Distasteful Wednesday
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Crock, 11/26/25
So, how old were you when you learned that “stuffing” an animal actually meant that you strip its skin off and fit it over an animal-shaped taxidermy form — a mannequin, basically? I was well into adulthood, and it was recent enough that I’m still a little freaked out about it. In this scenario, I guess this means either that Yarnell was for some reason skinned and then mounted on a prone form that fit into a coffin, which seems kind of pointless, or that he was skinned and mounted on a form in some heroic pose which is being displayed elsewhere, and currently his skinless corpse is the main event at an open casket funeral, which is much more horrifying and would explain Captain Poulet’s expression. It’s also possible that I’m misinterpreting the joke and actually Crock is simply going to force his men to eat Yarnell for Thanksgiving, a holiday that the French do not celebrate.
Shoe, 11/26/25
Holy crap! Shoe finally did it! It finally acknowledged that its characters are birds! And it did it with a slam on all us mammals out here reading it. “Can you imagine having hair?” thinks the Perfesser. “Grotesque.”
Dennis the Menace, 11/26/25
Hey, did you know that at any moment Dennis might just show up at your house and passive-aggressively ask to shit in there? That’s … pretty menacing, honestly.
Marvin, 11/26/25
“Oh, so they’re doing bathroom jokes in Dennis the Menace now, huh? Well, I guess it’s time for us to do strips about Marvin puking everywhere. I don’t like it either, but we’ve got a reputation to maintain.”
169 replies to “Distasteful Wednesday”
Blondie: Huh. I figured Daggy’d just toss the groceries in his expandable neck pouch like a pelican. I mean, those little folds on his neck, isn’t that why they’re there?
Dustin: Ha ha! Dustdad is a selfish ingrate. Add that to his poor health brought on by poor life choices and he’s a shoo-in for the next new Pluggers character.
Hagar the Horrible: Hagar passed his “Wilbur Weston Patented ‘How to be at Total Slob’ Course” with flying colors. And flies.
“C’mon, lady, Joey and I need to rig up our fix somewhere! And where do you keep your electronics?”
Marvin: Fits the joke that Wives fix problems while Husbands announce them.
“Hey Hon, the cat threw up.”
FC: It’s not enough that Jeffy is going to eat the body of another living creature. He wants toys to boot.
Cosmo’s deep existential reverie was then interrupted by Dennis and Joey banging on the door to use his bathroom.
DtM: And by “bathroom” Dennis means the bushes in front of the house.
RMMD: Wimmen, they sure are suckers for flowers, amirite??
JP: I should be finding this cute, perhaps even aspirational, because I’d love to bond with a pretty woman over a mutual love of movies both cult and mainstream. However, Emil is still a man with a mustache out of the ‘Do the Creep’ music video dressed like a longshoreman who is talking to a (formerly for the moment) sullen misanthropic sociopath who should be in a jail cell or rubber room for her criminal assault of a person of interest in an active police investigation.
MW: I guess it will be nighttime (Mary might still be around, who knows…) when Sunny starts calling out random phrases (‘The money’s in the…!’ ‘No, don’t do it, Manuel! I won’t squeal!’) that Toby didn’t “teach” him.
Toby thinks Sunny’s one smart bird, rolls over and goes back to sleep.
Luann: WOW! Why aren’t you offering to help?
Real talk though, was there a storyline where Grandma here dies or something? Is there a reason she hasn’t, AFAICR, featured in the strip since the ‘All Grown Up!’ shift?
Shoe “Also,I don’t have opposable thumbs, which would make that action pretty difficult.. ”
Marvin I wondered why these two would have children, given how much they seem to have them, but Jeff’s terminology today suggests that it was part of some tax deduction scheme.
Shoe: You’d think a bird would be pretty sensitive to the word pluck.
Shoe: He doesn’t have any teeth to clean, either, yet his bathroom still has a toothbrush.
CROCK: At very first glance, I thought they were standing in front of a big barbecue.
RMMD: Augie literally phoned it in. Fortunately, Summer is too dopey to care.
DtM: Dennis has never had ANY Stranger Danger training. Take that as you will.
9CL: Have we ever seen Amos’ mother, or did Edda use The Power of Poontang to have her obliterated?
Crock:
“Poor Yarnell. How sad. This close to Thanksgiving. Shields must be beside himself.”
Crock:
“I should have figured out that something was wrong with Yarnell when I saw how wooden her movements were!”
MW: Toby trying to get validation from a bird is a cry for help.
MW: Mary asks Toby if she and Ian are coming over for some turkey tomorrow.
Toby quickly puts her hands over Sunny’s ears and with eyes wide says “Mary!” as she motions towards the bird.
DtM:
“Lady, how is it that all the moms in this 2025 strip look like they came out of a ’50s time machine?”
DtM:
“Ma’am, to cobble a football-themed phrase that doubled as a hit song in the ’60s for Mel and Tim, ‘Backfield in Motion’ !”
The best part of the Thanksgiving meal isn’t the remains of your dead comrade, it’s the bread and celery that were cooked inside him.
“Got sick all over his bed”? When did Marvin’s father become British?
The eternal recurrence of Crock reruns means that not only did newspapers (note to self: check if there are still newspapers) run this strip today, but also fifteen years ago, without noticing that it was about cannibalism and the joke made no sense. Nobody is watching, cartoonists! Go wild!
