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Hey, everybody! Ready for this week’s top comments? Here’s #1:

“I like the fact that in Santa Royale, nothing says drunkenness like loosening one’s tie ever so slightly.” –Andrew Leal

As my wife says: “I know it’s easy to make fun of Mary Worth, but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying.” Also satisfying is collating the list of runners-up:

“A3G: Aaargh!! Sunday’s strip was no more than a synopsis of all the previous week’s crap, and Monday’s is a synopsis of Sunday’s. I mean, how much torture can one woman take? And by that, I mean myself, of course, not Lu Ann.” –Kronkina

“Dagwood is disturbed by the fact that he had a sex dream about Blondie. They’ve never done it — just look at their children, who are creepily identical to them. Clearly the Bumsteads reproduce via mitosis, possibly by releasing a cloud of spores.” –Steve S

“I’m having a real problem with Mark Trail. He says most of his stories are interesting, which means, by his own low standards, some are not. Much like ‘Can God make a rock so heavy that not even he could lift it?’ the concept of a story so uninteresting that even Mark Trail calls it boring is a paradox that experts in the field of logic, and college students high on pot, will debate for the foreseeable future.” –Missy

“Perhaps Hi is simply such a poor golfer that he won’t even be able to achieve par on his children’s mockery of a course, and with the entire venue in view of the window, his atrocious failure will be public fodder for jokes for years to come. But more likely he’s simply afraid his children found the bodies.” –minosbull

“I think that Mark Trail is actually the Elrod Repertory Cartoon Company, in which many different characters are played by the same toons. For example, George Spelvin played both Bo Jones in ‘Andy Kidnapped by Rednecks at the Ivory Billed Woodpecker Woods’ and is now playing the role of ‘Buzzard’ in ‘Oh, Those Crooked Airport Pols.’ The same toon plays Cherry, Kelly Welly, and now Sam Hill. Those years of study at the Old Vic certainly paid off.” –Islamorada Girl

“Mrs. Lockhorn is right, life is not like a box of chocolates; chocolate goes straight to your hips, and Leroy hasn’t paid a visit to that region in years.” –andreavis

“If Milford’s Poorliest-Drawn Kidz Klub is going to help cure cancer, I bet their plan involves standing around like 1970s Sears mannequins in a lab and freaking out the scientists. ‘Oh, hey, are you kids here on a field trip?’ [Eerie silence.] ‘I said, are you here on a field trip? Do you want to watch me titrate this sample?’ [Eerie silence.] ‘Oh. Oh, no.'” –Yitzchok

“When Mike says ‘I’ll get it gassed up and ready,’ he’s actually referring to the Pattersons’ secret basement death chamber. The poor realtor will regret the day he sold them that tree-magnet of a house.” –Steve S

[On Funky Winkerbean]: “Doomlarity will ensue.” –Jym

“Don’t you just love the look on Heather’s face? Her internal thermostat has run up from ‘Nanny’ to ‘Au Pair’ to ‘Governess’ to ‘Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS.'” –willethompson

“I’m off till Tuesday, secure in the knowledge that, when I return … county commissioners will still be behaving like typical liberal politicians who think any problem can be solved simply by throwing more birds at it.” –gh

“For someone’s who’s never had to drink from a glass without his butler’s assistance, Von’s a quick study: ‘Perhaps if I pour it on my forehead? Hmm, that didn’t work. No no, let me be, Jeeves, I want to puzzle this out for myself. Ah, what about into my ear? Unsatisfactory. It can’t be too difficult, surely. Poor people seem to manage it. Think, Von, think!'” –Old Bean

“I wonder if this was sent in by a dentist or a denture wearer. If it was sent in by a dentist, I find it very endearing that, when confronted by an obvious lie about broken dentures, the dentist’s vision of the awful truth is a brushing accident, and not the insane meth-induced BDSM/tooth breaking fetish nightmare that I would naturally lean towards. ‘Spongecake” indeed.” –evie oh oh

“Does the government keep a list of people aroused by reading Slylock Fox? Just looking at the strip makes me feel bad inside. It’s like getting off on the Junior Jumble.” –Flealick

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Slylock Fox, 5/27/07

Ah, that sexy Cassandra Cat! With her skin-tight wetsuit and her … pale … pasty fur … totally different from the tawny coloring established in her previous appearances … like a three-day-old corpse … seriously, what the hell happened to her? Is this what a cat looks like after it’s spent some time in the water? It’s creeping me out.

