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Crankshaft, 8/20/13

Crankshaft’s crankiness secrets … revealed! It turns out that he isn’t just an implacable machine hard-wired for hate. He actually has to work at it. There’s a real danger that he might actually have a pleasant interaction with a child, and we can’t have that. Did it used to come more naturally to him? Is he going soft in his old age? The sort of chill up the spine normal people get when they forget why they walked into a room or can’t remember the name of a loved one — does Crankshaft experience that when he catches himself smiling in the mirror sometimes, or when he notices that he’s expressing a glimmer of affection for his family?

Family Circus, 8/20/13

Aww, isn’t this an adorable edition of Kids Say The Darndest Things About Death? “Congrats on being the grandfather who will die second, grandpa! Can I tug on your wrinkled, sagging face-flesh, which feels so different from my own young and supple skin? Whoa, you really yelp if I pinch it too hard! I guess you still have some felling left in it! Yep, you’re still our alive-grandpa! You know, for now.”

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Mark Trail, 8/19/13

Oh my goodness you guys, Rusty dreams of dinosaurs! (I sneer at your pedantic “pterosaurs aren’t technically dinosaurs” gripe, Rusty and Mark were talking about dinosaurs all week and you know we’re going to get some.) While this will provide lots of opportunities for awesome dinosaur drawings, it also provides Mark with an opportunity to abandon his hideous ward in the woods, as you’ll note that Rusty has just dozed off on the ground without Mark being anywhere nearby. Looks like that fishing trip was just a last hurrah, or, more likely, an excuse to take Rusty so far away from home that he’ll never find his way back!

Funky Winkerbean, 8/19/13

This is a pretty textbook example of how things go down in a Funky Winkerbean 3.0 strip. The dialogue could be construed as a little light-hearted joking, but the grim facial expressions show that in fact everything is meant to be taken in deadly earnest. “No, really, the football team is terrible, and there’s literally no chance of it getting any better. Certainly not with me in charge of it. I’m the worst!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/19/13

Dang, Snuffy’s reputation precedes him … his reputation as a man who steals chickens so he can dismember and eat them. Ha ha, it’s funny that the chickens are afraid of Snuffy, because they don’t want to die!

Pluggers, 8/19/13

Pluggers just have to poop all the time.

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Blondie, 8/18/13

Having recently turned 39, an age significantly closer to Dagwood’s vaguely defined middle age than to Alexander and Cookie’s vaguely defined teenagerhood, I too struggle with the kids today and their lingo, and sometimes have difficulty distinguishing between actual teenspeak and things that comics creators who are even older than me think might be teenspeak, in some teen subculture somewhere. For instance, “sick” and “wicked sick” are slang synonyms for “good” and “very good” of such long standing that even I recognized them right away. “Wound” is another matter, though, one not helped by the fact that it’s not clear in writing whether it’s meant to rhyme with “pound” or “spooned.” I certainly hope it’s the latter and that some misguided sixtysomething Blondie gag writer came to the conclusion that “Well if being sick is cool, then being wounded must be super cool!”

Mary Worth, 8/18/13

Oh no! The talk group has gone dangerously awry! The participants may be emotionally fragile, but they recognize an alien robot spy wearing a human meatsack disguise when they see/hear one. “SOMETIMES FRIENDSHIPS RUN THEIR COURSE,” said the carefully constructed Homo sapiens emulation module. “REVIEW PAST INTERACTIONS FOR POSSIBLE CAUSES. HALT! BELAY AGGRESSIVE POSTURE! A SEMANTIC COMPREHENSION MISMATCH HAS OCCURRED! PREVIOUS SENTENCES WERE INTENDED AS HELPFUL SUGGESTIONS, NOT AS ATTACKS ON SENSE OF SELF! RECALIBRATING … RECALIBRATING …”