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Funky Winkerbean, 12/22/17

I think we can all agree that the worst part of the Funkyverse is the endless smirking, and today’s strip contains what might be the most malignant example I’ve seen in years. This guy just bought a book about Les’s dead wife/Darin’s dead bio-mom for his wife — who, in a stunning third-panel twist, turns out to also be dead. Les and Darin smirk meaningfully at each other. Nailed it! they’re thinking. People who have lost loved ones are gonna make us rich!

Gil Thorp, 12/22/17

Hey guys, did you know that people who declared bankruptcy don’t have the right to have opinions about their nephews playing sports? True story! Looks like Rick Soto’s back in the game!

Mary Worth, 12/22/17

“I have plans… I’m going to be capturing Iris’s soul in a steaming hot cup of coffee, using Andean magic I learned on a remote Colombian coffee farm. That way she can never leave me! Wait, did I say that out loud?”

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Mark Trail, 12/21/17

Ooops, it looks like our mysterious Orientalist caricature didn’t want to buy Dirty’s dirty (literally dirty, since they’d been up his butt, probably) diamonds, and is only willing to hand over a modest four-figure sum from his Enormous Safe of Cash and Gold Bars for Dirty’s trouble. Too bad Dirty seems to have an very large knife tucked into his belt, right near his butt, where he likes to store things, apparently? The upcoming vicious stabbing is going to be a valuable lesson to all of us about doing business with a guy who really, really insists that people call him “Dirty.” When someone shows you who they are — by, for instance, using a nickname that implies that they’re shady or criminal or bad in some way — you should believe them, you know?

Shoe, 12/21/17

I was going to make joke here along the lines of “Because Washington is on Earth, and your telescope is pointed towards the sky,” but then I thought — are these guys on Earth? Or are they on Planet Bird or whatever? Is this tech-wizard bird-man, despite the Perfesser’s dismissal, keenly observing the seat of American power through his telescope with envious eyes, his intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic, and slowly and surely drawing his plans against us?

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Spider-Man, 12/20/17

Let’s ignore the super-fisticuffs here for a moment and marvel at the moment where real serendipitous scientific progress is being made! When we last got a good look at the number that gator did on Dr. Connors, his pants had a huge hole in the leg, revealing his gashed thigh-flesh. But now it appears his pants have healed themselves, leaving just a fading scar where the material has somehow knitted itself back together. Could it be that Dr. Connors has been wasting his time with bioengineering potions and should instead focus on the “smart clothing” that can merge with and cybernetically enhance the human body?

Meanwhile, I know that playing around with the borders of comics panels for visual effect has a long and honorable history, but I’m pretty sure what’s going on between panels two and three isn’t so much “Let’s tweak longstanding visual storytelling conventions to create striking imagery that changes how readers perceive the narrative” as “oh crap I drew that guy’s body too far to the right and his head isn’t going to fit here, uh, uh, uh”

Mary Worth, 12/20/17

Holy shit, Wilbur really is going into a full-on paranoid breakdown in regards to Iris’s wealthy new boytoy. “My ex-girlfriend, whom I hold in high regard and desperately want to reconnect with, has a filthy drug-addict son and her new boyfriend is probably a criminal because she’s got no morals or loyalty. What a bitch! God I love her, the traitor!”