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Hey, Uncle Lumpy did a great job filling in and now I’m back, and you know what that means … an extremely late post! More thank yous in the coming-soon comments-of-the-week metapost, but first let’s get Monday’s comics out of the way.

Crankshaft, 4/20/09

So last week it looked like Crankshaft and minor league baseball racial pioneer/fellow old coot Jefferson Jacks were going to talk some sense into a promising young pitcher who was considering using steroids, a plot torn from the headlines of brittle, yellowing newspapers from two or three years ago. I was kind of looking forward to seeing Jacks (who, if I’m not mistaken, was created last year solely to shame this same spoiled pitcher with his tale of racial prejudice overcome) talk about how all these juiced up ’roid cases are ruining the game, which had its glory days defined by a generation of humble, hard-working heroes who were tweaked out of their minds on meth.

However, I hadn’t counted on Crankshaft’s dedication to total authenticity in storytelling. The strip really wants us to understand what it’s like to be yelled at by an angry, loopy octogenarian, and so the dementia-ravaged Jacks loses sight of his original point and instead launches into some insane tale of playing baseball against the nascent Cuban revolutionary government. Soon we will learn that Jacks’ cheating led directly to the overthrow of Batista’s benevolent democracy, or that Castro maintained his iron grip on power over the decades only because he was juiced up, or something similarly bizarre and inappropriate.

Hi and Lois, 4/20/09

Speaking of old people, I’m a bit concerned that the Nostalgia Channel appears to actually be shouting “FATHER KNOWS BEST” at its viewers. I wonder if the channel’s name is to be taken literally, and rather than actually rebroadcasting the shows (the rights to which are expensive), it just features senior citizens reminiscing fondly and overloudly about them. “FATHER KNOWS BEST! Now that was a good show … oh, wait, am I thinking of My Three Sons?”

Apartment 3-G, 4/20/09

You know, being on vacation is fun and all, but I really miss little moments like this. Ha ha, you work that elbow, Tommie! You elbow the hell out of him!

Your boyfriend is totally creepy, though. He’s right about that.

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Far be it from this blog to neglect one of its core missions: monitoring the glacial progress of legacy soap strips, so you don’t have to. Because believe me, you don’t want to! Let’s dive right in:

Apartment 3-G, 4/15/09

In Apartment 3-G, aimless maniac Doc Joe rushes to rekidnap his children after leaving them in Tommie’s care. But Doc Joe is confused: Tommie‘s not the dope — that’s LuAnn! Tommie is the pushover. You’d think somebody who looks like everybody else would see the differences — hell, they’re color-coded for you! At least nobody mixes up Margo. Not more than once, anyway.

As for Tommie’s logic in panels two and three: “Joe will be pleased I’ve surrendered his children to the vicious harpy who calls him a rat and warns me to lock the door. Oh, listen — here he is now!” Ha ha — what a dope!

Mary Worth, 4/15/09

But has there ever been a dope like Adrian? In the space of a few days, she learns some guy she met on a Santa Royale Fan Site:

1. claims to be a victim of identity theft
2. claims to have been bilked by a crooked partner
3. can’t make good on his ostentatious promise to her father
4. claims to have been laid off from his long-time flashy job
5. claims to have a sister in hock to the Mob
6. presses her to wire fifty large to said sister
7. never really had that flashy job anyway.

“B – b – but he calls me ‘Queenie'”!

Judge Parker, 4/15/09

In Judge Parker, we’re spending the week buffing the reputations of Rocky Ledge and Godiva Danube: it’s only Wednesday, and already the couple could elbow aside Venerable John Henry Newman in the canonization line. Good lookers, green energy entrepreneurs, economic saviors of Parkerville, with geeky names, six adopted children, and success in their chosen careers — plus supporters of the troops and plain ol’ rural folk to boot! Farmin’ folk! Boy Howdy!

“Wussat, Bru? Another Nobel Prize? Sheee-it! Whut’s thiss’n for? Litrichur? Bodacious! Cain’t even spell it, and now I are one! Throw it on the dang pile with Peace and Economics, and pop me anuther cold one, woncha darlin’ — NASCAR‘s on!”

Drăguţ vreme, everybody!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Apartment 3-G, 4/9/09

This, combined with this, makes me think that we should add “outfits that people wear while cleaning” to “drug paraphernalia” and “men who don’t look like the two or three dudes that every dude in Apartment 3-G looks like” on the list of things for which the Apartment 3-G team could use some reference photos. My alarm bells are pinging, of course, as to why Ruby might be in desperate and immediate need of some industrial-grade solvent. “Hey, look at that lady over there in that vacant lot! It sure looks like she’s burying someone in a shallow grave and then using some sort of potent cleanser to accelerate the corpse’s decay, doesn’t it? But that can’t be right — nobody dressed like a Colonial Williamsburg re-enactor could possibly be involved in anything shady!”

Family Circus, 4/9/09

I’m all for Billy rotting his mind with comic books, as he’ll clearly never amount to anything anyway, but can’t we expect him to pay attention to the details? As far as I know, Peter Parker doesn’t even have a mother; he was merely created spontaneously when Aunt May and Uncle Ben came down with nephewism, a common affliction in fictional characters. But maybe I’m being too hard on Billy; his larger point — that it would be amusing to see one of Peter’s loved ones beat him to death with a shoe or a rolled-up newspaper — is one that I can heartily endorse.

Mary Worth, 4/9/09

Oh, look, I guess I was wrong: it seems that Ted really is a scammer, and now we’re going to get to watch the Spanish Prisoner con in action, for certain limited definitions of “action.” Meanwhile, I’d just like to offer this bit of advice to noir-aspirant villains everywhere: though it is important to keep your victim in your sexual thrall in order to prevent her from thinking too much about the details of your fraudulent scheme, creepily drawing her onto your lap in public and gently caressing her cheek, all the while telling her how much she reminds you of your sister, is not the best way to go about doing that.

Shoe, 4/9/09

There is exactly one character in Shoe at whose antics I laugh in a non-ironic fashion, and that is Buzz, the elderly dyspeptic bird. Today, he’s spent hours wandering around aimlessly, angry and confused, because he’s old and losing his mind! Ha ha! Oh, I’m going to hell.