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Archie, 10/2/07

Huh, the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000 seems to have put the wrong dialogue into today’s cartoon. Here, let me fix that:

Panel one, Miss Gundy: You feel that our school has singularly failed to inculcate any sort of moral sense into our student body? That we are training an army of sociopaths?

Panel one, Mr. Weatherbee: Indeed! What is it that has hollowed out their spirits from the inside, leaving them only fit to be alternately victims and tormentors in life’s theater of cruelty?

Panel two: [A sickening crunch as Archie’s kneecap fractures, leaving him with a limp that will linger the rest of his life.]

Panel three, Mr. Weatherbee: Perhaps we shouldn’t have painted every wall in the school a blindingly bright white. We sought to inculcate spiritual purity, but instead we created the illusion of a yawning void that reflects the emptiness of the students’ souls!

Gasoline Alley, 10/2/07

When last we left this feature, Slim’s insane meteor plot had landed him in an actual mental hospital. Soon afterwards, his clinician choose to follow an unorthodox treatment regime — sending him and Clovia to the beach — and Skeezix, who is the father of one (possibly both? who knows?) of them, had to take over at the garage and deal with their surly employee, who went out on a call and then vanished. In this strip’s newly found rhythm of veering from dull to insane as the plot develops, Skeezix has tracked the missing mechanic to this creepy old house, which is probably inhabited by a family of inbred murderers wearing human skin suits, or a passageway to the plane of damned souls, or something similarly bizarre. The harrowing adventures in this hell-house will of course cut back and forth to and from the dialect-heavy hillbilly antics of Rufus and Joel, who Skeezix left in charge of the garage.

Spider-Man, 10/2/07

Oh, Spider-Man! Is there any hero in the pantheon of American comics tougher and more noble than you? Spidey and his wife have decided to flee Los Angeles for the safer climes of Manhattan; they’ve been driven out of the city of angels by the twin scourges of the Shocker (a “super” villain whose “super” powers mainly consist of a crippling inferiority complex and vibrating gloves he built in his basement metal shop) and an army of amateur paparazzi. But now he faces his greatest challenge yet: heavy traffic on the 405! Obviously it’s worth Peter Parker betraying his secret identity if that’s what it takes to get to the airport on time; after all, air travel between LA and New York is incredibly sporadic, and if Peter and Mary Jane don’t make their flight, clinging to the landing gear like it’s the last helicopter out of Saigon if need be, they could be trapped in Los Angeles indefinitely.

Gil Thorp, 10/2/07

Uh-oh, Howard looks like he’s about to prove that wearing Buddy Holly glasses and being named “Howard” doesn’t automatically make you smart. It’s well known that the Internet primarily exists as a vehicle for anonymous personal abuse. Googling the name of a crappy high school quarterback who plays in a town unnaturally obsessed with high school sports will mainly serve to demonstrate how many ways there are to misspell “YOU FUCKING SUCK.”