Crock: Aw, it’s just a joke about shoving a blend of bread, onions, celery and maybe a little cranberry if you’re into that sort of thing up a corpse’s ass. He’ll smell wonderful in the crematorium!
Crock: Alternatively, Poulet might be simply disgusted by the mental image of Crock cramming handfuls of sage, onion and breadcrumbs up this corpse’s intestinal cavity – and probably not even good quality breadcrumbs.
Shoe: I might try this as a motivator in the morning. Just look at myself in the mirror and remind myself of the benefits of being a mammal. “One good thing about having a bony endoskeleton is I don’t need to moult as I grow”, “One good thing about having skin is that I don’t need to live in a pool of nutrients”, “One good thing about having external genitalia is that I don’t have to package my sperm into a sharp calcified dart that pierces my skin while I’m simultaneously being pierced by my partner’s own calcified sperm dart” etc
Marvin: Our kids are adopted, and one night not long after they came to us, our son threw up in his bed. Mom cleaned him up while I grabbed the sheets and threw them in the washer. “Well, if I wasn’t this kid’s dad before, I sure am now,” I thought. I’m taking Jenny’s side against Jeff, is what I’m saying, I’m finding Marvin #relatable and I couldn’t be more disappointed.
Couple of short ones:
Shoe: “Now those soft, downy underfeathers that never molt on their own, that’s another story.” [Goes to town with his beak on a random spot]
Dennis the Menace: Joke’s on you, Dennis: that’s not a neighborhood mom, just a neighborhood mom’s skin stretched over a human-like taxidermy form.
@matt w:
Damn right! All the other dead guys they ate with ketchup and mustard. This is a HOLIDAY, dammit! Just, as Josh notes, not in France. Or North Africa. Or anyplace else the Legion served in.
Dustin: [Dustin, appears from behind] – “Can I borrow some money for lunch?”
Alice: Can’t wait for Alice to bring her mushrooms and lentils, brussels sprouts and pumpkin lasagna to the pool party when she shows up in Charterstone looking for her parrot.
Blondie: This is me in Aldi when I forget to have a quarter for the cart.
GT: Unironically loving panel 3 with the marching band getting down New Orleans-funeral-style.
MW: You’d think that after all the years she’s known Toby that Mary would be familiar with the concept of small-brained creatures being able to mimic human speech.
Today’s Arlo and Janis is a nice contrast to today’s Dustin, as a decent human being is always a nice contrast to a loathsome asshole.
Don’t get be getting all high and mighty there, Captain Cloaca.
***
This is the most disturbing Shoe yet. It’s one thing to make the artistic choice to have all of your characters represented by birds instead of humans, it’s another to have them reference humans and the grotesqueness of our aging process. Because everything takes place up in trees and everyone seems relatively intelligent, could this even be taking place in the Slylock Fox dystopian universe where our beloved avian cast is too smart to get mixed up with the likes of Count Weirdly? Dang it, this is too much for a Wednesday morning.
***
“How’s your day going so far, Tabby?”
“Well, it started with the mental image of a dead Legionnaire having bread shoved up his backside by the kitchen staff. You?”
Shoe has finally run out of story lines for its birds, and is going to start shamelessly ripping off other, better (?) comics. Today, it’s Pluggers. Tomorrow? Not to give anything away, but here’s a hint: Dennis, in his cute little tie, pointing at the middle of the Thanksgiving table while his relatives look on, saying “I guess now Mom’s cooking really WILL taste like a Shoe.”
So here’s the sequence of events leading up to this punchline-like object: A woman opens her door to two children she does not know. “Hello, children I do not know,” she says brightly, “I know what you could use.” The children she does not know remain silent as she goes to the kitchen, opens a bag/box/jar of cookies, puts cookies on the plate, and returns to the door, plate in hand, while the children she does not know continue to wordlessly exist on her porch. Each of them takes a cookie. Each of them takes a single bite of cookie. Only then does the child she does not know to our-right-her-left finally speak. (I like to imagine that this scene ends with the woman staring down at these two knuckleheads and shutting the door, firmly but gently, in their cookie-smeared faces. Go shit yourselves, kids.)
Crock-“We drop Yarnell on the enemy at dawn.”
RMMD-Auggie wins points for having a flower delivery service on standby.
MW-“Get bent you meddling old biddy.”
FC-It’s that time when you can tell people to get stuffed.
Crock: Well, there was that Far Side joke, where a bear family comes home and finds a taxidermized bear in the living room with a sign on its chest saying “Goodbye Cruel World”
Female Bear: Oh my god, Larry! He stuffed himself!
Despite I got an actual chuckle out of Crock, The Far Side is probably one of the few genuine examples of how one does a taxidermy joke and makes it funny.
Dennis the Menace: What’s the lead-up to this interaction? Dennis walks up to this lady’s porch and rings the bell, and her Pavlovian response is to give him cookies?
What hellish training program did DtM mastermind to make this happen? You have to squint and read between the lines to see the Menacing here, but it’s real and terrifying!
Dennis the Menace: Luring kids inside her home with cookies is pointless when the kid already decides on coming in anyway.
I’m certain that there’s a menacing factor here, just can’t find it.
Shoe: After that moment of musing the Perfesser continues his usual morning routine, pressing oil out of the glands beside his beak and rubbing it through his feathers.
Crock: I assumed that the turkey was also taxidermied, and no one’s eating anything for Thanksgiving. It’s a lot of work for a petty bit, though. Petty and industrious is a weird combination of character traits, but I guess that describes a lot o cartoon characters.
