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Your COTW in a moment, but first: surely you recall this charming COTW runner up from last week:

“Someone really ought to paint panel 1 of Bobbie and Margo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. They can just paint over whatever’s there now.” –monsieurjohn

Well, faithful reader Brenda Starr Destroyer made that happen. Impressed?

And now, on to the business of the day — the COMMENT OF THE WEEK!

“That look on Sam’s face could be ‘Oh, that’s the guy who’s been nailing my little girl,’ but I prefer to think it’s, ‘A cart? And here I’ve always carried my baggage like a schmo.'” –gleeb

And your funny runners up:

“Don’t listen to her Bobbie! You put that gun down, she will swallow you whole! Like a snake!” –Rantingdude

“Clearly, Billy has decided to start a sandwich collection, and is disappointed to receive one he already has. It’s just like Pokemon cards, only his parents don’t think bread is the work of Satan.” –Andrusi

“The Magee household must have a hell of a thing to witness back in the day since two members of the family ask, ‘What’s going on?’ instead of ‘What’s with the gun?'” –skullcrusherjones

“Billy requires two sandwiches because of the extra stomach in his head.” –Rhekarid

“I love the POV of Gil Thorp’s panel 3. Now we know what the world looks like to Kaz’s left forearm! Hopefully they remember to turn the KazKam off before he hits the men’s room to drain all those lite beers.” –Krazy Kat

“With regard to ‘stepmother,’ I believe the term you’re looking for is ‘evil stepmother.'” –MKH, on the proper description for Bobbie’s relationship to Margo

“It is definitely a mistake to think that Ziggy has ever been within a mile of anything hip enough to be in UrbanDictionary. He’s referring to jacks, which he plays, like the game of life, badly and alone.” –MsMolly

“This is just a rerun of a strip from the 80s, with ‘iTunes’ in place of ‘Pac Man Fever’. And that was just a rerun of a strip from the 60s, with ‘Pac Man Fever’ in place of ‘chlamydia’.” —Chyron HR

“Last time we saw Mark he was in the lake with an overturned canoe after the hairy dudes took a shot at him. Now he is dry, with perfect hair and immaculately ironed clothes. Just more proof Mark is actually made out of plastic. You can also see this because his lips never move. Poor Cherry, I think she thought being married to a tall plastic pillar would be more fun.” –nerowolfgal

“Wow, I never noticed that poor Puddles never made it out of the old Evans drawing style. Puddles is some sort of sad, flabbily drawn, vestigial creature. Whoa … I felt a moment of compassion for him until I remembered that whole Puddles-centric Christmas adventure, where Puddles had thought balloons for what seemed like weeks on end, and romanced some sort of poodley girl dog, and ended up hangin’ with Santa. Fuck you, Puddles.” –Spotted HØrse, Jungle Steed

“Are there actually pluggers in Eugene, Oregon? Or is this ‘Glen Wolfram’ a U of O elitist who said to himself, ‘I dunno, Pluggers something something overeating. Hey, a writing credit’s a writing credit.'” –Artist formerly known as Ben

“The New York Campaign for Cruelty-free Food hung those banners, and ‘Free Pizza!’ is an imperative sentence, calling on the good people of New York to line up, march into Montoni’s, and take action in the name of good pizza. Each misbegotten crime against gastronomy, secured in a well-insulated pizza box, is quietly carried out to the dumpster and compassionately euthanized. Inside the crime scene, or ‘restaurant’, each rescuer is permitted to punch Funky or Les in the face.” –Walker of Dog

“The safeword is ‘Rosebud’ because it’s the last thing you’ll say before you die.” –The TJ

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Ziggy, 4/8/10

Man, I can’t even pretend that I know what the hell Ziggy is talking about here (the way I pretended with yesterday’s Family Circus — it was about Easter eggs, apparently? Ha ha, people eat Easter eggs! Who knew!). As I usually do when I’m confronted with a slang term that I don’t understand and I want a repulsive definition for it that was fabricated by 14-year-olds, I consulted Urban Dictionary. The first definition given there — “the word used to replace ‘share’ in a request to do so with someone” — can’t be right, as Ziggy is a loser with nothing to share with anybody; he even seems to have once again misplaced his recently rediscovered pants! Thus, we’re left with definitions two (“Defecation. Derived from the term number two.”) and three (“Spar’s strong white cider, sold in bottles of 2 litres, originally for 2 pounds, hence the nickname twosies, often abbreviated in writing to ‘zz.'”). These are both strong possibilities, actually; Ziggy’s facial expression, with undereye bags and a crooked half-smile, could be taken as indicating that he’s shat himself, or that he’s drunk in public in the middle of the day on some British cider drink, or that he’s shat himself in public in the middle of the day after getting drunk on some British cider drink.

