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Funky Winkerbean, 7/26/19

Well, I guess, uh, Jessica’s Big Hollywood Experiment is over, now that she has … not produced her long-ago promised documentary about her father, John Darling (seriously, this never came out, right?) and she and Cindy solved the Big Butter Brinkel Mystery (with that classic trope, “the talking chimpanzee was the real killer all along“). Just as her husband before her turned down the chance to work as a storyboarder on the next big-budget Starbucks Jones movie so he could toil away at a comics startup based in a dying cancer cluster of a town in northeast Ohio, she has now turned down the chance to be a assistant cinematographer on the next big-budget Starbucks Jones movie, so that she can do … something, I guess … in a dying cancer cluster of a town in northeast Ohio. Her logic is that she didn’t want to suffer what her father, John Darling, suffered from being in “the biz,” and despite the fact that local newscasting is in no way the same “biz” as cinematography or narrative filmmaking, you can see why she’d be worried about going down that road, since her father turned out to be a huge asshole who was murdered in an aggressively wacky manner. Was learning about Butter Brinkel’s murderous what made her realize she was in too deep? Was she worried that she, too, would be killed by Zanzibar or his successors because she knows too much? Is she laying low in Westview to stay safe from the Monkey Mob?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/26/19

Obviously I know Hootin’ Holler is behind the times, but it’s wild that they’re just now getting into Vine.

Dick Tracy, 7/26/19

“That’s pop culture for you! It sure is a shared language and set of experiences we can use as a shorthand to communicate with one another! Ha ha!”

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Crock, 7/25/19

I’m not usually a “this political cartoon needs more labels” guy, but today’s Crock — which is not, strictly speaking, a political cartoon, but nevertheless is rich in political content — needs some more explanation of what the hell its point is, because folks: there’s a lot going on here. It’d be one thing if the implication was that the Kids Today have turned away from baseball cards (or, more generically “sport trading cards”) and instead turned to CEO cards; it could be some ambiguous statement about changing priorities, or the entrepreneurial nature of the kids today. But the reference to the “crime stats” really puts a whole different spin on it. Is Maggot’s side-eye a criticism of our lawless culture’s affect on children, where predatory business practices are lionized and the youth fall under the sway of win-at-any-cost business leaders? Or is the children’s card game meant to be a critique of capitalism, and Maggot’s discomfort is with this obvious socialist propaganda dissuading the youth from respecting those who’ve worked hard to create jobs? And why is there a vulture involved? I mean, I know the larger sense there’s a vulture character in Crock, but is he meant to be symbolic here? Does he represent venture (“vulture”) capital funds, which buy up unprofitable companies and strip them for parts? Does he represent Marxist “revolutionaries” hoping to gorge on the wealth created by productive capitalists? WHY? WHY AM I THINKING ABOUT THIS SO MUCH? WHY??????

Six Chix, 7/25/19

Now here’s a strip that doesn’t need any explanation! Just a mom cockroach and her adorable little kid cockroach, and they love each other! Nothing weird or unpleasant or confusing about that!

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Pluggers, 7/24/19

If I were to make a joke about exurban American old people obsessively watching Matlock, it would be rude, but since Pluggers is a feature by and for exurban American old people, they can say it, and I respect that. Anyway, my guess is that what the dog-man plugger is attempting to convey is less “I use the syndicated rebroadcasts of classic TV shows in the pre-local-news programming block to tell the time, just as my ancestors used the position of the sun and the stars” and more “woman, please hold your tongue and do not interrupt me during my favorite stories, it makes it hard to focus and solve the mystery, we discussed this.”

Mark Trail, 7/24/19

I always knew Mark Trail was in the tank for the Fourth Estate, but who knew that the payoff of this story would be that good local journalism was the real treasure all along — more valuable than gold?

Mary Worth, 7/24/19

Dawn has spent most of this date using factoids from the “Trivia” section of Wikipedia articles she got to from clicking names in the “List of French people” at random as conversational prompts, and somehow it’s still going better than the last one did.