Speaking of things that creep me out, the first iteration of the firefighter in the “how to draw” section at the lower left is missing not only his nose and mouth, but also most of his brainpan. It makes it very difficult to look at the completed drawing without imagining that big hat resting on the flat surface of his impossibly truncated head.

Back to Cassie’s grift: I do appreciate that various genres of news media are here to cover this sexy, sexy story: the big-haired dog from the local TV news, the eager beaver writing up the story for the newspaper’s morning edition, and the pelican, who’ll deliver the tale to an eager audience via half-eaten fish.

Dennis the Menace, 5/27/07

Good lord, just when I think Dennis can’t get any less menacing, he swings into action with his actively anti-menacing “stop smoking!” message. I suppose it’s possible that our young menace is being transformed into such a goody-goody that he becomes a menace through his cloying, annoying crusading, a symbol of the intrusive nanny state, though that doesn’t really match up with his traditional oeuvre of more straightforward menacing, like property destruction and nap disruption. It’s also possible that he wants to keep Mr. Wilson alive as long as possible so as to harass him further. “I’m not going to let the sweet embrace of cancer take you away from my persecution, old man!”

I’ve said it before, but there are few visual conventions in this strip that I find more unsettling than the “single bead of sweat coming down Mr. Wilson’s forehead,” a good example of which can be found in the rightmost panel of the second row. Really, the only thing it says to me is “WARNING! KILLING SPREE IMMINENT!”

Family Circus, 5/27/07

The Family Circus, on the other hand, does have a whiff of menace today. If this strip has an underlying message other than “drugs are awesome,” I’d love to hear it.

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They’ll Do It Every Time, 5/26/07

For many, TDIET is a glimpse into a kinder, gentler past, when doctors and nurses wore bright white starched uniforms and little kids of both genders wore plaid vests and inevitably responded to obscenity with a hearty “Oh, what you sa-a-a-a-i-d.” But today’s installment for me offers a look into the future — specifically, my future wearing dentures. Who knew that this seemingly innocuous prosthetic device came with its own elaborate code of shame? Who knew that breaking your dentures while eating is somehow socially acceptable to explain to a licensed dental professional, but that breaking your dentures while brushing them is not? I think I’ll redouble my flossing efforts so as to avoid ever having to navigate this complex sea of lies.

Herb and Jamaal, 5/26/07

Yes, isn’t it odd that people are willing to idly pass the time discussing potentially untrue things written in a modern publication, but aren’t willing to wholeheartedly base their moral code and belief system about how the universe works on the exact wording of a series of books written between three thousand and seventeen hundred years ago and painstakingly copied by hand by semiliterates over and over again in the intervening centuries? I sure see exactly how this might confuse you.

On another note, I dare you to brightly say the following to one of your friends: “Wow, check out the latest on the hotel socialite! The stuff they say about her really makes you think, doesn’t it?” I’m pretty sure you’ll soon find yourself in an interrogation room at CIA headquarters, since obviously the only person who would construct such a sentence would be a sinister robot scouting out our planet and reporting back to an alien invasion fleet.

Pluggers, 5/26/07

Wow, I was really torn between saying “Pluggers are almost unfathomably lazy” and “Pluggers really don’t understand how this stuff works,” but then I realized that I didn’t have to choose! That made me feel better.

Gil Thorp, 5/26/07

“That’s right, I have it on good authority that he’s being scouted by the Baltimore Elite Giants and the Pittsburgh Keystones! Believe me, Mike’s got what it takes to have a real future in the Negro leagues.”