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Gil Thorp, 9/2/08

Wait … in panel two … is that … YES! COACH KAZ’S EARRINGS ARE BACK! COACH KAZ’S EARRINGS ARE BACK! This, along with the shadowy figure lurking in the back of the equipment shed (no doubt with an axe) has me so excited that I’m willing to forgive the fact that in panel three we’re being shown word balloons emerging randomly out of GYM rather than some kind of crazy homoerotic mass “group physical” featuring dozens of teenage boys and the author of I Know This Much Is True.

By the way, any guesses on the Very Special Affliction that is keeping some player to be named later off of this year’s gridiron squad? Scabies? Testicular cancer? Bighandulism?

Funky Winkerbean, 9/2/08

Thank goodness for my faithful commentors, who informed us all that Susan Smith Westbrook was the student who pre-time-jump fell in love with mopey Les for some reason and tried to kill herself when he didn’t return her mopey advances. Naturally this strip will be completely baffling to anyone who isn’t privy to this information, even if, like me, they’ve been following Funky Winkerbean faithfully for the last three years. Anyway, Susan’s thousand-mile stare in panel three promises more psychotic hijinks to come. She looks like she’s spent most of her life fleeing across Darfur one step ahead of genocidal militias — or, you know, like she’s a character in Funky Winkerbean.

Archie, 9/2/08

At first I was going to guess that “SHOOOM! KA-BLAM!” represented Archie ka-blamming in his pants as he finally gets to first base with Veronica. But on closer inspection of panel three, I think that’s a transcription of the noises his spine makes as he attempts to twist around for optimal out-making while keeping his crotch pointed firmly away from his partner, as the strict puritan movie theater rules demand.

Mary Worth, 9/2/08

“Easy for you to say … since you’re sitting in front of a computer … and can just do exactly what you described with the touch of a button … oh, God, this so so horrible!” [uncontrollable sobbing, etc.]

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/2/08

“Yes, she’s a desperate, lonely old woman, possibly in the early stages of dementia! Better cash that check before someone responsible gets wind of it!”

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Hey everybody, it’s the wee hours of Tuesday morning, so it’s COTW time! But first, as is becoming more and more common, it’s adorable merch picture time. Both of today’s pics come from the future Mrs. Spectacular Spider-Brick, who here is modeling the one of the fine t-shirts bearing the CLAM DOWN logo designed by her beau:

And her kitty loves the logo almost as much in its mousepad form!

Also! There are two comics blogs that I have been meaning to link to for about ever:

  • Mary Worth, Style Mavin takes on the extremely important task of analyzing the fashion in our favorite meddling-biddy-themed soap strip. Not only does blogmistress Tina offer her opinions on the clothes worn by Mary, Toby, and the rest, but she actually creates real-life versions, as you can see here and here.
  • Comics In My Pants proves rather conclusively that every comic strip can be improved by changing the punchline to some variation on the phrase “in my pants”.

And now, here’s this week’s not-in-my-pants top comment!

“Alan’s deep into drug addiction now. Shirt open at the collar, no undershirt seen, and it looks like his cuffs are unbuttoned. Next thing you know, he’ll stop wearing a belt, and maybe let his pants cuffs down an inch. This raw depravity gives me the vapors.” –Muffaroo M. Muffaroo

And the runners-up! So funny!

“Today’s FBOFW would look good on a Hallmark card that had been set on fire and flung into a sewer.” –Angry Kem

“To get pregnant, [Elizabeth] would have had to had contact with Anthony’s junk, which, henceforth, we shall refer to as ‘Little Anthony and the Imperials.'” –Old School Allie Cat

“I can’t wait for the inevitable three-year story arc when Toby and Chinbeard get to Scotland and she’s run over by an oncoming glacier. ‘That ice! It seems to be getting closer. Should I move?'” –Mr. Coffee Nerves

“Toby often uses her credit card to cut up lines of coke, but usually spends cash on her main purchases. Namely, coke.” –Rusty

