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Curtis, 4/11/19

Far be it for me to criticize another man’s curmudgeoning, but I think that Greg has the escalating affronts to his sensibilities in the wrong order here. The elder Wilkins is generally depicted as being obsessed with how much Better Things Used To Be, in the Past, despite the fact that he’s a middle-of-the-cohort Gen Xer, at oldest, but anyway, what is a podcast if not the modern-day equivalent of an old-timey radio show? Shouldn’t Greg be pleased that this ancient art is being recognized and turned into movie franchises, just like the old radio serials of old? His reaction seems way, way over the top: as he begs his Creator to take him away from this fallen world in the final panel, he appears to have taken the admonishment in Matthew 18:9 to heart, plucking out his own eyes so that he can’t see the abomination that is a Sir Patrick Stewart-voiced poop emoji. But you can still hear the podcasts, Greg. You can still hear the podcasts.

Shoe, 4/11/19

I can’t decide if this strip is an indication that the Shoe creative team has suddenly remembered that their characters are all birds, or have forgotten so profoundly that they made this joke entirely on accident.

Judge Parker, 4/11/19

Two days later, Marie was murdered by the mafia. Sam and Abbey never noticed that she failed to visit over the holidays, because [rolls dice] Neddy [rolls dice again] was sad because she lacked direction, and that took up all their energy.

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Mary Worth, 4/10/19

Hmm, it seems that wiring “Arthur Z” a mere $10,000 has made little to no change in Estelle’s material circumstances, but has enabled “Arthur” to trade his filthy, green-tinted hovel for a delightful seaside bungalow where he can enjoy a fine meal and glass of champagne in peace. Thus, this grift is good revolutionary praxis! I assume he refers to her as “my queen” because he sees his scheme as the equivalent of seizing one of Marie Antionette’s chateaus for the common folk to live in.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/10/19

Ah whoops it looks like, despite the fact that Jess’s co-worker was excplicity identified as “Cindy” in dialogue yesterday, my brain refused to process her as “Cindy, Funky’s ex” for some reason. In my defense, Cindy has always been portrayed in this strip both as blonde and as absolutely terrified that she’s going to get too old for her hunky actor boyfriend, so the fact that she’s let herself go grey certainly threw me. Also, I know documentary work Cindy did for Buddyblog got an Emmy nomination, and Jessica did move to LA with big dreams, but honestly, I have no memory at all of the two of them ever connecting professionally. And honestly, I’m pretty OK with my mind slowly turning to goo so long as the encyclopedic memory of Funky Winkerbean plotlines is the first to go.

Dick Tracy, 4/10/19

Dick Tracy well knows that, in his universe, the correct answer is always the most obvious one, so the fact that this sportwriter is from Tacoma, just like the serial killer he’s tracking, is all the proof he needs that the sportswriter is the serial killer, but I enjoy his contemplative look in the third panel, as if he’s seriously considering building a barbed wire fence around Tacoma so he can more efficiently interrogate all 200,000 inhabitants until he gets some answers.

The Lockhorns, 4/10/19

I’m sorry, but Leroy’s whole thing is that he’s a poorly paid white collar drone, and I refuse to believe that he somehow rates an office with a door and a personal assistant to field his calls. Was this joke so good that it was worth undermining the very nature of the Lockhorns reality? It very much was not, in my opinion!

Gil Thorp, 4/10/19

I definitely respect Gil Thorp’s total commitment to its unique, herky-jerky visual narrative style, and if sometimes that means that a moment of actually exciting sports action is described in a narration box while the accompanying panel just shows someone standing on a base bag and clapping, well, so be it.

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Funky Winkerbean, 4/9/19

Oh, say, remember Darrin’s wife Jessica, who was going to make a documentary about her father, John Darling? If you don’t remember, the story goes something like this: Jessica’s father John Darling was a newscaster who was murdered when Jessica was a little girl, and Les wrote about the murder in his first book, which was a critical and financial failure. But Jessica decided she wanted to make a documentary about him, in the course of which she discovered he was a huge asshole, though not, as his murderer briefly implied, a philanderer. Anyhoo, I can’t find anything in my archives about this plot thread since 2014, so I’m not really sure what ever came of it — I have to assume that if it were released and flopped, we would’ve heard about that, because of all the suffering it would’ve caused for everyone involved. Maybe Jessica got emotional closure and then decided not to inflict the film footage on the rest of the world, which, good for her, honestly! But I guess she’s doing … some other kind of documentary film work with a lady who knows she loves murders? Here we go again, with the murder documentaries!

Pluggers, 4/9/18

Good news, everyone! Pluggers don’t fuck. I guess we all “got lucky” today when we learned that, ha ha!