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Funky Winkerbean, 8/13/21

So, in case you haven’t been keeping track and/or want to feel a million years old, Lisa’s death in Funky Winkerbean happened [dramatic music sting] almost 14 years ago at this point. And you’d think, in theory at least, that ongoing syndicated media products like Funky Winkerbean would have as a goal, if only an aspirational one, that they have some regular readers today, in the year 2021, who weren’t regular readers in 2007, and would tailor their content accordingly. You’d think that! But then you apparently haven’t reckoned with the sheer dramatic intensity of characters watching actors re-enacting strips from 2007, while expressing no visible emotions of any kind.

Mark Trail, 8/13/21

So Mark is going to punch [checks Wikipedia] the lakes of southern Russia and Ukraine? He’s gonna unleash the right fist o’ justice on [scrolls deeper into article] the ballast water of ocean-going ships traversing the St. Lawrence Seaway??? He’s going to use his crushing right cross to get to the root of the problem, which is [keeps on scrolling, surely it’s here somewhere] trailered boat traffic? Can we stop trailered boat traffic, with punching? We’re gonna find out!

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Mark Trail, 8/12/21

Oh, uh, the “Mark parties with influencers” storyline has wrapped up, and I’m not going to describe everything that happened (it was confusing?) but there was definitely punching. Now Bill Ellis is assigning Mark to a new editor who works for a member of Woods & Wildlife’s family of trusted brands: Hot Catch’s print run ended in 2011 and now it’s a blog with six to eight mostly aggregated content items per day, but it does have a freelance budget for the stories that it knows will bring in those clicks. And the W&W audience development team has determined exactly what that magic element is: Mark punching somebody. Will Mark be punching people violating fishing conservation laws, or just punching the fish themselves?

Dennis the Menace, 8/12/21

We established years ago that Dennis has achieved at least basic literacy, which raises a lot of questions about today’s panel. Is he doing a gender-reversed version of the thing where girls pretend to be dumb so boys will like them? I leave it to you to decide if the overall terribleness of this strategy is mitigated by the menace to the patriarchy that this particular move represents.

Beetle Bailey, 8/12/21

In order for the rhythm of this interchange to work, we have to assume that General Halftrack already has that bottle of liquor in his right hand in panel one, just out of our sight. I was going to say that he was wandering around the house with the bottle, waiting for the perfect setup for him to unleash a bon mot as he poured himself a glass, but based on his well-known disdain for his wife, perhaps any interaction with her would serve as a suitable trigger.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/12/21

A couple weeks ago we learned that Grimm is dead, and being tortured eternally in hell. “But how did he die?” you probably wondered. The answer is revealed in today’s flashback strip: it’s rabies. He didn’t get his rabies shot, and then he contracted rabies, which killed him.

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Daddy Daze, 8/11/21

I think we’re all well aware that the actual cat poster caption is “Hang In There, Baby,” which led to me read this strip and immediately wonder “Hmm, is the actual ‘Hang In There, Baby’ poster copyrighted, and is the copyright holder extremely litigious?” This in turn led me to the Wikipedia article about the poster, which was a whole journey, informing me that:

• The photographer was Victor Baldwin, who had previous been best known for taking pics of Rat Pack celebs
• The original version was this, a photo I was totally unfamiliar with



• It was immediately ripped off and knockoff versions with different pictures proliferated, which explains why I was unfamiliar with the original
• Baldwin sued the makers of all the knockoffs he could find, just on principle, almost never asking for more than his own court costs being covered, which I guess answered my original question
• The first person to buy the poster was Meredith Wilson, composer of The Music Man
• People sent copies of the poster to Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon during their respective scandals in the ’70s, urging them to hang on to office (it didn’t work)
• “Victor Baldwin made approximately $700,000 from sales of the posters, much of which went to settle his divorce, which he was apparently happy to spend it on”
• Based on their respective “See also” sections, Wikipedia apparently considers “Hang In There, Baby”‘s U.K. equivalent to be a a poster featuring a tennis player’s naked ass, based only on the fact that they were both wildly popular posters in the 1970s

Anyway! Comics can be truly educational, in the sense that they frequently irritate me into learning things despite myself.

Mary Worth, 8/11/21

Mary is starting to go through her highly regimented Meddle Protocol! Stage 1: Determine if the subject is capable of recognizing basic behavioral patterns!

Marvin, 8/11/21

JUNE 2021: Hmm, all the characters in Marvin are getting a little stale. Mostly they just are angry at Marvin all time time, and obviously you can’t blame them, but it gets old. What if we introduce a new — and topical — one: an Alex home assistant?

AUGUST 2021: We regret to inform you that the Alexa home assistant now mostly just gets angry at Marvin all the time.

Family Circus, 8/11/21

A fun fact about the Grand Canyon is that Colorado City, which is in the small sliver of Arizona north of the Grand Canyon, was for a long time a hotbed of rebel Mormon polygamists precisely because the state line protected them from Utah authorities and the Grand Canyon protected them from Arizona authorities, just putting that out there Billy