Gil Thorp, 4/8/10

You know what would actually be pretty great? If, just as Derek “Slim” Chance has discovered that being a teenage alt-country singer in a Central City bar is about a bazillion times cooler than being a pitcher for the Milford Mudlarks, the Gil Thorp comic strip would realize that, just for a few months, following the adventures of non-athletes might be a bazillion times more interesting than watching yet another team of dim jocks try and fail to make the playdowns. Since it’s been widely acknowledged that the last spectacularly awesome Gil Thorp storyline came three summers ago when Kaz punched his way into Gail Martin’s entourage, the reconnection of our be-mulleted hunk with the world of music can’t in any way be a bad thing.

Boding particularly well is Slim’s rhinestone-encrusted, dice-festooned outfit. I know that’s supposed to be cowboy-style fringe hanging off his sleeve in panel one, bit it looks like his arm is just leaving a trail of pure light behind it as it moves, indicating that Slim is truly a magical, transcendent figure, or that Kaz’s acid is finally kicking in.

Apartment 3-G, 4/8/10

I just want to pause briefly in the midst of all this awesomeness (Ha ha, “She won’t dare shoot me!” And look at Margo’s face in the second panel! “Hey, lady, only I get to insult and belittle my father!”) to contemplate the word “stepmother” for a moment. Is this really the right term for the relationship between Margo and Bobbie? I mean, yes, technically Bobbie is a woman who is not Margo’s mother but is married to her father, at least until state of New York or that illegally purchased firearm dissolves that union. But generally the word is reserved for a woman your father marries sometime after you were born and his relationship with your mother dissolves, and not, say, the woman your father was married to when he knocked up the maid, and who raised you as her own, hating you and him and herself all the while. I have no idea what the correct term would be, though, and I’m open to suggestions.

Baldo, 4/8/10

Ooh, Tia Carmen and her supermarket romancer, who normally only interact in soap opera strip art form, are going on a real date! We’ve been shown that he’s apparently gone nuts and bought a wedding ring already, but he may be reconsidering that decision now that she’s shown up for dinner dressed as Cruella de Vil.

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Mary Worth, 4/7/10

Sweet Christ, if the sight of Mary grunting out the words “FINAL PARTING” through clenched teeth as she snips off the head of that flower doesn’t chill you to your very core, then you’re a much, much braver soul than I am. “Why wouldn’t her husband talk? He was quiet! Too quiet! Quiet people get their [snip] fingers [snip] cut [snip] off!”

Apartment 3-G, 4/7/10

For a while now people have been trying to figure out who the least essential person in this storyline is, since he or she will clearly the one who’ll end up on the business end of Bobbie’s gun. Most of the characters in the story are regulars or semi-regulars and it would be shocking to off them — but what if Bobbie plans to end her marriage by shooting herself? Having decided that her pill-addled life isn’t worth living, she can at least feel sure that the ghastly sight of a hallway decorated with her brains will traumatize Martin and Gabriella so much that they’ll never be able feel comfortable together again, knowing the consequences of what they’ve done. What she hadn’t counted on was the presence of Margo, whose inability to feel human emotions will throw a monkey wrench into her melodramatic suicide plans. Who could bear to end it all under Margo’s sneering, disdainful gaze? I’d be too ashamed.

Beetle Bailey, 4/7/10

There’s something about Miss Buxley’s expression in the final panel that I actually find quite poignant. She most definitely did not sign up to participate in the Halftracks’ spectacularly dysfunctional marital dynamic. The general’s ham-handed sexual advances are probably preferable.

Family Circus, 4/7/10

I’m pretty sure the last few Family Circuses have been straight-up re-runs, given some subtle differences in the art, so I’m assuming that this one is from the feature’s brief “experimental” period in the ’70s, when it eschewed jokes and humor of any kind and went for mundane slice-of-life realism. Yup! Egg salad again! Ha ha … huh … eh.

If I had to guess as to what in God’s name this is about, I’d say, based on some kind of half-remembered material floating around in my midbrain, that, back when only men worked and all women stayed home to keep house (i.e., in the ’50s, on television) and wives made their husbands’ lunches before said husbands headed off to the office, there was this cliché/running joke where said husbands would open up said lunches at work and, whaddya know, egg salad again! Isn’t that just like a woman, to make me a lunch that I don’t appreciate! And see, it’s like Billy’s gone into “the office,” which is school, and see, his lunch is … oh, hell, even assuming all these suppositions are true, it still isn’t funny. What I really want to know is this: Billy has a sandwich in his lap. Billy’s friend is holding a sandwich. WHERE THE HELL DID THAT OTHER SANDWICH COME FROM?