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Funky Winkerbean, 4/6/10

A layperson might believe that Funky Winkerbean has already extracted the maximum amount of misery possible out of its characters and settings, but rest assured that the Pain Scientists over at Westview Industries are working hard at pushing the envelope of pure torture. It is of course pathetic that this grease-stained fast food subchain is the only place where FW characters can be happy (presumably they’re mistaking the sated albeit somewhat bloated feeling that comes from eating the pizza, combined with the absence of immediate physical pain, for “happiness”), but it’s all they’ve got. And now even that’s being taken away from them! Montoni’s will go bankrupt and all of you losers will be forced to morosely pick through dumpsters for sustenance! Ha ha ha!

One of the fascinating things about today’s strip is that it contains the structure of a joke without any even nominal humor content. It would have maybe worked if Funky (and yes, it took me a minute to work it out, but I’m pretty sure that’s Funky calling from the accountants’ office, and not some accountant placing a mafia-style phone call with no proper nouns and vague, unspecified threats) had claimed that Montoni’s was “guilty of insolvency” or something. As it is, it appears that Funky and Holly are each deploying a mismatched half of a desultory pun-couplet of the sort that marginally leavens the bleak horror of the Funkyverse, leaving them (and us) confused as well as depressed.

Crankshaft, 4/6/10

Meanwhile, over in the “fun” Funkyverse strip, suddenly single Crankshaft has decided to look for love online. The expression settling on his face in panel two as he realizes that nobody likes him is utterly priceless.

Judge Parker, 4/6/10

Speaking of priceless expressions of despair, check out Sam slowly morphing into a sad-eyed Margaret Keane painting in panel three. “He’s wearing the same color of minty green as I am … but he looks so much more attractive and carefree in it than I do! Damn you, you handsome, leonine-haired young buck!”

Hi and Lois, 4/6/10

Ha ha! It’s funny because they’re going to be sleeping in their car!

Pluggers, 4/6/10

Pluggers could die at any time, anywhere they park their lazy asses, and nobody would care much, or even notice.

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Your COTW coming momentarily, but first: I have been utterly remiss in not linking to faithful reader yellojkt’s annual March Madness-themed comics smackdown! The theme this year is the “National Crappy Comics Copy Cats”, and voting is still open for Calvin Clones, Faux Far Sides, and Doonesbury Dopplegangers. Vote early, vote often!

Also: a plea to elitist iPad users! Are you reading this site on an elitist iPad? 29 of you were yesterday, according to Google Analytics! Anyway, I’d love to hear your impressions on what the site looked like and how it worked on this awesome and terrible new device, so please shoot me an email at bio@jfruh.com, with screenshots, if you can!

And now: your comment of the week!

“‘If you ever need a sympathetic ear’ Mary says, mocking a woman who clearly has no ears, sympathetic or otherwise.” –bunivasal

And the runners up! Very funny!

“Abbey: ‘That’s right. Jules will be sleeping where he’s least likely to have sex with anyone: next to Sam. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an escort to hire.'” –Black Drazon

“I’m intrigued to learn that Sam is a hipster doofus, who may blog about vintage WASP clothing.” –Rusty

“That is the saddest seder ever. And which one of the plagues is ‘Mary Meddles Your Ass’?” –Gabacho

“Because Luann just wouldn’t be Luann without periodic public discussion of teenage girls’ underwear.” –commodorejohn

“What with the problematic real estate market and all, Lois has had to make ends meet by doing a smear job on librarians. Later, in some back alley, an operative from Amazon.com will give her a wad of unmarked bills.” –Jym

“Mary clutches the steaming baking dish in front of her as she talks, as if to entice them to divulge their personal business to her with the promise of its gooey, tan-hued blandness. ‘Just think,’ she whispers, holding it tantalizingly close, and yet just out of their reach, ‘This reconstituted potato-based food substance could be yours … if you tell me everything.'” –Gap-Toothed Starey “HOOOO” Guy

“Dear Rex Morgan Production Team: Sometimes your artwork is a little awkward, but dang how do you manage to peg us SK8RBOYZ so accurately? ’Cause I know there’s nothing I’d rather do than travel from place to place doing pointless manual labour for The Man so’s I can pay back loans from my chick and enjoy a precious Sunday afternoon with my homies stylin’ down the staircase railings over at the Art Museum. It’s like you are inside my mind! Yours truly, Youth With Unbelievable Nickname.” –Mooncattie

“Mary is pointing towards the calendar in order to show Bonnie that, if you wait long enough, all trends come back into style. Specifically, the trend of hot-pink geometrically-patterned curtains next to walls that are painted matte black.” –Patrick

