The Funnies Read Online Free Page A

that poor girl?”
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘poor girl’?”
    Pierce shrugged. “Oh, you know. She seems so…doomed.”
    â€œDoomed,” I said.
    He gripped his head with both hands and made to throw it at me. “Whatever.”
    Here is Pierce’s story: my father began the Family Funnies when Bobby was born, and for five years the strip was just Bobby, Rose, our parents and a dog, Puddles, who in real life would be dead before I arrived. Then the cartoon version of my mother grew fat with me, and I was introduced as a chunky buffoon lugging a pacifier around. I was two, both in the strip and in real life, when Mom next got pregnant. In real life, the pregnancy ended with Pierce. In the strip, the pregnancy just ended. Nothing. No baby, no explanation—only the cartoon Mom, slim as a cigarette girl again, and us three kids.
    There must have been some sort of uproar at the syndicate, but what were they going to do? The Family Funnies, by that time, was a major merchandising cash cow—a new development for comic strips—and thousands of greeting cards and T-shirts and coffee mugs couldn’t be wrong. The Public would forget.
    Nobody in my family did, though. And I was old enough to notice the desert that sprung up between my father and mother when, three years later, Bitty was born into our house and—without warning—into the strip as the fourth child of the Mix family. My father had skipped Pierce entirely, and bestowed upon the cartoon Dot, my mother, the apparent miracle of spontaneous procreation.
    It would be an oversimplification to say that this was the central conflict of our family. In a sense, though, it stood for all the others. So, by association, did Pierce. Whatever problems he was destined to have later, this certainly didn’t help.

three
    Pierce and I drove to the funeral with Bobby and his family: Nancy, his wife, who was four or five months pregnant and sat with the front seat reclined nearly as far as it would go, and his six-year-old daughter Samantha, who sat between us in the back. Pierce kept doing things with his hands.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Samantha demanded. Already I could see the church; it was only four blocks away.
    â€œDon’t bother him, honey,” Bobby said.
    â€œPierce is just nervous, Sam,” Nancy said, obviously nervous.
    Pierce palmed Samantha’s head. “It’s true. I may eat you.” He growled, and Sam giggled, and then we were there.
    We spilled out into the church parking lot. I helped Nancy from the car while Bobby set the alarm. It chirped like a parakeet.
    â€œThank you,” Nancy said, looking at the ground.
    â€œMaybe you’d be more comfortable with the seat up.”
    â€œNo,” she moaned, shaking her head. “I have a little condition.” She moved around the car to Bobby and took his arm. Pierce and Sam led our group, holding hands.
    The church was the one we had gone to when we were kids. It was also the one in the strip. The Family Funnies was a churchy cartoon, and since their aging was arrested while Bitty was still a baby, the cartoon us persisted in their religious devotion long after our actual family had lapsed spectacularly. Every Sunday strip involved church. There were the ones in which Bobby proudly sung the wrong lyrics to various hymns, the ones where Rose asked probing and misguided questions about ecumenical matters, the ones where we’re all in the car on the way to or from the church, being cute. To be fair, a few of these things actually happened. But mostly, like many other FF standbys, the church cartoons were a crock.
    We found seats. I was just getting comfortable, no small feat in the uncushioned wooden pews, when I happened to notice the casket, burnished, beflowered and shut tight on a rickety-looking metal stand at the foot of the altar. Something scaly uncurled in the space below my diaphragm, an almost sexual feeling like