Crock – Will the widow Shields be joining you for your Thanksgiving dinner? That could get awkward.
Marvin: Why are they sleeping in Mary Worth’s bedroom?
Crock-“Wait a minute. We are a French military unit in the deserts of Northern Africa. Why are we following an American tradition?”
Dennis the Menace-Come back when you’re teenagers and she’ll let you eat her cookies.
@Rube: Arlo and Janis is always a nice contrast to whatever else is going on in the comics. It’s the only strip I read unironically.
Crock reaches into the smoker(?) with his right hand and pulls out a pair of ribs attached to one of the lower lumbar gesturing with it to the soldier.
“Make a wish.” He says.
@The Quiet Man:
On Luann, and whether her maternal grandmother is still alive : Huh, that’s a good question. I’m assuming no, otherwise it’s even WEIRDER that Luann hangs out with a nonagenarian she barely knows (even volunteered both her kidneys!) while she never, ever even MENTIONS her grandparents.
Also, this is a “Grandma brought only the stuffing and sidedishes, forces Mom to do all the cooking for the main dishes (plus BUYING THE INGREDIENTS LAST SECOND) by herself because ‘it’s HER family now’ ” scenario as viewed by the father-daughter duo who never lift a finger to help, right?
…too far?…***********
Crankshaft : Hey, remember less than two weeks ago, when Crankshaft said that insomnia is a sign that you’re about to die? Just being wishful…
**********
Crock vs Shoe : you know, if you asked which of these strips would do the “it’s the funeral of a guy I hate. I’m only attending because we’re eating him for Thanksgiving dinner afterwards” I would have said… what am I saying, of course I would suspect it would be Crock going there.
Even prefacing it “Guess what, Shoe is actually doing a joke acknowledging the characters are birds” wouldn’t have misled me!
**********
Frazz : and Caufield LOVE commercial holidays, because it allows them to feel superior to other people.
**********
Slylock Fox : SOLUTION : it turns out the Weirdly twins are innocent, the real culprits are those horrible Burber-Van Hoesen twins, Polly and Lolly.
“Hey, uh, this Pluggers knock-off joke doesn’t work because our characters are all birds who don’t have nose hairs.” “When have we ever acknowledged our characters being birds? Just last month we did a comic where the joke was ‘the Perfesser is too out of shape to jog’ and not ‘there’s nowhere for him to jog to because you can see he’s on a tree branch’.” “Eh, it’s still not a good idea to do a joke that actively contradicts our characters’ nature. Sure the girl characters all have boobs, but still.” “Awright, awright, I’ll rewrite it.”
RMMD: why doesn’t Augie change the principle character to a high school math teacher named Sep Starling, who gets drawn into a stalking through a woman?
@The Quiet Man:
Would you really trust Luann to help with cooking a Thanksgiving meal? I wouldn’t trust her to make a sandwich.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Yeah, that was my first thought too–cleaning up 4am toddler sick is a two-person job, Jeff, start pulling your weight on this parenting thing.
Crock: At first I wondered why the French Foreign Legion was celebrating Thanksgiving. Then I remembered the “foreign” part of the name, and conceded that Yarnell at least might be an American. Then I realized I was using my precious brainpower to figure out Crock’s backstory, and I began to question the life choices that led me to this point.
Crockey! — I think the CDC used to recommend that you bake the filling (yes, we say filling and not stuffing) outside of your dead comrade’s body to avoid salmonella, but who knows these days. . . .
DtM — Dennis hasn’t peed in the woods since that time he got stys in this eyes. . .
@Baja Gaijin: Ed Kudlick does not have the level of endearing charm it TAKES to be a plugger.
Today’s Crock causes me to consider that perhaps they’re bringing up Thanksgiving not because of the usual syndicated zombie strip tradition of looking at the calendar to inspire a weak gag, but because Yarnell might have enlisted as a member of the French Foreign Legion and be American by birth. I am then forced to consider how much of the rest of cast are also not French, as Poulet is the only character whose name is even French.
DT: “What’s your preference, Good Cop or Bad Cop? I tend to lean more towards Bad Cop myself, I’ve got a knack for breaking fingers, but I don’t mind switching it up on occasion…”
Dustin: “Why doesn’t anyone think of me, the middle-class, middle-aged white male for a change?”
GT: Damn, that clarinetist is going OFF! They must be doing “Rhapsody in Blue” for the halftime show.
HotC: Okay look, I know these kids grew up in the digital media age but I’m calling BS on them sitting in a room full of DVD/Blu-Rays without realizing what they are. Did they think Dad-of-I’m-not-sure-which-character collected a lot of small, narrow movie posters?
JP M&M switch from random facts from travel articles to random facts from IMDb.
Luann: It’s what, 10am on Thanksgiving morning and you still haven’t worked out the side dishes?
MW: He’s not exactly “saying words,” it’s more like he’s mimicking sounds that have been repeated countless times by others in a simulacrum of speech and intelligence. A situation that you, Mary, should be quite familiar with.
@richardf8: Or the minimum level of performative altruism. I’m sure there’s at least one strip on the theme of “Pluggers drop their spare change in the Salvation Army bucket” or “Pluggers bring a couple of cans to the church food drive” out there.
@Anonymous: I’d suggest having Luann set the table to get her out of the way, but honestly that might be a bit much for her. She’d likely end up panicking over the silverware placement and just give everybody spoons.
