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Spider-Man, 6/15/18

Oh, hey, whaddya know, Spider-Man and Iron Fist’s laudable attempts to find out why Jimmy Woo got stabbed and stop him from getting stabbed again, respectively, have unfortunately been set aside so that they can battle it out on the roof of a hospital while engaging in some of the most cringe-inducing banter this strip has ever seen, which is really saying something. Mostly, though, I’m interested in the third panel here. Like many comics, Spider-Man is extremely wedded to the classical iconography that has nurses dressed all in white and sporting a nurse’s cap, even though that hasn’t been the standard nurse’s uniform in the U.S. in decades. Another change in the nursing profession is that now there are male nurses, who never wore the cap, so putting that kind of retro outfit on them would be pretty silly, which gets you incongruous visuals like we have in this strip, where one of our sinister baddies has taken regular scrubs from the supply closet, and the other prepped for this job by shopping in the “naughty nurse” section at the local Halloween superstore.

Crankshaft, 6/15/18

Bad news, everybody: Crankshaft’s garden club isn’t going to turn into a weekly senior citizen S&M orgy, despite what we’ve all been hoping.

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Mary Worth, 6/14/18

Guys, guys, guys, are you ready for Tommy’s drug-free, Christ-centered summer romance? Because it’s happening! Tommy has chivalrously driven his comely co-worker home so she doesn’t have to take the bus, and I assume from his pregnant pause before “hang out” that her neighborhood was the site of some criminal adventures in his younger “very own meth lab” days. That’s probably where he went to buy — as an ahead-of-his-time entrepreneur, when it came time for him to peddle his wares, he did so in the leafy environs of UC Santa Royale, which unfortunately resulted in his immediate arrest. Anyway, I assume that Brandy lives downtown, which in the ’00s was a seedy, nightmarish hellscape filled with tank-top wearing toughs and abused women who had to suffer at the women’s shelter if they didn’t have a nice lady like Mary to take them back to her condo; but today it has a burgeoning arts scene and is, as Brandy notes, gentrifying nicely. Better not try any funny drug business around here now, Tommy! The cops actually respond to calls downtown these days!

Gasoline Alley, 6/14/18

Good news! Slim has finally received medication to help treat his terrible head injury, and it’s immediately sent him into an erotic desert island reverie. Did you know “play post office” is code for “three-way makeout fest”? I didn’t, and I’m now having to re-evaluate everything I thought I knew about the American mail distribution system.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/14/18

Last week’s Crankshafts were all about how Crankshaft hoarded thousands of “Bean’s End Catalogs” (Bean’s End being like the combination of LL Bean and Land’s End, only … about gardening equipment rather than sensible clothing?) and eventually agreed to sell them off, and then they were purchased by obsessive collector Chester “The Chiseler”; meanwhile, ten years later in the Funkypresent, Chester, now the employer of Darin and Mopey Pete at a doomed comics startup, decided to unload his Bean’s End Catalog collection on eBay in order to bring in some cash to stretch out the lifespan of said doomed comics startup. I didn’t cover any of this at the time because it was all boring, but I am assuming that Funky’s dad lurking around weirdly and overhearing this conversation will lead to him buying said Bean’s End Catalogs as a gift for the now-comatose Crankshaft. I’m not sure how this dovetails in with the few things I seem to remember about Funky-dad’s characterization, which is that he’s an alcoholic and a real asshole, but if he ends up spending the bulk of Funky’s inheritance on a futile gesture of kindness towards a man who won’t appreciate or even notice it, that’s OK with me!

Mark Trail, 6/14/18

“A whole country full of ruins? An entire civilization laid waste by foreign invaders and the alien diseases they brought with them, their people reduced to a subordinate caste for centuries and their monuments left to crumble in the jungle? And now I get to climb all over them and take pictures? That’s amazing! I can’t get enough!”

Pluggers, 6/14/18

You’re a plugger if everyone you know is either sick or dead.

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Family Circus, 6/13/18

I’m not sure who’s reactive facial expression in this panel I love more: Sam, striking a noble pose and working very hard to look like he can’t understand what Jeffy is talking about, that his position as morally superior to the other Keane dog, named “Barfy” for what I assume are obvious reasons, is still intact; or Mommy, cringing inside, worrying that Jeffy doesn’t need any sort of even vague hint that peeing on the floor is, in fact, an option.

Rhymes With Orange, 6/13/18

FUN FACT: did you know that even in the blessed afterlife, where we’ll spend eternity glorying in the close companionship of God, we will, eventually, grow bored with our existence, and seek new and ever more extreme ways to stimulate ourselves? And that without the prospect of bodily infirmity or death to create a natural end to this process, it can only escalate? Suddenly Lucifer’s rebellion against his Creator becomes easier to understand!

Spider-Man, 6/13/18

“–you need a refresher course in Spider-Man 101! First lesson: you’d think the whole point of spider-sense would be that it warns me about stuff when I’m not paying attention. But turns out nope! Turns out I have to be paying very close attention for it work. And if you’re thinking to yourself, ‘Wow, that’s pretty lame, and not really very impressive at all,’ well, wait till you hear about the rest of my whole deal!”

Pluggers, 6/13/18

You’re a plugger if you’ve had ten years, literally a decade, to figure out what the App Store is, but you just haven’t, and you have no plans to do so going forward, either.

Hi and Lois, 6/13/18

Ha ha, it’s funny because the baby has crippling anxiety that prevents her from experiencing uncomplicated happiness for more than a brief moment!