“I think Bobbie is going to shoot Margo, and we’ll have a long-drawn out deathbed scene with rib-tickling histrionics from all the principals until Margo drinks someone’s blood — maybe Tommie’s, since she is probably a virgin — and revives.” –The Divine O’F

“Y’know, putting a shirt or vest on your fursuit just emphasizes its pantslessness.” –Naked Bunny with a Whip

“I’m hoping that someone in A3G gets shot so we can have another round of everyone being surprised that Tommie is working in a hospital.” –Andy L

“Notice how Mark is trying to throw off the Parker Brothers by pointing to the tree: ‘No, leave me, it’s the tree you want!'” –Digger

“Say what you will about this Manley, but that last panel guy’s face takes up an area about 0.75 cm square on my monitor, yet spells out ‘Nice Ass!’ as clearly as if it were the title page of a Reader’s Digest Special Plugger-Friendly Large Print edition (of a book titled Nice Ass!, presumably, which seems a little unlikely now that I think about it, but I’ll let it go).” –One-eyed Wolfdog

“‘And what purpose will that serve? You think such I can be felled by your puny bullets? Haha…ahah…AHAHAHAHAHA.’ Silly Roberta, everyone knows that Margo can only be defeated by the poisonous nectar of human kindness.” –DialMforMerger

“Someone really ought to paint panel 1 of Bobbie and Margo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They can just paint over whatever’s there now.” –monsieurjohn

Big thanks to everyone who put cash in my tip jar! And we must of course give thanks to our advertisers:

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B.C., 4/5/10

You might think that the familiarity that comes with reading and criticizing the comics section every day for years would breed a certain amount of contempt for the medium and its perpetrators. But I’ve actually gained respect, or at least sympathy, for cartoonists in the process of writing this blog. For one thing, I’ve learned how hard it can be to come up with something funny to say every day, and realized that sometimes you have to write something only semi-coherent, tell yourself that they can’t all be winners, and then move on. And, once you’ve assembled a body of work over several years and know that you have a long-term audience, you’re faced with the dilemma of writing something that stands on its own or going back to that in-joke well.

Take today’s B.C., for instance. That’s Wiley in the hat, manager of the strip’s ever-hapless baseball team. And there are his players, visible only from the neck up; at some point in the mists of the strip’s history, there was a gag in which the baseball diamond’s dugout was depicted as a literal hole literally dug out of the ground, which has now stuck.

So, if you’re a long-term reader of the strip, all these visual cues would make some sort of sense (but not really all that much). But let’s assume, for a moment, that there are people who, right now, are picking up the newspaper or loading their Web browser, and reading B.C. for the very first time. Would there be a single thing in this cartoon that they could grasp, at all? Would you look at Wiley and understand his outfit as a baseball manager’s and not, say, a train engineer’s? Would you look at the hatless, baseball-equipment-less players standing in an open trench and think, “Oh, yes, these are baseball players, in a dugout, ha ha?” Wouldn’t it all just be madness to you, a sea of symbols without an organizational system?

The answer to that last one seems to me to be an obvious yes! But, on the other hand, the “Wiley is a baseball manager and his team’s dugout is a hole in the ground” tropes long predate my first reading of the strip, and yet here I am patiently explaining them to you, so somehow I’ve managed to pick up on them. And I’ve never even particularly liked B.C.! The determination of the human mind — or at least my mind — to make sense of larger narratives is impressive, I suppose. But I do wonder, now that people are more likely to find their comics on the atomized Web rather than on collected on a newspaper page, if people will have the same patience with strips they don’t get right away.

And with that said, here are a couple of comics and commentaries thereupon that probably won’t make any sense if you aren’t a regular reader of this blog!

Gil Thorp, 4/5/10

So, our basketball-season stories have wrapped up with surprising grimness: the girls’ team is defeated in the playdowns, Cassie ditches her erstwhile fiance and is ditched by her friends in turn, and Steve Luhm gets punched in the face and is still a janitor. I imagine that we haven’t seen the last of at least some of these clowns, but now we’re launching into our exciting baseball-season stories, which will involve baseball in the sense that the sport is mentioned in the first panel before we move on to whatever sort of sleazy underground S&M den Kelly is trying to forcibly drag Coach Kaz into. “The Pit” doesn’t sound that hot to me, honestly, but since most of their romantic encounters take place at Kaz’s sex dojo, her standards are probably pretty low.

Apartment 3-G, 4/5/10

We’re pretty much all in awe of Margo’s quotin’ and naked ringless fingers, but I’m not sure if they’re really the match for an actual loaded pistol that she seems to believe they are. Still, I wouldn’t mess with her, armed or no!