Crock-“This time don’t overcook him like you did with the last guy..”
Luann-I see Nancy hasn’t shoved Grandma into the oven yet.
@TheDiva: Thank you for giving me flashbacks to my high school marching band performing “Rhapsody in Blue” for our halftime show. I had up until this point blocked out just how physically and mentally brutal that routine was, far beyond anything any Mudlark football player has ever had to endure under Gil’s half-assed tutelage.
MW- ….As opposed to Wilbur, who communicates with grunts, groans, and animated hand gestures.
(Appropriately named) Crock – At first I thought this was funny. I thought the casket was a big gas grill….
Shoe – The toothbrush is a nice touch….
DtM – This is one of those black eyed children deals…right? Remember – they can’t come in without your permission….
Marvin – Since Marvin shit the bed. You know…cuz it’s Marvin….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
Shoe – “One nice thing about having a cloaca, all the girls are into anal.”
@Bob Tice: #16- Double dribble,baby!
REX MORGAN M.D.: “He’s not going to win any prizes with that bit of writing–but he does earn some points with me. I, of course am not a ‘prize’ As you can see, I’m easier to get than a participation trophy.”
REX MORGAN M.D. (2): Also, if this tortured awkward rather contradictory syntax is any indication, Summer really can’t be trusted to ‘write her own story” and should in fact just leave it to professional paper-grader, Augie, to handle.
Gasoline Alley: Let’s not waste time. Sunday, this guy’s corpse will be found covered in ice like Jack at the end of The Shining.
Crankshaft doesn’t get much praise from me but I admire this arc, the tilted panels previously, how little dialogue they’ve used, and their commitment to the bit.
MW: I’ll let Toby alone with this delusion and not tell her the real truth about Koko the gorilla.
Slylock Fox:
“That’s all the evidence we need. You’re both arrested!”
“On what charge?”
“Of being useless nepo kids. Your uncle Count would have at least worn a shirt to cover up those tattoos.”
Crock: A thing about Crock is that I constantly walk away from it feeling like it’s supposed to be some kind of stereotyping humor, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how. Like, is there a stereotype about the French being cannibals? Because I certainly wasn’t aware of that if there is.
Shoe: The dialogue indicates that Perfesser is supposed to be smug and proud, but the art makes it look more like he’s actually in crippling depression over his lack of nose hairs and trying to deny it.
Dennis The Menace: Dennis was gonna pull this bit on his usual victim, Mr. Wilson, but Wilson took aim with his shotgun when Dennis came near his house, so Dennis has decided to find other people to torment for today.
Comics Curmudgeon: Come for the snark, stay for the stuffing recipes!
DENNIS THE MENACE: Y’all really don’t realize that this woman is just a witch fattening them up so that she can invite them in and shove them into her oven? I guess I’m the only one who recognizes a modern-day Hansel & Gretel when he sees it. (The woman’s neutral expression signals her mild internal turmoil about these developments. On one hand, she does get them into the house, but without the ironic juxtaposition of their own greed sealing their fate, cooking children kinda loses something, y’know?)
@richardf8: -imagines Ed Kudlick as a animal-person (UNSEE UNSEE!!!)
@2+2=7: Sad was the day where witches have to move from the depth of the forests to suburbia, and can no longer use actual gingerbread houses or houses with chicken legs, because people would “question it”
@Dennis Jimenez: Good to know I wasn’t the only one who at first thought the casket was a giant gas grill or even what Google’s AI search for “sideways barrel shaped smoker” tells me is known as a “horizontal offset smoker” or “horizontal ugly drum smoker (UDS)”.
@The Rambling Otter: Also, this in turn makes me wonder if by the advancement of the technological world, caused mythical creatures/cryptids to go into hiding.
I mean, maybe China back in the old old days actually had dragons flying around in the sky.
Marco Polo did recount very VERY bizarre things in his memoirs that people accused him of making up. Which on his deathbed, he said that he only mentioned a fraction of the weird stuff he saw.
@Anonymous:
As opposed to Wilbur, who communicates with grunts, groans, and animated hand gestures.
And that’s at karaoke!
@The Rambling Otter: The best joke is when a city person goes to a rural thrift shop or antique store and discovers The Taxidermy Section.
CROCK:
Well that thing in panel #1 does look more like a grill than a coffin, so….
@TheDiva: What if they’ve been in the Wyoming Basin all this time.
@Guts Dozier: I went into an antique store some years back, in my city, not exactly rural, and on one wall was a MASSIVE mounted Buffalo head. I didn’t know they got that big.
Dennis the Menace —
Joey: “Uh, Dennis, I think these cookies are made of bran and Ex-Lax chips. We should stop eating ’em!”
Dennis: “They’re cookies, Joey — I can’t stop eating ’em!”
Lady: “So, Dennis, do you remember hitting a baseball through my window or egging my house at Halloween? Because I do! Now smile… this Ring video is going to make me queen of the Neighborhood app!”
MW- “What are you making for dessert tomorrow, Mary?” “Pumpkin pie and parrot cake.er..um..ahem..Carrot cake. Turkey squares and garlic cheddar dressing muffins.”
@Anonymous: I wanna hear Wilbur’s rendition of Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby, or as he calls it Ode to Mayonnaise….
