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Your COTW shortly, but first, a long overdue update to the Comics Curmudgeon Store! Are you too fancy for Hoboken and too hot for church? Why not let everyone know, in t-shirt form?

Oh, wait, did I say “t-shirt form” as if there weren’t other options? As if underwear weren’t available? You’d better believe there’s underwear!

Now that you’re done spending every last cent of your clothing budget on these fine items, I give you … your comment of the week!

“I’d love to see this Spider-Man storyline come to an end with Spidey and the monster learning to communicate, it waving about his elderly, frail aunt and he waving about his television remote. Ultimately, they fall in love.” –Black Drazon

And your runners up! Very funny!

“Damn you, Earth’s core! Damn you to hell!” –True Fable

“Anyway, I read somewhere that a wedding gift should offset the per-head cost of the wedding. Judging by your venue’s drop ceiling, I think this $8 card and envelope should cover it.” –ks

“Do we know the note is from Jill? I was kind of hoping it was from the drug dealers who shot Scott.” –Roktober

“P.S. Mary Worth was nice enough to introduce me to a nice young doctor and we’re moving to Siberia to get married. Do not look for me and I definitely wasn’t murdered. Sincerely, Jill.” –bunivasal

“Of course, the ‘Happy New Year Handshake’ is pretty marketable as well.
And by ‘Happy New Year Handshake,’ I mean the A3G comic panel above, not the sex act.” –Lorne

“The Bora Bora Lagoon Resort on Ventura Blvd in L.A. is probably 30 miles or so from Santa Royale. Mary might even drive the happy couple there, instructing them carefully on contraceptive methods as she does.” –bats :[

“Since we virtually never see anyone in A3G from the waist down, I think it’s pretty safe to say that everyone is probably wearing assless leather chaps.” –Jim North

Big thanks to everyone who put cash in my tip jar! And we must of course give thanks to our advertisers:

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Ziggy, 1/13/11

Ziggy is always hilariously cruel, but I find the cruelty in today’s panel not just hilarious but particularly poignant. Ziggy of all people is being told that his standards are too high? Ziggy, who is poor and hungry, who soils himself on park benches, who gets insulted by random passers by, who’s worth more dead than alive — Ziggy needs to calibrate his expectations for life downward? Is Universal Press Syndicate ready for the waves of suicide that will be set off by a new, even more depressing Ziggy?

Apartment 3-G, 1/13/11

What’s really awkward, of course, is listening to a woman talk all night about her dead fiance, like Trey’s done, and then trying to kiss her. This is true among ordinary humans, anyway, which is why Margo really needs to take the initiative, and capture and enslave her own mates.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/4/11

Some of my comics obsessions — like Margo Magee’s smoldering, angry sexuality, for instance, or Mark Trail’s cheerful, violent autism — are amusing. (I assume you agree because you are after all reading this site.) However, I’m the first to admit that some of my other obsessions are just weird and sad. For instance, I’m kind of fixated on how the economy of Hootin’ Holler, the setting for Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, operates. We see very little by way of economically productive activity; the women engage in some subsistence agriculture, while the men mostly laze about and occasionally steal things. Yet the characters are shown to be at least dimly aware of money as a medium of exchange, and have some access to manufactured goods. How exactly do the inhabitants gain access to this money? Do they export things? If so, what? Chickens? Moonshine? Labor? Do the more industrious Hootin’ Hollerians head down to the flatlands to work in mines or factories for a pittance, saving money by living together in dilapidated shacks and sending cash back home to keep women and layabouts alive?

Today’s strip is particularly interesting from this perspective, as we are shown an intriguing phenomenon that can happen at the fringes of a developed economy. Loweezy is planning on engaging in barter to gain access to medical services, as is traditional in her community; however, instead of trading livestock she raised herself, she uses processed foodstuff that comes from outside the zone of local production, foodstuff that can only be produced by cultures with a much higher level of economic activity than Hootin’ Holler itself can sustain. This demonstrates that a strictly linear model of economic development rarely applies in reality, as not even the poorest and least developed communities exist in total isolation from the outside world.

That having been said, I think we can all agree that this comic would have been better if Loweezy had been offering the doctor butchered pig parts, possibly still dripping gore, especially if the medico’s grin and “gimmie gimmie” gesture remained in place.

Shoe, 1/4/11

Another thing I spend too much time thinking about is the configuration of characters required to set up the jokes in Shoe. I’m assuming that the strip began with the joke, and then two characters were sought out who might plausibly offer each half of it — notorious vice addict Shoe and naive child Skyler, in this case, never mind that generally the two of them have no real reason to interact within the strip. Is Skyler doing a report for school on comparative mammalian locomotion? Does Treetops lack a public library, forcing him to head down to the local newspaper, the one source of knowledge in the town? Don’t these birds have access to the Internet? If not, the Treetops Tattler’s decision to acquire the TreetopsTattler.com domain was extremely ill-conceived.

Herb and Jamaal, 1/4/11

Yes, there’s very little more embarrassing than your mother seeing you naked, and then dragging out the photo albums to show your best friend all the naked pictures of you she still has on hand.

Apartment 3-G, 1/4/11

I’m less surprised that Margo is watching the ball drop alone than I am surprised that she’s watching it on January 4. I guess she recorded it on the TiVo that she’s got hooked up to her 13-inch black-and-white TV.

Curtis, 1/4/11

Not satisfied with ruining Kwanzaa with a depressing tale about unemployment, Curtis has upped its game: our saintly hero asked a magic mouse for world peace, and the mouse responded by wiping out all human life. Ironic genocide is, of course, the best kind of genocide.