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So ends the Comics Curmudgeon Fall 2012 fundraiser. Thank you, generous readers!

Gasoline Alley, 11/16/12

Any hopes of social acceptance for coal-eyed monster Boog — from the cruel attentions of bullies to his prospects of a future mate — hang on the slender thread of his mother’s ability to keep his school — nay, the entire town — stuffed and brain-addled from her carbohydrate-laden snacks. Bake, Hoogie, bake! Bake like you’ve never baked before!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/16/12

Rex Morgan, M.D. plots are notorious for starting from an intriguing premise — Rex and June investigate a brothel — and then larding in so many trivial digressions that readers lose track, and eventually interest. And so we have Honey’s plumbing emergency, Ginger’s stockkeeping crisis, Edna’s heart attack and Herb’s gratitude, June’s free clam lunch (with extra free crab cakes — come back again for more free!), Dolores’s battle with cancer, Nurse Amber Thomas coaxing Rex into a TV spot for CPR training and his consequent public acclaim, Ginger’s Rex-poaching plans and backstory conflicts with the Marine-pilot wife of an former paramour and scheming clamshack waitress Rose. The shame in all this is that when the whole rickety edifice finally collapses in a hail of gunfire or ceremonial award of yet another boat, no one will much notice, let alone care.

Gil Thorp, 11/16/12

Talented and yet somehow Irish footballer Terry Gallagher has let his largely-fictional triumphs on the American gridiron go to his head! Here, the Cool Girls conspire in some vague iPhone-related plot to take him down a peg, because if the stars of the NFL have shown us anything, it’s that a deep and abiding humility is the key to football success.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/16/12

OK so Big Walnut Tech is obviously a Designated Villain in Funky Winkerbean: they routinely crush the Westview Scapegoats in football, and it was team star Frankie who got Dead Lisa pregnant (she was not yet dead at the time), so that Les could heroically give her a lift to the hospital and the Fairviews could get Darrin to adopt. And today Big Walnut Tech bests the Westview High crowd yet again, this time by remote control.

Sounds like a pretty interesting place, doesn’t it, this Big Walnut Tech? I’d like to know more about how their coach managed to maintain a consistently successful football program over so many years, and how they built an academic environment that develops clearly marketable skills in fields like robotics. And what about Frankie? Did he build on his high-school social and athletic successes to become a man of consequence? Were his dreams bigger than Westview?

I like to think of Frankie taking his final box of trophies out to the curb and drawing a last deep breath of Westview air, with its faint smell of bad pizza and flop sweat — then firing up his trusty old van, scene of so many conquests, and driving it down the sad main street out of town forever without a single glance in the rearview.

Judge Parker, 11/16/12

All along, Avery was just looking for a place to hang his hat and park his trout. He would see it clear enough if he took off those ridiculous glasses.

— Uncle Lumpy