GT – Gil’s in a tough spot. It would be humiliating to lose to his ex-wife, but there’s no pride to be had in beating her either. His best bet would be a bit of ju-jitsu in blatantly allowing her to win, then afterwards huffily telling Marty Moon, “What, you think I would beat up a girl?” He gets to save face and piss off his ex in one stroke. Also his syndicate, which starts getting a flood of cancellations on Monday.
@DAS: Pluggers Lament – My UDS gave me IBS!
@Victor Von: “Dennis walks up to this lady’s porch and rings the bell, and her Pavlovian response is to give him cookies?”
Makes me start to question if that neighbourhood is some sort of Stepford Wives-ish community, brainwashed to dress and act like they’re still in the 50’s, isolated from the outside world with no smartphones or Blu-Ray or videogames and such.
Marvin’s mom is a care-giver but not a damn-giver
Crock – “Wait, Yarnell was the woman! We whacked the wrong Shields & Yarnell!” “It’s okay. Whoever they were, they were still mimes.”
DUSTIN: Geez, Helen, Ed barely cares about his own children, and now you want him to “help” someone else’s. Stop smothering him, lady!
DUSTIN (2): This is particularly egregious since it’s implied they are going to a charity event, where they get to hobnob with other well-off assholes while decked out in their finery. They don’t even have to be around the filthy “poors” who are selfishly making them feel “guilty” for needing basic necessities of life they can’t afford. It must be so hard for them to have to stand around munching on catered food and making idle chatter while getting an occasional ask to throw a few (tax-deductible) crumbs toward the less-fortunate when they could be using that money for much more useful purposes like giving it to people who’ll scapegoat them or lock them up.
Don Abundio, translated:
“I think I’ve had this dream before”
“You’ve covered Lust, but… what about the others?”
“Wait for it”
“Here comes Gluttony!”
@brendancalling:
I believe your recommendation got me reading A&J in the first place. Think I’m a little less enthusiastic, but it’s usually a bright spot, thanks for pointing a guy in the right direction.
Crock: For the last 3 days, Agnes and her friend Trout have been trying to learn how to stuff a dead possum without resorting to taxidermy. They have decided simply to cram it into a food dehydrator. Maybe that would have worked with Yarnell too?
RMMD: Do poetry, Augie. Chicks love poetry.
“You’re blonde and pretty
And loaded with class
The back of your head
Is a horse’s ass.”
@Ukulele Ike:
You once were hot
With this artist you’re not
Stop overreacting
I did the redacting
This bouquet sure cost a lot?
@Anonymous: You are correct of course, but I didn’t say anything about accepting Luann’s help. A normal 5-year-old might have the wherewithal to say “Can I help, Mommy n’ Gran’ma?” but as we all know, Luann is too ‘special’ to learn any social graces.
@TheDiva: Exactly! You get it.
@2+2=7: And Ed truly is fortunate, since he apparently makes a very comfortable living while never being shown working on a file that the average firm wouldn’t give to a junior associate, during the few minutes he isn’t sitting in the breakroom scarfing down the donuts that were meant for the support staff.
@The Rambling Otter: I’m certain that there’s a menacing factor here, just can’t find it.
________________________________________________________________________
Its Martha Wilson,watching just out of panel figuring out her revenge against this newcomer working her side of the street, before Dennis leaves her and finds a new Mr Wilson to bother.Without Dennis around to block, she’ll have to go back to having George sex on the regular.
@The Rambling Otter: Gary Larson is responsible for a truly epic taxidermy joke in the animated special Tales from the Far Side II, which I will not spoil here. I don’t think it’s online, so use whatever dark forces you can summon to seek it out elsewhere.
In Dennis Minus Menace today the menace is
Martha Wilson,watching just out of panel figuring out her revenge against this newcomer working her side of the street, before Dennis leaves her and finds a new Mr Wilson to bother.Without Dennis around to block, she’ll have to go back to having George sex on the regular.
@Peanut Gallery: Too bad they couldn’t get Raquel Welsh to revive her role as Lust from the original “Bedazzled”.
RIP Raquel.
@The Quiet Man: “You mean ‘Luann is ‘blank slate‘,’ right, dearie? You see, ‘Grandma,’ you old bat, this is why I’m still in the strip and you’ve been tossed aside like expired Thanksgiving leftovers!” –Mrs Horner (wearing the same daffy, oblivious senile smile she always wears while saying it.)
DT: I see Sheriff Buford is all set with his special uniform for investigating Clown Murders.
Last month he was working on serial killings carried out by a coven of Tennessee witches, and wore a pointy hat for three weeks.
@Anonymous: Crankshaft and Pluggers have had more focus on senior medical issues than Rex Morgan has had in years.
@GarrisonSkunk: Apparently that movie got poor reviews, but I think it’s great. And in the Seven Deadly Sins sketch, Barry Humphries nailed it as Envy.
DtM- I suppose in the modern world, HOAs would forbid gingerbread houses.
@Peanut Gallery: I also think it’s great. And as a bonus, the Sisters of St. Beryl get a name check in Good Omens
Sex Organ V.D.: What the heck did Rev Jim do that he’s begging forgiveness?
Marvin’s parents look so, so emotionally spent. It’s as though they’re stuck in a comic strip with a perpetual toddler, a trap from which there is no escape.
@Peanut Gallery: How can anyone hate a movie featuring Dudley Moore as a fly on the wall blowing a raspberry?
Disappointing to find out that some farmers in Algeria do raise domestic turkeys, since I have one less reason to excoriate Crock for treating its characters as misplaced 21st-century Americans. I was all ready with a joke that the only thing to eat there on Thanksgiving is roasted camel.
