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Folks, before we jump into me making fun of today’s comics, I wanted point you to an article I wrote about comics elsewhere! I talked to a bunch of comics artists about their decision to acknowledge — or ignore — the coronvirus pandemic’s effect on our everday lives, and it turned into a meditation on how time and history intersect with the ephemeral medium of newspaper comics. Check it out over on Polygon!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/11/20

We’re fully a week and a half into this “Rex tells Sarah about how he and June met” storyline and June hasn’t even shown up yet, and are you feeling, bored, huh? Do you think this storyline, and Rex Morgan, M.D., storylines in general, move too slowly? Do you wish they’d just get to the point already? Well, it sounds like you’re a big whiny baby, and not a cool supergenius baby who can figure out how to blackmail people, but a dumb baby who had amnesia and now doesn’t know anything anymore. Do you want to be a dumb baby? Do you? No? Then shut up and let this strip set up “context” for the next six to eight weeks, buddy.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/11/20

OK, there are kids of suffering that awful characters in Funky Winkerbean endure that I like and kinds of suffering that I don’t, and I’ve decided that this is the first kind. Do it, Mason! Watch the special secret tapes that were emotionally intimate and only for Les! Strip-mine his personal agony to make a virtuous but unwatchable movie, which is worse than Les strip-mining it himself to produce three virtuous but unreadable books, for some reason! Use Lisa’s corpse to burnish your millionaire action hero status with some indie cred and further your career! Take no prisoners!

Beetle Bailey, 6/11/20

Plato’s “Science Facts” pamphlet is four pages long, including the cover, which is an otherwise blank page that just has “Science Facts” written on it. This is one the saddest things I’ve ever seen.

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Mary Worth, 6/10/20

Well, it looks like Saul has allowed his … first-cousin-once-removed-in-law? … to browbeat him into serving as Madi’s guardian for the summer. What do you think their first fight is going to be about? Since Saul forced Greta to put on a bow tie to match his own even before he got her home from the shelter, I assume it will be about Madi’s refusal to wear a bow tie. Presumably she’ll eventually put it on, signaling the resolution of this storyline’s conflict, after she’s figured out how to make it “goth.”

Dennis the Menace, 6/10/20

Casually letting Mr. Wilson know that amazing things are happening all around him, but that he’s so steeped in anger and poisonous nostalgia that he’ll never be able to truly appreciate them, is by far the most menacing thing Dennis has ever done.

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Curtis, 6/9/20

Obviously strips like Curtis where the focus is more on the kids’ lives tend to give short shrift to the parents, but it’s 100% true that we never see Greg interacting with any adults other than his wife in a non-work context. At least Diane has her church group friends to occasionally have meetings with so Curtis can disrupt them! It’s absolutely heartbreaking for Greg to say, without hesitation, that what he misses most is his friends, as he closes his eyes and smiles wistfully, contemplating another, better world where he was emotionally fulfilled.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/9/20

It’s funny because we’ve seen Mason Jarr play exactly two roles in his time in the Funkyverse: Starbuck Jones, in the big-budget Starbuck Jones production, who is some kind of superhero spaceman and thus could not be the subject of this kind of “get in his head” exercise, and Les Moore, in the first abortive attempt to film Lisa’s Story, at which point Mason wasn’t even aware that the guy he was playing was same guy as the screenwriter! But I don’t want to dwell too much on that, because I’m too busy dwelling on the image of a second, smaller Les Moore, possibly implanted in Mason’s digestive tract by some sort of facehugger creature who rammed its ovipositor down his throat while he was unconscious, bursting out of Mason’s ribcage during dinner, leaving Les and Cayla’s dining room a mess of blood and viscera. Would the pleasure we’d all derive from this gruesome scenario be mitigated by the fact that, at the end of the process, we’d have two Les Moores?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/9/20

Rex is telling Sarah the story of how he and June met, which mostly seems to be the story of how back when he first started his medical career he had to deal with a lot of patients and their illnesses and their human problems, gross. Now he runs his own clinic and he doesn’t have to do shit! It’s great!

Judge Parker, 6/9/20

“The honest truth is that I probably would’ve lost the mayoral race, and badly, but this mug? They can never take this mug away from me. Not without a warrant.”