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Gil Thorp, 10/11/08

The only Marty Moon strips I like better than the ones where he passes out drunk in his car are the ones where he’s proven ragingly incompetent at his job. Surely a reporter with years of experience covering high school sports shouldn’t get rattled by some seventeen-year-old’s idea of being a difficult interview, even if he is 6′ 9″? (I note the latter fact because this may be the first strip in weeks in which Jeff Ponczak has appeared and nobody’s mentioned his height.) Anyway, Jeff has made a terrible enemy of Marty Moon, for making him look bad on his crappy public access show that nine people watch! Marty’s vengeance against his many nemeses — Cully Vale, Gil Thorp, that Ben Franklin lookalike golf hustler guy — has generally either backfired hilariously or just gone unnoticed by its intended targets, so hopefully we are in for some wacky hijinks.

Dick Tracy, 10/11/08

The current Dick Tracy plot, involving impractical robots on opposite sides of the law, will be painfully boring until the robots fight, and maybe even then, but today’s strip deserves commentary for two points. One, I am spending way too much mental energy wondering why Dick Tracy’s robot speaks in some kind of vowel-poor version of l33t-speak but the bad guy’s robot doesn’t; and two, “Elsewhere” is possibly the most minimalist and least informative change-of-scene narration box ever deployed in comics, even beating out “In another room.”

Archie, 10/11/08

Is anyone else hypnotized and unsettled by Jughead’s shirt, which offers no explanation as to who or what it’s promoting with its enormous letter “S”? Is it meant to frustrate and ultimately educate the bourgeoisie, who naively expect written text to transmit information of some kind? That explanation would seem to fit in with Jughead’s unexplained transformation from a shiftless high school student to an avant-garde photographer with a major gallery show.

Beetle Bailey, 10/11/08

OK, we get it, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC! There’s nothing in this world you love more than golf. If you had to choose between golf and your family and friends, you’d choose golf without hesitation, since if you show up at the course by yourself they’ll assign you to a foursome, so you technically don’t need them. In fact, as today’s strip shows, you love it so much that you’d rather announce that fact than, say, coming up with one of the seven weekly jokes that basically make up your job.

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Mary Worth, 10/9/08

“Yes, Toby, a, er, colleague! His name is Owen … Owen, er, Blameron. Professor Blameron confided in me that he received an e-mail that offered a surprisingly low price on a number of delectable videos, such as ‘Sexy Scottish Lassies,’ ‘Sorority Girls Can’t Resist An English Prof,’ ‘Younger Woman, Chinbearded Lover’ … well! You get the picture! This Blameron fellow could hardly be expected to resist such an offer, could he? But when the charges that appeared on his card were much higher than advertised, and then the videos never did arrive, I — er, he, I mean, he — eventually came to the conclusion that he’d been had. Sadly, the man was too embarrassed to admit what had happened to his credit card company, and when his credit rating tanked, the only mortgage he was able to afford, despite his respectable position at the top-ranked second-tier school in the University of California system, was on a pathetic one-bedroom apartment in a aesthetically blighted post-war condo complex where fun and joy go to die … where was I? Oh, yes, don’t worry about your little identity theft thing, happens to the best of us. Um, I’ve heard, from my colleague, I should say.”

Archie, 10/9/08

Ha ha, Jughead’s hunger for free hamburgers is so intense that the promise of them grants him superpowers! But Archie had better hope that said powers are only temporary, because when Jughead finds out that there are not, in fact, free burgers on offer, he’s likely to come back to the pool and crack Archie’s skull open like a walnut.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/8/08

Today’s Funky Winkerbean features two creepy middle-aged men talking about buying and selling teenage girls! It’s there to make you say, “Hey, how about another cancer storyline? That would be significantly less disturbing.”

In other news, today’s Medium Large has a special treat for Pluggers fans.

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So, longer, more effusive thanks, plus more info on the phrase “Hot Blogger” and what it means for you, when I do the COTW post tonight, but: a huge THANKS! for Uncle Lumpy’s turn as guest blogger, and an even HUGER THANKS for everyone who gave money to the fund drive. Aw, you guys! You’re the best! Blush, etc.

Anyway, on to Monday’s comics!

Archie, 10/6/08

The AJGLU 3000 may not know much, but it knows this: a couple of old people talking about raising the prices of nitrate-laden cafeteria food isn’t enough to sustain a strip. It also knows that depictions of pretty teenage girls move product. Unfortunately, its grasp of “pretty” is fairly loose, as panel two indicates. Yes, my vacuum-tube-driven friend, large breasts are generally considered attractive on human females, but not when they only emphasize how freakishly tiny the skull of such female is. And even if one has a tiny pinhead perched at the end one’s neck, generally a true nose, rather than some barely visible lump just north of the upper lip, is an important element on a face. Sadly, what we have here is less “easy on the eyes” and more “candidate for the freak show.”

On the other hand, she has distracted me from the terrible punchline.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/6/8

White rural voters are apparently up for grabs in swing states like Virginia and Missouri this year, so here’s a bit of advice for Barack Obama and John McCain: when campaigning in the Blue Ridge Mountains, promise that the perpetrators of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith will be jailed and tried for crimes against humanity. Today’s strip encapsulates a number of this feature’s common tropes about the noble hillbilly — that he is mooch who will ask random strangers for money; that he’s so dumb that he doesn’t immediately recognize someone who’s new in town, despite “town” having a population of roughly 150; that he wears patched shirts and hideous overalls; that he considers “Mistofer” some kind of acceptable form of address — all of which amount to nothing more than slanderous hate speech.

Curtis, 10/6/08

Nothing would have made me happier than if Michelle had on carried her usual contemptuous conversation with Curtis with her clothing going completely unremarked upon. I must admit to being both amused and unsettled by the final panel, though, in which we learn that she’s not wearing a fencing outfit, but a “fencing” outfit.

Momma, 10/6/08

I tried really hard to figure how, or why, this might be about Hillary Clinton and/or Sarah Palin, but then I decided, why bother? Just enjoy a Momma that consists of one dotty old lady saying something inscrutable to another, and not, say, Oedipal horror.