@The Rambling Otter: #75: Do you remember how much they were asking for it?
BTW: It was one of the last posts yesterday but I found that TV program that scared your mom when she was a kid.
Crankshaft – that last leaf is symbolic of Crankshaft’s remaining life – dried, useless and just waiting to fall and rot. Wait, this is an upbeat comic, forget all of that!
JP – okay, so we are now going to write off a Chicago visit and various sites outside of Oslo.
DT – Deputy, explain again how Ozob is implicated in the Sherriff’s death? Or we just going to hunt him down, and kill him so you can settle your beef with him? Just asking so, I’ll know how much ammo to bring.
RMMD: A few weeks later, another even fancier bouquet arrives. The card reads “made the deal, and the book is now number 1 on the best sellers list. Taking a meeting with some people from Netflix about adapting it to a movie. Thank you for making me realize I had to chase my dream when I still could do it.”
@treetown:
RMMD: A few weeks later, another even fancier bouquet arrives. The card reads “made the deal, and the book is now number 1 on the best sellers list. Taking a meeting with some people from Netflix about adapting it to a movie. Thank you for making me realize I had to chase my dream when I still could do it.”
Summer is initially upset, but then gets over it and shrugs. “As long as it turns out better than that terrible series about that CIA lady hunting down a supervillainess model named ‘Godiva Danube’, I’ll be okay with this.”
Kudos to Crock for making a joke disturbing enough that I almost didn’t notice the main character was walking away either sideways or maybe twisted backward, so you can see both his face and rear end at the same time. This is a good lesson for any would-be cartoonist who doesn’t know how human bodies work.
@Baja Gaijin: The crossover nobody asked for: Dagwood performing as the sometimes-villain-sometimes-informant “Pouch” in the Dick Tracy strip.
CS: Hasty, hasty, Ed. Didn’t you ever read that O. Henry story? When that last leaf falls, you die.
FC: Psst, Dolly. Looks like Jeffy will believe any shit you tell him. Get him started on the Great Pumpkin.
Pluggers: Claude Manx does know that you can buy sliced turkey for sandwiches any time of the year?
DtM: Now that I think about it has any of these 1950s Stepford Wives ever been drawn wearing slacks? I guess in their Eisenhower era world only bad girls wear slacks, usually skin tight capris or toreadors.
Phantom: Well, to be honest, there is no backup force. We in the Jungle Patrol are so used to having this vigilante clad in purple spandex do all our work for us that Colonel Worubu rarely sends us out to do anything. I came here on my own against orders.
@Ukulele Ike: #88 RMMD- “Oh precious Summer, no need to get weepy; I’m your new stalker…isn’t that creepy?
DT: “If we’re lucky, the drug runner in holding who may give us a lead on Ozob.” Sorry, Dick, run that past me again? Either that “who” shouldn’t be there, or “the” should be “there’s a”.
Either way, this is a train of thought that only works in Neo-Chicago. “Ozob’s a criminal, the drug runner’s a criminal. Even though we’ve made no connection whatsoever between Ozob and the drug trade, this guy’s probably been following Ozob’s updates on the Neo-Chicago Criminals Discord.”
JP: I know I’ve joked about most of the people at this Friendsgiving being extras, but it’s actually hilarious the way Sophie, encouraged to make friends here, immediately focuses on the guy Reena and Askel were trying to set her up with, But They Both Already Have Partners, to the exclusion of everyone else. You can actually hear the plot mechanics grinding into place.
(By the way, I get that Reena has decided Sophie’s long-distance relationship isn’t healthy, but are we ever going to learn Askel’s problem with Emil’s pointedly-not-invited girlfriend?)
MW: “It’s remarkable how he can say actual words!”
“Yes, I’m trying to teach him to say ‘The past is how you remember it’, ‘Everything happens for a reason’ and ‘Have you considered giving Wilbur another chance?’ Then we won’t need you any more!”
Phantom: I apologise to Patrolwoman Han for questioning her judgement that these bakers are dumb enough to immediately blab about the guy they were just saying they were never supposed to mention, because it turns out one of them is!
RMMD: I apologise to Beatty for suggesting he would go for an incredibly obvious twist here. Clearly, that would have been too interesting for this strip.
@88 Ukulele Ike: and @113 Anonymous:
This is getting to sound like Whose Line Is It Anyway in Scenes From A Hat where the category is “Poems that will get your face slapped”.
LUANN: Totally feel for Nancy, she was taught a good girl always obeys herother, and to respect her elders . She’s yet to learn, “my house, my rules”. At least she’s giving her aging mother a good trip down memory lane. :-/
GT: good ol’ Marty Moon probably meant to say “neither team has scored a single point.”. But in the he excitement of being back, he forgot how many teams are playing.
SFx: the twin on our left has a bulge on left side of her head where she stores stolen items– no wonder the kitchen ds said she was an egghead!
THANKSGIVING
– PLUGGERS: Don’t we all?
– PREP NOTES: My turkey was a progressive, she had three hearts.
– when been buying a beer for beer bread and you forget ID, please know cola is no substitute.
@Guillermo el chiclero: On Pluggers: Just remember— Pluggers are morons. And proud of it.
Slylock – I didn’t figure out the answer, so I’ll nitpick: For all we can tell from the illustration, it could be that both twins have skull tattoos on both shoulders.
