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Funky Winkerbean, 1/5/10

So I’ve been reading the new, retooled Funky Winkerbean long enough to distinguish amongst the various forms of creeping dread found therein, and to have preferences among them, and this here is pretty much my least favorite flavor of creeping Funky Winkerbean dread: Les’s creeping dread about his daughter’s burgeoning sexuality. Summer actually seems against all odds to be a pretty well-adjusted person, but that won’t stop Les from mapping his own awkward, fumbling adolescence onto her. (The rear-view mirror knocked askew by his helmet of hair in the flashback is a nice touch.) While Les should probably be more worried about the terrible, life-ruining car accidents the kids are prone to — just ask Becky the one-armed band leader! — the automobile instead represents to him an avenue Summer can use to escape his suffocating control, and his thoughts drift unbidden to his daughter and some faceless dude in the back seat, hands drifting south, clothes slipping off of young, athletic bodies … and … so forth.

Luann, 1/5/10

Of course, if you really want unsettling car-based sexuality in the comics, you’ve got to turn to the Brad and Toni show in Luann. It’s Toni’s hand gesture in the third panel that really puts this strip beyond the feature’s usual ribaldry, as she seems to be promising to “go under the hood” and manually pleasure Brad’s car in unspeakable ways.

Mary Worth, 1/5/10

One person whose awkward sexuality I personally can’t get enough of is Wilbur, obviously. Most of us would have a lot of conflicted emotions if we discovered that we had an adult son we had never met, of course, but Wilbur mainly seems to be having sexy intrusive thoughts about the boy’s sexy dead mother. Those huge blue eyes … that unnaturally long neck … that weird bunchy collar … who could ever forget a face like that? Well, Wilbur could, as you can see when all of his reveries about his lost love are compared:

With the different facial features and neck lengths on display here, I think you’d be hard pressed to recognize these as the same woman. The only thing they seem to have in common is a tendency to list to the right, perhaps as a result of some kind of inner ear disorder. I’m now guessing that Wilbur was such a prolific seducer in his youth that he honestly doesn’t remember who this “Abby” character was, and the “demon” he needs put to rest is his uncertainty over which of his many lovers bore the man who showed up on his doorstep.

Mark Trail, 1/5/10

Of course, Mark Trail is where we should go to escape from human sexuality of any sort. I particularly love today’s new-adventure-launching installment, as it nicely encapsulates the sort of dream state that defines most Trailian narrative. “Oh, my old friend called me earlier? I’ll just pick up this phone right here at the table and talk to him. Hello, Leonard Nimoy!” “Hi Mark! Did you know that you have an ‘outdoor reputation’? You do, and it can solve problems! Why don’t you bring you and your reputation over to out here, which is far, far away from your wife?”

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Apologies to everyone who contributed to the monstrously long holiday thread, but I generally don’t include comments posted in my absence in my considerations for COTW. I was going to give Icepick Jones another week at the top, but there’s been a rash of comments that made me laugh from the last couple of days, most of them Wilbur-related; thus, I give you your comment of the … well, the last 48 hours or so, really:

“I gotta say, most of Wilbur and Kurt’s dialog reads more like ‘online affair awkwardly transitioning to the real world’ than ‘father and son reunion.'” –Steve S

And the funny runners up!

“The Sunday FW lately always appears to have been dipped in tea or something to give it the look of a movie shot through a nostalgic filter. It’s probably been dipped in Summer’s tears.” –Rusty

“In that outfit, Dawn looks like she parties like it’s 1899.” –zerowolf

“I propose an exercise: Every time the word ‘know’ shows up in the strip from now on, we read it as Wilbur here intends it. ‘Ah, yes, I know Tommy the Tweaker!’ ‘Yes, Mary and Aldo knew each other quite well!’ It’s fun for the whole family! Good Biblical fun!” –Wasabi Jane

“The Mary Worth holiday strip is the best Christmas card I got this year. We’ve seen some amazingly inappropriate song choices in 2009 (the Frames, anyone?), but ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’ as a commentary on the ‘did Wilbur knock up his hippie girlfriend?’ plot line takes the cake. If I’m interpreting this correctly, ‘home,’ for Wilbur, is his college romance with Abby, about whom he had completely forgotten until he signed up for Facebook this week. And now he can only dream of spending the holidays at ‘home’ with his lost love, because he is stuck in his actual home with his daughter from a later relationship, toasting in phony merriment while he thinks about how much better his life could have been. Season’s Greetings, everyone!” –Mollie

“I believe the ‘demon’ Kurt is hunting is the man-thing that impregnated his angelic sainted mother in her younger days by blinding her with his devil’s tonic (Boone’s Farm Cherry Wine). Watch out Wilbur — I think Kurt will only be happy when you are ‘resting’ at the bottom of the Santa Royale pool.” –Rachel211

“I’ll note that even in his college days, Wilbur had a forehead combover, which is presumably catnip to coeds.” –Jym

Re: the Curtis “Crazy-ass Kwanzaa Jamboree”: “If only Edge City could go off on a post-Hanukkah Jew Tales of Insanity binge every year, I could truly be proud of my own heritage.” –GirlyQ

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Oh my goodness, the site’s been all rearranged! More information about the redesign can be found on the Internet.

Curtis, 1/4/10

Oh, right, Kwanzaa! If there’s one thing that keeps me from viewing the purchase of a new calendar as just another step on the ever-descending spiral towards death, it’s the annual Curtis Kwanzaa fable of hallucinatory madness. I generally tear through the first half of the tale with joy when I return from my Christmas travels. Past adventures have included:

• The trials of six-fingered piano players
• Terrifying bat-winged bears
• Giant telepathic otters (still the gold standard, to my mind)
• Talking two-headed snakes
• Greedy maidens vomiting out various creepy-crawleys

This year’s story, involving nightmarish soul-stealing shadow-things, talking, styled animals, and all-knowing rhythm instruments, while whimsical and awesome when measured by other yardsticks, is thus rather pedestrian by when viewed in the Curtis Kwanzaa context. Still, today our hero appears to be passing through a magic mirror into the realm of the dead, so perhaps things might be looking up. I’d also like to point out that his sentient animal friends can speak and think like humans but, since they cannot enter the spirit realm, apparently do not have souls, which to my mind makes them by far the creepiest part of this whole drama so far.

Pluggers, 1/4/10

Speaking of monstrous, soulless beasts, let’s check in with Pluggers! Let’s see, yep, same old same old, pluggers are casting their minds back to a bygone age and … finding it … wanting? OH MY GOD EVERYTHING I KNOW IS WRONG! Is 2010 the year pluggers finally get with the times? What’s next? “Pluggers will suffer a witch to live”? MADNESS!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/4/10

This strip would be funny (well, OK, not funny per se, but at least not so unsettling) if Ol’ Lukey were laffin’ it up with his fellow rustics in the second panel, rather than just sort of staring off into space looking befuddled and a little frightened. As it is, it appears that this elderly hillbilly is falling into corn likker-accelerated dementia, unable to remember where he’s going and why at any given moment. Soon he’ll be receiving Hootin’ Holler’s version of elder care (e.g., abandonment on a rocky hillside to be eaten by grizzlies).