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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.”

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Shoe, 6/8/20

As I’ve said here before, probably the thing I’ll be remembered for the longest is coining the term nephewism for a fictional scenario where a child lives with an uncle or aunt and their parents are neve mentioned, and while I used it first to identify the relationship between Peter Parker and Aunt May and Uncle Ben, it really applies to the Perfesser and Skyler in Shoe even better, as nobody ever made a series of Shoe movies starring Andrew Garfield as Skyler where they tried and largely failed to get people excited about what happened to his parents. Anyhoo, it seems like nephewism is hereditary in the Shoeniverse, as Roz assumes that the Perfesser is talking about his own uncle, who she probably knows as his own closest relative, and she assumes that he’s helping to care for him in his old age. But he’s not. We’ve never seen this uncle in this strip, and the Perfesser clearly never thinks about him much. He’s not his dad, after all. I think you can tell by his heavy-liddle look of despair that he might be starting to realize that someday Skyler will treat him the same way.

Mark Trail, 6/8/20

Folks, Mark has been really casual about Andy going missing and now we know why: he’s hoping to mine #content from the poor dog’s trauma! Mark can brag all he wants about writing being a “good career for me to provide for my family,” but nothing generates revenue like viral clickbait pet stories, so Andy better Incredible Journey it back to Lost Forest real quick.

Slylock Fox, 6/8/20

Wait, none of Count Weirdly’s fucked up inventions are grounded??? Good lord, it’s a miracle he hasn’t burned his castle down!

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So today a lot of comics artists have inserted some symbols into their strips to pay tribute to essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic. And, naturally, there was a range of approaches to this!

Dustin, 6/7/20

You could, for instance, take the Dustin route, where the symbols are explicitly explained in text, and then used in the comic itself to further the cause of recognizing various heroes, sung and unsung!

Baby Blues, 6/7/20

Or you could take the Baby Blues technique, which is to integrate the symbols naturalistically into the comic itself, on the assumption that readers will pick up news stories about this campaign and understand what they’re looking at.

Six Chix, 6/7/20

Or — hear me out — you could do it the Six Chix way, by which I of course mean the most half-assed way imaginable, wedging symbols into a joke that’s already terrible by itself so as to make them fully incomprehensible. What’s the most insultingly placed of the icons here? Lotta people are gonna say the steering wheel at the bottom left corner, held by disembodied human hands, but don’t sleep on the picture (?) of the microscope that the pigeon is wearing (?) on its chest.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/7/20

Funky Winkerbean, of course, can not accomodate any misery that is not Funky Winkerbean, so it will not be acknowledging the coronavirus pandemic nor any of the essential workers ameliorating it, but I did enjoy today’s strip, in which Cayla desperately begs Mason not to try to get inside the mind of a madman, it’s too late for her, but he can still save himself, there’s still time, there’s still time.