Marvin I’m an “only parent” to my kids, so I can say from experience that one adult can deal with 3AM vomit all over, but that if I hadn’t been an only parent to begin with and a perfectly-capable-of-helping spouse tried to dump that cleanup on me, I’d have been an only parent by the time I was done!
@118 Peanut Gallery:
Or Slylock could have waited to see who would try to fence dinosaur eggs.
Trixie Flagston (2 years old Comic Book Time) was found today dehydrated and suffering from severe cloth burns in a small laundry basket. Local realtor and Killbot Lois Flagston has been charged with 15 counts of neglect. Upon hearing the news,family friend, Sol Sunbeam, entered the Flagston residence and took matters into his own rays. Result: A burned out house and burned up Flagston family. Mourners are requested to send money to The Foofram Robotic Institute, Drs. Richard Daystrum and Ed “Thursty” Thusten, President.
@Guillermo el chiclero: I never checked the price of the Buffalo Head.
And about the show/movie/such do please tell :3
Crock: Least surprising thing in the comics today is that Crock’s battalion has descended into cannibalism. It may as well have been his mission statement.
DtM: She should’ve known that if she kept handing out Ex-Lax chocolate chip cookies to the neighborhood children it would eventually backfire on her.
@The Rambling Otter: If you go back to late last night, he spelled it out in admirable detail
@Sequitur: Or Slylock could have waited to see who would try to fence dinosaur eggs.
______________
…or investigate the Forrestown Denny’s new Fresh and Fruity Prehistoric- aroney™ egg breakfast deal.
C-Shaft: Biggest surprise here is that he hasn’t belted it with his leaf blower yet.
DT: The drug runner is nicknamed “Lucky” because Dick dragged him in for questioning instead of pushing him off the top of a 20 story building.
Dustin: These two are Walt and Connie Duncan without the personality. No, actually they’re Frank and Nancy DeGroot with even less personality. So yes, they are very fortunate to be at or near the center of their own strip.
GT: If you haven’t heard Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” with an ecstatic clarinet solo have you really heard it at all?
JP: Self-evidently, Emil means that he and his girlfriend tried to have sex in all those movie locations, and are consequently now banned for life from ever shooting location for Public Enemies.
Luann: Copyright number aside this appears to be from a significant number of years in the past, before Luann’s grandma left over creative differences.
MW: Sunny’s vocabulary is limited to “love toe-BEE” and “ha ha ha.” By parrot standards he’s very special needs.
Phantom: And then after five solid minutes of hysterical laughter, “No, but seriously, how many Jungle Patrol troopers are really here?”
SFx: Apparently the twins could have forever stymied Slylock by wearing jackets. It’s sort of comforting to know that there are still dumb vaguely-human criminals in the world.
Pluggers-If only turkey was sold year round precut for sandwiches.
@The Rambling Otter: Oooh thanks!
@Guillermo el chiclero: Thank you!!
Those spoiled Weirdly Twins! Doubling their pleasure,doubling their fun, secure in the knowledge that the Weirdly Gum™ Fortune will buy their way out of trouble once again!
@Guillermo el chiclero: I’ll do more research on “Suspense” and “A voice in the night”
Again, thank you so much ^^
@Artist formerly known as Ben: MW: Sunny’s vocabulary is limited to “love toe-BEE” and “ha ha ha.”
____________________________________________________________________________________
Can a parrot have a foot fetish?
The Familliar Mucus: The turkey will give you a real cool toy…A wishbone, you can use it to wish for brains that work.
@Guillermo el chiclero: I found it on Youtube, showed it to my Mom.
She recognized it ^^
I didn’t realize it was such a well known story, that’s cool.
@The Rambling Otter: #131: You’re welcome. It was eating at me so I had to go find it. Once I found out that Matango: AKA Attack of the Mushroom People was based on the short story A Voice in the Night I just looked that up and under previous adaptations there it was.
Don’t Flash Gordon! presents the weirdest Snickers™ commercial ever.
@GarrisonSkunk: Be careful, or you just might get an answer.
Late Thread Cuisine: Another “what the hell were they thinking” recipe.
@Liam:
Turkeys! Comparing mildew-thin deli slices of cold meat with quarter -inch slices just roasted chicken his morning? And with no stuffing and cranberries!
Congrats to Mudge who also knows birds have little hairs under their feathers. At least poultry does. After you chop off head, plunge body in hot water, yank out feathers, you must burn off the little hairs before disemboweling. Poultry farmimg is not for the squeamish.
@Guillermo el chiclero: The William Hope Hodgson story? No kidding. Excellent weird tale.
I saw Mushroom People on a Saturday afternoon creature feature when I was a kid, but that was years before I read the story.
@137 Baja Gaijin:
What th’ hell were they thinkin’?!
Oh, you already said that.
But really, what th’ hell were they thinkin’?!
@Baja Gaijin:
Did someone set out to make stuffed cabbage but forgot they didn’t have cabbage and said, “Hmmm cauliflower is related to the cabbage. Close enough!” Otherwise, this looks like way too much extra work to make on purpose.
@Guillermo el chiclero:
Don’t get them started on that filthy jezebel Laura Petrie.
@141 Anonymous:
I think a student in a culinary school was given an assignment of creating a meal no one had done before and came up with that.
@Ukulele Ike: Hodgson wrote stuff that didn’t resemble anybody else’s. My favourite is The House on the Borderland. (Made into a pretty good CGI animated movie a few years ago.)
