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Crankshaft, 12/17/19

I’m not sure who exactly this Generic Gloomy Businessman is supposed to be; presumably he’s a representative of the private equity firm that bought the anemic local mall, then juiced its cash flow by loading it with debt and raked in huge “management fees” as a prelude to declaring bankruptcy and shutting the whole thing down. But shoutout to him for delivering a setup line that doesn’t really flow naturally with either the thing Crankshaft thinks he’s saying or the thing he’s actually saying. Anyway, I for one am looking forward to next year’s Christmas sequence, where Santa-Crankshaft sits grumpily on the pile of rubble where Centerville’s primary retail center used to be, watching the twinkling lights on the cars driving fifteen miles away to the Wal-Mart over on Route 179 to do their shopping.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/17/19

Meanwhile, over in Westview and ten years in the future, Les is sitting in a dark room alone, obsessively watching cartoons, muttering to himself! Is this the result of some deep, underlying emotional issues which, despite his remarkable degree of self-absorption, he’s never really tried to address head-on? Or is it because his daughter abandoned him? Probably the second one, right?

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Dick Tracy, 12/15/19

Yesterday we learned that Splitface, who used to be Haf and Haf and who also used to work as a carny, also used to work at the zoo, and this alligator, to whom he intends to feed all of our heroes, is an old pal from the carny days. For a strip that generally rushes through things and doesn’t really supply a lot of motivation for what characters do, we’re getting, like, too much backstory on Splitface and his relationship with various reptile co-workers for my taste, honestly. Hey, did you know he used to be Haf and Haf? True story.

Mark Trail, 12/15/19

So it turns out that yeti do in fact whistle, so Mark probably heard one last night, which revelation has caused Dr. Camel’s mighty, braying laugh to echo off of the distant Himalayas! Anyway, I have fully forgotten what Genie’s deal is, since she first showed up spouting fun Kathmandu facts. Like is she Dr. Camel’s longtime assistant, who has finally come round to being sick of his shit, or is this expedition her first experience with him, in which case she’s gotten sick of his shit fairly quickly? I guess the important, and hilarious, thing is that she and Mark have become visibly sick of his shit more or less at the exact same time.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/15/19

God knows I would almost never take the side of a Funkyverse character doing wordplay, but I dearly wish Becky would say, “Hey, man, didn’t you go ironically deaf and quit as band director more than ten years ago? Pretty sure ‘music director’ was a make-work job they came up with to ease you into retirement and you’re supposed to be puttering around the Board of Education offices downtown, not sitting at a desk immediately behind me for no good fucking reason, right here, in the band room, during band practice, which, I can’t emphasize enough, you can’t hear well enough to be helpful.”

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Shoe, 12/15/19

Ha ha, you know what’s a novel part of modern life? A “drive-thru” window, assuming you consider the 1970s and ’80s, when drive-thru windows became omnipresent on fast food restaurants, to be recent enough that someone might find their existence noteworthy! Anyway, what today’s Shoe asks you to imagine is this: what if there were a mortuary that had a “drive-thru drop-off window,” and while drive-thru windows are usually a means by which you can access an establishment’s goods or services without leaving your car (something already available to funeral customers), the implication of “drive-thru drop-off” seems to be that you’d drive up to the mortuary with a corpse in your car, and just heave it out your window and into the funeral home, then drive off, presumably to have your car’s upholstery cleaned, because of the dead body smell. Pretty funny, huh? Yes, this is definitely the juxtaposition of two discordant ideas for comical effect!

Panel from The Lockhorns, 12/15/19

One would assume that whatever gelatinous off-green mass is on everyone’s plates here is the evening’s main course, so it’s honestly weird that Leroy is only now pulling out this even more inscrutable selection of appetizers. Presumably their preparation was terribly botched even by Loretta’s standards and the decision was not to serve them, but then Leroy fished them out of the trash and stashed them at the ready on the off chance that a wordplay opportunity like this would present itself. Dinner with these two must truly be among the most tiresome things anyone could imagine.

Marvin, 12/15/19

I revisit the concept of comic book time, in which characters always exist in more or less the current calendar year but never age, a lot on this site, but today’s Marvin in some ways reverses it. Usually I imagine characters like Hi and Lois’s Trixie frozen in time, aware of their eternal infancy but unable to break out of it. But today we learn that for Jenny, Marvin’s birth wasn’t that long ago, and her pre-motherhood life is still recent enough that she can catch up with an old friend from those days without much oddness or awkwardness. Sure, he’s a terrible baby who brought her to tears, but she’s confident that will pass, as he naturally moves on to other stages of life, learning to speak, read, and, of course, use a toilet. Meanwhile, in real life, I’m the one who’s trapped. I’m the one who’s been making jokes about Marvin shitting himself for nearly thirteen years now. The characters in these strips are just scribbles on paper, and the prison of the comics is a prison for me and me alone.