously hand-crafted two-person horse costume for some good old-fashioned equine cosplay. But Jack Riley was nothing if not a patient man.

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Mark Trail, 5/15/14

As promised, we are at last being treated to a genuine wild bear fight, of the sort that happens all the time in the actual wilderness, as determined by me doing exactly zero research on the subject because this is super rad and I want it to be real.

Also super rad is Mark’s completely gob-smacked expression in panel three. It’s almost as if, even though he planned to lure this wounded black bear into Rex’s territory, he never really expected it to work. Is this the origin story of New Model Mark Trail, in which he realizes that he can control the beasts of the wild, with his thoughts?

Apartment 3-G, 5/15/14

Man, I kinda regret having shown you any of the last six weeks worth of Apartment 3-G, because if I hadn’t I could believably present today’s strip to you and say “Tommie’s taken on work as a trainee dominatrix at a rural BDSM dungeon — but is she ready for the job?”

Family Circus, 5/15/14

I was pretty disgusted by Jeffy’s lack of even basic science knowledge here about suborder Rhopalocera’s life cycle. But, upon reflection, I don’t think Jeffy should learn that a gross, squirmy caterpillar can eventually become a beautiful butterfly. Best not to get his hopes up, you know?

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Mary Worth, 5/14/14

I’m not going to claim that Iris and Tommy’s dialogue in panel one consists of the greatest twenty-word sequence in the history of English prose, but let’s just say that it’s my current favorite, OK? I hereby order anyone who lives in Atlanta, New York, Houston, Phoenix, or any other city with a Midtown and who is talking about a restaurant in said neighborhood to say, airily, “you know, the eatery down in Midtown?” Will one of your friends respond with “Yeah, I know of it”? That all depends on whether you hang out with hardened meth-dealing ex-cons whose native tongue is the language of the streets, I guess!

This is, quite obviously, the beginning of the promised Redemption of Tommy, and I have to admit that I’m charmed by how extremely chill he’s being about it. “Enh, maybe that lady was right and I can expiate my past sins by finding a job. Hey, does this Jerry guy want to give me a job? Can’t hurt to find out, I guess.”

Dennis the Menace, 5/14/14

OK, let’s ignore the dumb wordplay and just acknowledge that Dennis is maintaining eye contact with his mother while dumping the meal she made for him directly into the trash. Would it be more menacing if he were saying “This is garbage, just like all the other garbage I have to put up with in your garbage house”? Yes, but let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Family Circus, 5/14/14

Oh, man, PJ is just delightfully smug in this panel. “That’s right, Dolly, you wallow in nostalgia all you want. Your day is done. I’m youth! This is PJ’s time now!