@26 Charterstone: Dune: on Alice: I hope to be upwind of Alice’s place about 8 hours after Thanksgiving Dinner. Her meal choices are going to create a toxic gas cloud reminiscent of Bhopal. (Too soon?)
@50 richardf8: Pluggers have “endearing charms”? I know they have charms. Lucky Charms. For breakfast and often midnight snacks.
@53 TheDiva: To be honest, it’s “Pluggers drop spare washers in the Salvation Army bucket” or “Pluggers bring couple of dented, rusting, leaking cans of canned cream possums to the church food drive.”
@88 Ukulele Ike: I didn’t see that last line coming. Ha ha!
@111 Hannibal’s Lectern: Hmmm…
@112 Guillermo el chiclero: on Pluggers: No, no he doesn’t know you can buy sliced turkey all year round. He’s a plugger.
@117 Rube: Preach it, barrister brother!
@125 GarrisonSkunk: Damnit! Now I have to find another Late Thread Cuisine for tomorrowthread.
@126 Artist formerly known as Ben: on Mary Worth: “By parrot standards he’s very special needs.” Like Toby, like parrot.
@142 Artist formerly known as Ben: “…that filthy jezebel Laura Petrie.” Which explains why “The Dick Van Dyke Show” continues to run on TV a half a century after it went off the air.
@140 Sequitur: I would normally say something about the drugs being good in the late 60’s when the recipe was printed but this card was printed in 1984. Maybe all the hairspray women used to keep their hair big has clogged everyone’s brains?
@141 Anonymous: Look at the recipe “tip”: A straight-sided soufflé dish, glass or ceramic, is the ideal baking dish for this meatloaf. A glass dish? So that people can see the monstrosity before being threatened with eating it? Oh yeah, that’s a winning idea.
@143 Sequitur: I’ll bet someone served this recipe to soft drink executives right before they released “New Coke.” And the computer executives before they thought the IBM PC jr. was good idea.
@The Rambling Otter: #133: You showed it to your mom? If she has nightmares tonight don’t blame me.
DtM: Arrrrrrgh, it kinda looks like Joey is bigger and taller than Dennis. The shitting angle is bad enough, but this is too much.
Dustin: Jeez, Helen. Your husband doesn’t give a shit about his own children. Do you think he gives a rat’s ass about starving children in other countries?
@Sequitur: It really does look like a recipe someone made up on a dare, or a bet as to whether or not they could get it published.
MT: Per the “fresh pork chops” yesterday, Mark, you should think twice. One reason the feral hog problem hasn’t been solved via mass supermarket sales is because feral hogs are really good at carrying human-shared diseases. Feral-hog-butchering must be done very carefully lest hog fluids transmit brucellosis, leptospirosis, tularemia, trichinellosis, etc. etc. And the meat needs to be cooked to 160 F to be safe. Do ya think Tess and Jess give a flying ferk about that, Mark? Good luck, hope you’ve got health insurance.
@Ukulele Ike: #139: Saturday afternoon? That must’ve been Superhost.
@Baja Gaijin: People were doing drugs in 1984, of course. We saw that in THE BIG CHILL. I myself did not personally know anyone who was smoking the evil weed in that year [cough]. But the smoking was happening in Iowa, and I had a friend who was entering recipe contests for the money, and Iowa livestock commodity organizations could be generous recipe-contest sponsors when the contests focused on creative ways to use meat, and the Meredith Corporation was headquartered in Iowa back then and was looking for recipes and publishing lots of cookbooks and BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS recipes and special recipe magazines, and the Iowa State Fair had meat-recipe contests, and frankly, [stares at the photo again] those realities might account for this.
@Poteet: They really need to import Obélix for a bit, he’d eat through the boar population in a few feasts.
@Baja Gaijin: Looks like a specimen bowl holding a dissected brain.
@Poteet:
Oddly, weed did NOT improve The Big Chill. And weed Stargate good!
@Baja Gaijin:
Ever wanted to eat the forest from Fellowship? Now you can!
@Baja Gaijin: Re The Dick Van Dyke Show: The jokes and characterization are rock solid. That might help too.
@Guillermo el chiclero: I brainfarted. I thought being a thing that happened when she was a kid, she being a grown adult now wouldn’t find it scary anymore.
She was a little creeped out but nothing worse than that, thankfully.
@Artist formerly known as Ben: I saw it recently, he went to his son’s school to talk about what he did for a living. That 10 minutes was not only awesome and hilarious but all you would ever need to know about Dick Van Dyke is that scene in a nutshell.
I baked a Blueberry pie and mixed berry pie the other day, but I apologize that I wasn’t thinking and forgot to take photos of them to share with you guys.
@TheDiva: #54: There’s a reason Nancy won’t let her work in the family-owned restaurant.
@Artist formerly known as Ben: #161: And not a single “Three’s Company” plot ever.
@The Rambling Otter: #164: I baked my turkey breast side down so the juices from the dark meat run down and baste the white meat. No more dried white meat this time. In fact, it makes the breast meat taste more like capon.
@Guillermo el chiclero: I saw it at an acquaintance’s on the shore outside Sandusky (parents had a summer place near Cedar Point). So it may have been a Toledo station.
I just watched the 1957 Suspicion episode of “Voice.” Not too impressed as to level of “nightmare fuel.” Barbara Rush was pretty, though.
@Sequitur: #115-” And you wonder why Auggie doesn’t get laid? He seems to always have papers to grade!”