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Funky Winkerbean, 5/3/18

Hey, you know how Funky Winkerbean is extremely up its own asshole about comics? Like, it’s a comic and one of its main locales is a comic book shop and many of its characters are either comics obsessives or comics obsessives who managed to snag actual jobs in the comics industry? And now those guys (who, to reiterate, are themselves characters in a comic strip) are being given the opportunity to create their own fresh new comics characters? Well, get this: what if this comic-within-the-comic had its origins in [pause for dramatic music sting] A COMIC BOOK SHOP????? Really makes you think, huh?

Mark Trail, 5/3/18

So for some reason Mark has spent the last several days recounting to his family the plot of ¡Three Amigos!, a 1986 Steve Martin-Chevy Chase-Martin Short vehicle that is widely remembered with a certain amount of warmth, but apparently Rusty has checked out from this lesson in pop culture to go talk to a girl. A girl! This is what happens when you leave the compound! Mark’s weird sidelong glance in the last panel shows that he knows that, in theory, it’s important for someone Rusty’s age to learn the basic social skills necessary to interact with another human outside of his immediate kinship group, but that doesn’t mean he has to be happy about it.

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Dennis the Menace, 5/2/18

Ha, yes, Dennis, we do exist in a world of corruption and decay, where we ingest not only the cooked and dismembered corpses of our fellow beings but also the dead microorganisms that once hitched a ride on, and in, their bodies, a slurry of organic matter from a thousand different ecological niches, most of it invisible to us. This is what being an animal is, of course: you eat other things that used to be alive. Like most of Dennis’s menacing, today’s incident is just ripping the polite mask off of our brutal, grotesque, and complex reality.

Pluggers, 5/2/18

One thing that I will always say when I try to explain why Pluggers annoys me (and I seem to annoy other people when I say it, but so it goes) is that it’s smug. Not always, but often! The not-so-subtle implication is that these salt-of-the-earth folks are better than you, you big-city elitist, somehow simultaneously simpler but also smarter. Today’s a great example: A plugger just sleeps on an ordinary pillow filled with feathers and not … some presumably much more suspect alternative to this? Yes, if you’re like me, you had to Google “My Pillow” to discover that it’s a poly-foam pillow heavily advertised on late-night infomercials, marketed by a company that was forced by numerous lawsuits to stop making various specious claims about its health benefits. Anyway, who’s morally superior? Pluggers, who are extremely smug about not having been taken in by the “My Pillow” scam that they’ve seen advertised endlessly? Or me, who’s never heard of it in the first place because I don’t watch infomercials but instead spend my aimless late nights reading articles about subway systems and 18th century wars on Wikipedia???? CHECKMATE PLUGGERS!!!!!!

Marvin, 5/2/18

So Marvin is sucking the life force out of his grandfather so he can remain forever an infant, un-potty-trained for all eternity? Sounds about right!

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Mark Trail, 5/1/18

I had a friend once who insisted that since luck could be good or bad, saying that someone is “lucky” shouldn’t by right indicate whether or not they had good things happen to them more than they would to an average person, but rather should mean that the luck they experience is just far from the mean in either direction, which, that’s not how language works, man, but anyway, Mark seems to be definitely buying into this worldview! Like, how “lucky” can a man be who’s suffered through multiple boatsplosions and also the aforementioned volcanic eruption, you know? Thank goodness they’re headed to Mexico, where volcanic activity is unheard of, they’ll probably be fine.

Hi and Lois, 5/1/18

Wow, I’m pretty sure the Flagstons haven’t had a ginormous Last Supper hanging on their dining room wall before this? Like, it seems like it’s the sort of thing I would’ve noticed. Anyway, while everyone else is squabbling about the pizza and whose fault it is that it wasn’t here ten minutes ago, Trixie is contemplating the fact that one of the others that she’ll be dining with tonight will definitely betray her.