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Judge Parker, 12/8/22

When I was a teen, there was a syndicated War of the Worlds show that was a sequel to the 1950s movie version, but set in the present-day (i.e., the late ’80s) when the aliens from the movie — who were not dead after all, just in suspended animation and kept in secret labs around the world — started waking up and making a comeback. I pretty instantly fell in love with this show, and so was somewhat discomfited when the second season started and abruptly the time period was shifted to a dystopian, riot-scarred “near future” where society had begun to unravel, and several beloved (by me) characters were killed off almost right away and new boring ones introduced. This was before obsessive online fandom was a thing, so there was no real way for 14-year-old me to know that a new showrunner had been brought in to change things up, but shoutout to the War of the Worlds (1988 TV series) superfan who put all the drama on the Wikipedia article.

My point is that Cavelton, the Connecticut-ish Judge Parker setting, has always been pretty bucolic and suburban, but suddenly we’re expected to believe that since 2018 it’s been in the grips of “the C18,” a deadly drug gang. Well, I’m not 14 anymore and I’m not going to just accept this. I’m calling it now: these C18 guys are just as boring as everyone else in this drippy town, as evidenced by the fact that their attempt to come up with a cool name like “MS-13” produced extremely dopey results.

Crankshaft, 12/8/22

You’re talking to a janitor from the future about how the book you’re about to write will create a utopia. Meanwhile, or maybe ten years ago, who can say, I’m passed out drunk in a Santa costume in the middle of the day. We are not the same.

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Dustin, 12/7/22

If you had asked me before today, I would have said with some conviction that Blondie and Dustin both fell into the category of “comics I read every day but do not particularly like.” Nevertheless, the past couple days have provided me with some surprising information about the nuances of my opinions: I think Elmo-only strips are a violation of the Bumstead-centered narrative unity of the Blondieverse, whereas Dustin strips in which the Dustin family doesn’t appear, and instead the only recurring character is the weird little neighbor kid Dustin is inappropriately friends with? Sure, go nuts, doesn’t bother me a bit. Oh, do you want to do a joke with him talking to a mall Santa, but the joke only makes sense if the guy is actually Santa, throwing things into further narrative confusion? I already told you I don’t give a shit and this won’t change my position on shit-giving, sorry.

Blondie, 12/7/22

Speaking of Blondie and liking or not liking things, one thing I do like about this strip is that Dagwood and his mailman genuinely do not like each other. The mailman is absolutely justified, of course, as Dagwood repeatedly flings open the door and runs into him at full speed on the way to his carpool, scattering mail everywhere. I’m not sure what Dagwood’s beef is, but his animus is fairly clear.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/7/22

Ah, yes, we’ve hit the Wall Of Text phase of this time travel exposition dump, as we learn that the time travel business is apparently responsible for the weird Crankshaft/Funky Winkerbean chronological discontinuity that’s exercised so many of our best minds over the past decade. Our future janitor is also proving that knowing how to control the timestream doesn’t mean you know everything; if he thinks that Summer is basically done writing her book now that she’s decided what she wants to write about and has taken some preliminary notes, I would like to refer him to the three years it took for me to get from my Kickstarter to my novel, and also refer to him to the experience of everyone else in human history who’s ever written a book.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/7/22

Good news for everyone who plays by the rules, everyone! Remember Wanda, the comely diner waitress who was shamelessly flirting with Mud? Well, now she’s going to make herself sexually available to Truck, as his reward for doing the music business “the right way” (i.e., he doesn’t pretend to shit his pants on stage but also doesn’t make any money). Who’s the loser now, Mud?

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Funky Winkerbean, 12/06/22

It probably shouldn’t surprise you to learn I have been a daily comics reader for more or less my entire life. But until I really got started on this blog, that meant that I read the daily comics that were printed in whatever newspaper I was reading at the time, which meant there was a decade-long gap in my daily Funky Winkerbean readership straddling Y2K, a period during which the strip made its now-infamous Turn To Grim, and even now I’m still putting together the pieces of what all happened in the strip during that stretch. Like, someone bombed the Westview post office? Sure, why not!

One thing I do know happened during that period is that Lisa had breast cancer, then went into remission, then her cancer came back, but the hospital mixed up her lab results so she was told she was fine and the whole thing wasn’t figured out until it was too late. In the real world, this is the sort of mistake that would have resulted in multiple lawsuits, and in a world where a janitor from the future was subtly manipulating things behind the scenes, it seems like it would be a very easy mistake to fix, certainly easier than convincing a top neonatal physician to keep living it a shitty town like Westview. But you have to remember that Lisa was primarily important as the Birthing Vessel for the Chosen One, so once Summer was born, all extraordinary or indeed ordinary measures to keep her alive immediately ceased.

Dennis the Menace, 12/6/22

What exactly is Alice forbidding Dennis from doing in the first panel here? Is she telling him that, as five-year-old children, he and Joey are not allowed to just wander out into the wintertime by themselves? Because it doesn’t seem to have worked.

The Lockhorn, 12/6/22

You have to respect how big a production Leroy and Loretta make out of passive-aggressively trying to destroy each other emotionally, like with props and everything. That’s how they keep things fresh!

Mary Worth, 12/6/22

Look, I understand the dramatic reasons why we’re spending today’s strip on Iris’s inner monologue, but frankly I’m much more interested in finding out whether or not Nan is making airplane noises as she feeds Zak.