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Crankshaft, 8/22/18

I’m all for seasonally recurring gags in the comics — since I’ve moved to Southern California, one of the few signals I get that we’re transitioning from summer to fall is when the moms on Crankshaft’s bus route go into their training routine to prepare to get their children to school safely despite the district’s steadfast refusal to fire their most incompetent employee. Still, I feel like today’s strip has lost the plot a little bit? I mean, if you feel like you need to work out your anger towards some overly aggressive personal trainer (or possibly towards some middle aged lady who won’t try hard enough) in your comic, more power to you, I guess, but let’s not forget to include a little Crankshaft content in there!

Dennis the Menace, 8/22/18

Casually mentioning within Dennis’s earshot that Henry and Alice never wanted kids in the first place is one of the more menacing things Mr. Wilson has done in a while, you have to admit!

Funky Winkerbean, 8/22/18

It never took Mr. Dinkle this long to “drive all the way up the east coast,” if you know what I mean! (I mean sex. Mr. Dinkle had sex with Holly’s mom and as a lover was both generous and efficient.)

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The Lockhorns, 8/21/18

Look, I get that Loretta wants an excuse to cut off all physical contact with Leroy. She should’ve probably done it years ago, honestly. I just don’t see why she has to use some imperceptible change in the dimensions of his as always vaguely blobbish body as a supposed inciting incident.

Mary Worth, 8/21/18

Ahhh, another Mary Worth storyline wraps up, and all’s well that end’s well, just in time for the end of the we[checks calendar]oh dear God do we have four more days of middlingly chaste beach cuddling to look forward to????

Mark Trail, 8/21/18

WELP, THIS MARK TRAIL HAS GOTTEN TO A PLACE WHERE SOMEONE IS YELLING AT RUSTY FOR BEING TOO HORNY, TIME TO DIE I GUESS

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/20/18

Time has, it goes without saying, not been kind to the core cast of Funky Winkerbean, the ones who were all in high school in the original, carefree iteration of the strip, and even though they look extremely wizened and beaten down, I guess they’re supposed to be at the oldest end of Gen X, now in their early 50s. This puts them squarely in what’s being called the “sandwich generation”: forced to simultaneously care for both their belligerent and confused Greatest Generation parents and their smarmy, unlikeable Millennial children. You’d feel bad for Funky and his cohort if not for the fact that they themselves are also completely and utterly insufferable.

Mark Trail, 8/20/18

Hmm, Rusty, did you ever think that maybe Becky is selling the copies on the black market as an elaborate sting operation to catch the artifact-rustlers who have been plaguing the Yucatan for far too long? I mean, she’s not, of course, because everyone in Mark Trail is exactly as villainous as they appear, but still! Anyway, I’m enjoying the vision of Becky spending years making and discarding two-dimensional copies by just jamming them into a photocopier, shaking her head and waiting for the day when technology finally catches up with her criminal ambitions.

Slylock Fox, 8/20/18

It’s bad enough that the animals rose up and largely exterminated humanity and then moved into our cities and took over our civilization as if it were theirs. But now they’re erasing our history, producing films that imply Cleopatra and her subjects were something other than full-blooded H. sapiens. I know casting minority actors isn’t always “convenient” for directors who have a core set of performers they usually work with, but I’m sure that Slick Smitty is available and more than willing to wear a wig.

Pluggers, 8/20/18

Oh no, I know this movie is nearly 20 years old and this point but it’s still avant-garde weirdness and pluggers will not be able to handle it. Abort, plugger, abort! Reruns of Matlock are on all afternoon, why not settle in for them instead