“I love the confusion on Toby’s face when the bank asks her ‘Did you move to Canada?’ Clearly she doesn’t know. Perhaps she did. How can one tell? Where is Canada? Toby’s mind is on overdrive.” –Gabacho

“There’s something about that ellipsis and subsequent horrified triple exclamation mark in Margo’s speech bubble that suggests very strongly that if she, personally, happened to get any Lu Ann on her hands she would scrub them with a strong disinfectant.” –One-eyed Wolfdog

“When our A3G narrator says the sunshine ‘restores Margo’s spirits,’ what he/she/it means is that, of course, liquor stores are usually only open during daylight hours.” –Nate

“Today’s installment of Luann maintains such a precise balance of ‘huh?’ and ‘eww!’ that it’s almost a thing of beauty, except for being dreadful beyond human expression.” –Violet

“Was Dennis menacing? If he whipped it out on the diving board and started doing an ‘out of control firehose’ on the people below, I have to give him a bit of credit — perhaps even a standing ovation for something finally ‘menacing’ after all these years of milquetoasty bits of annoyance. However, I’m betting that he probably simply stood up on the high board, shaking with fear and a miserable look on his face, with a stream of urine running down his leg as some bigger kids lined up on the ladder behind him kept taunting him to jump.” –Frank Parsnip

“I also like that pluggers buy magazines to look at the pictures, thereby subtly, hilariously subverting one of the oldest jokes about illiteracy. Books can’t be found within fifteen miles of this conversation.” –ChargeMan

“I think the duck looks a little irritated with Slylock. Maybe he suspects the way the thief gets across the water is because the thief is a duck. ‘It’s like he doesn’t even see that I’m here,’ he’s thinking. ‘Howabout the next thief steals chickens from a henhouse — how would he like that?'” –Shmork

“Take the wheel, Jeff, I need to gesticulate.” –Red Greenback

A3G has such nice, polite, well-groomed dope fiends. I can only assume their drug of choice is Flintstones chewables.” –Joe Blevins

Also worthy of honorable mention (though far too long to reproduce here in its entirety) is faithful reader Gold-Digging Nanny’s meticulous reconstruction of the last few months of Apartment 3-G storylines, with damning analysis of how they have almost universally failed to live up to their potential.

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Gil Thorp, 9/1/08

Hey everyone! The incredibly long long boring long non-exciting long story of Elmer appears to have finally ended, with Elmer getting to stay in America because he has a new job doing bilingual outreach for the Kalamazoo Kings, even though it was repeatedly established that Elmer is entirely monolingual. But whatever! Don’t question it, or they’ll drag him back and try to explain away his happy ending some more.

Anyway, it’s September, which means it’s football season, which means that we get to see Matt Rogers and Jeff Ponczak head off to Central City to get a “football physical”, for some reason. Matt and Jeff (which sounds just like Mutt and Jeff — one’s short and one’s tall, get it) are a couple of nattily dressed buds who are no doubt destined to be this strip’s most lovable pair of totally platonic dude friends since Bill Ritter and Stormy Hicks. I’m sure there will be delightful antics, with more hilarious malapropisms from the Widow Ponczak, the batty Bratislavan!

Apartment 3-G and Blondie, 9/1/08

Since the harrowing real-life effects of drug abuse — the violence, the terrible mood swings, the neglect for hygiene and the resulting oozing open sores — are considered too intense to depict on the comics page, there’s only one way left to depict Alan as the desperate addict we all know he is: by establishing via a narration box and dialog that he was asleep in the middle of the afternoon! Damn you, demon dope! (Of course, we can’t actually show him sleeping, as that would be simply too shocking.)

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that I think Dagwood has been a junkie for quite a while now.

Gasoline Alley, 9/1/08

I was going to make fun of Gasoline Alley for taking a day off, but then I realized that the chain link fence depicted here has had more work put into it than a week’s worth of this strip’s usual hillbilly antics.

Pluggers, 9/1/08

You know, if you’ve gotta repeat a joke every four months or so, pluggers ain’t gonna hold it against you or nothin’.