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Funky Winkerbean, 5/9/22

Happy Monday, everybody, Funky Winkerbean is starting up the week with a funeral, obviously. I’m pretty sure Mary Sue isn’t someone we’ve actually met before in this strip, and Funky and Les want to make it clear that they don’t actually know her well or care that much about her, they just think it’s an important Funkyverse ritual to stop by funerals and acknowledge that everyone’s dying all the time, just some of us a little sooner than others. “Mary Sue” is of course also a derogatory term for an idealized authorial self-insert character in fanfiction, and it absolutely tracks that an idealized self-insert character in Funkyverse fan fiction would be someone who dies off-panel in order to give the sad sack main characters the chance to talk about how the whole world is falling apart, really.

Crankshaft, 5/9/22

Meanwhile, the “fun” Funkyverse strip is here to make sure you never forget the real victim of 9/11 (Crankshaft’s grill).

The Lockhorns, 5/9/22

I’m sorry, I’m usually on team “The Lockhorns is good, actually,” but I do demand that the strip keep to its mission of laser-focusing on Leroy and Loretta’s mutual animosity and self-inflected misery. Leroy complaining that it’s annoying when he has to leave the house to buy things simply won’t cut it.

Mary Worth, 5/9/22

Well, it seems this plotline is going to wrap up without much conflict, I guess the last detail to take care of is Cal, I wonder how oh my GOD Ian is going to come to Toby’s class and GLOWER at him, and possibly start pounding his chest and making what he thinks are gorilla noises, this is gonna be AMAZING

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Family Circus, 5/8/22

Wow, Family Circus did not need to go this hard for Mother’s Day, reminding us that, no matter how much your human litter loves you, you can never make it up to the cat mothers whose babies you cruelly stole away. I’m pretty sure this isn’t actually how it works, though, as cats are generally quite solitary and territorial, and in many cases actually work to drive away kittens soon after they’re weaned. My personal experience in this is that we had a feral cat who brought her already partially weaned kittens in our yard not long after we moved into our current house, and we managed to trap all of them and get the mom fixed and the kittens adopted. The mom we released back into our yard, and while she’ll never be a housecat or even let us pet her, she has stuck around to this day because we feed her daily; after one (1) night of sounding sad about her kittens she apparently forgot all about them, to the extent that, when we were trying to catch another feral cat with a baited trap, she walked right into it and got trapped again, even though that trap was the source of the most traumatic experience in her life to that point. Your cat is fine, is what I’m trying to say, Jeffy, so don’t worry your oversized head about it.

Rex Morgan, 5/8/22

“We’re on the brick shift! Nobody knows why, but every night two doctors at Glenwood Hospital are kept in reserve to exclusively treat any brick-related injuries. I’ve never had to do any work on any of these shifts, and I sure don’t expect tonight to be any different!”

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Beetle Bailey, 5/7/22

I have never denied being an effete urban liberal and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that I know very little about how guns “work.” That said, I did see, in the theater, the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Eraser (dubbed “the OK-est film of 1996” in a review in the Omaha World-Herald that is sadly behind a paywall), so I’m aware that carrying a rifle in each hand with an intent to shoot both at once is simultaneously possible and extremely cool looking. Yes, Sarge’s guns are not anywhere near as bad-ass as Arnold’s, but also Beetle and Killer are significantly less dangerous foes than even the henchmen in a typical Schwarzenegger movie, and definitely my first thought in seeing this is that Sarge had decided that an accidental encounter in the dark, where faces can’t be seen but the perimeter of the facility must be protected at all costs, might be the solution to a lot of his long-running problems.

Gil Thorp, 5/7/22

You read it here first: they’re gonna drag this thing out so that we think Mr. Hamm is on the run from the mob or something, when in fact he’s the subject of a humiliating viral video from like 2009, where he tripped in public and said something real dorky like “Oh, for love of Pete!” His personal hell is that every new microgeneration of teens discovers his pratfall anew every few years on the latest social media platform: the college-age millennials of the early ’10s on Facebook, the dirtbags of Snapchat, the doomscrollers of Twitter, the furries of Tumblr — each, at the height of their power, coming together to relentless cyberbully him. Currently it’s spreading like wild on TikTok, as teens worldwide try to imitate the tremulous tone he uses with “Pete!” while deliberately falling face-first onto the sidewalk as their friends hoot and holler behind the camera. If any of these people find out where he lives, he’ll be toast.