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Hi everybody! I am back and EXTREMELY grateful to all of you who gave so generously in the fall fundraiser! Many of you have already received your What Would Margo Do bracelets (I promise a bevy of pics tomorrow), and hopefully the rest will arrive soon; you’ll all be getting email thanks from me as well. And huge thanks go to Uncle Lumpy both for his money-soliciting and comics-mocking prowess, though really he got a reward of his own … with the greatest week in Mary Worth history! Oh, how I envy the man who got first crack at this panel:

Instead, I’m just left with the aftermath:

Mary Worth, 9/27/09

Scott has been shot in violent shoot-out … the best kind, as any aficionado of shoot-outs will tell you. Is he in serious condition, or is he the one who didn’t make it? More importantly, are the seriously wounded cop and the corpse of the other cop just sort of flopping around in the back of this paddy wagon, which appears neither to be an ambulance nor to be staffed by actual paramedics? Will Adrian be able to tell the living from the dead, amid the carnage? STAY TUNED!

Apartment 3-G, 9/27/09

Apartment 3-G, meanwhile, is taking a much sexier path, assuming that you find it sexy when pill fiends offer up their sweet middle-aged bodies to head-shrinking quacks in exchange for pills, which Dr. Papagoras obviously does. Ruby finds the whole thing just plain tawdry, even if it is happening at the Ritz-Carlton, which just goes to show that she’ll never be a real New Yorker.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/27/09

And Rex Morgan managed to combine impending doom and sexytimes with a sly aside out of this bespectacled lothario! “I’m a lover, Becka, not a violent person! Specifically, I’m an extremely skilled lover. Say, you know, I just thought of a clever way we can track down my mother. When I was a teenager, she always had this uncanny knack for coming home right when my girlfriend and I were starting to fool around. What if…” Remember, Becka, it’s not cheating if your husband’s infidelity, or your suspicions thereof, are tearing you up inside!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/27/09

Ha ha, it’s funny because Snuffy is an unletter’d heathen! Wait, those actually are his most appealing qualities.

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Oddly coincident with my stewardship here at The Comics Curmudgeon, the Sunday comics are rolling out their B-Teams. Let’s take a look.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/20/09

OK, Rex Morgan, M.D. usually disappoints by dishing out endless observational chit-chat between Rex and June followed by a lot of talking on phones, and then, once everyone has lost interest, annihilating some minor character in a hail of gunfire or whatnot. Josh cites this as one factor in The Rex Morgan Problem, and I will not say him nay. But here’s a new and disturbing development — after weeks of observational chit-chat between secondary character Becka and assorted walk-ons, one of them (wildlife writer Tim Howard, and there’s fifteen minutes of my life I won’t get back) flies into an incandescent rage over a minor procedural issue in the organization of search parties. By the time we reach the final panel, we envy poor, wet, demented Pearl and Henry (oh God why me), feeling that the story that’s tormented us since June is fresh and new.

Also: “A@#SS“!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/20/09

Passing by the fact that Snuffy is himself a replacement for long-departed Barney Google, what’s with poor Micah? This is the first we hear of him — yet, as the only gainfully-employed resident of Hootin’ Holler, he must’ve been the centerpiece of the Gazette‘s business section for years. I mean, it’s not like violence and murder are going to crowd him out of the paper — the Gazette puts the Police Blotter, casualty list, and obits in agate type behind the classifieds.

Apartment 3-G, 9/20/09

Oh, and here’s Aristotle Papagoras, newly emblondened and ready for his closeup. This charlatan pusher absent-mindedly bilks disease-addled Dr. “Skully” Bryant out of his lucrative Upper East Side psychiatric practice, while thought-babbling obsessively about his junkie skank “patient.” This better end in murder, and I don’t much care who.

Crock, 9/20/09

Yes, for quite a few years now, as a matter of fact!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/13/09

I present to you this Snuffy Smith not because it’s noteworthy (it isn’t) or funny (oh, definitely not) but because it gives me an opportunity to point you in the direction of the puzzlingly detailed Wikipedia article for “Old Time,” which concept our flatland tourister (tourister?) neatly exemplifies. “The archetypical Old Timey costume includes … vertically-striped fabric, straw hats … a vest, and sleeve garters of the type worn in the later half of the 19th century,” says the crowdsourced wisdom of the world’s largest online encyclopedia, and two out of four clearly ain’t bad. The question of why the flatland tourister is dressed all old-timey, when the strip has always at least half-heartedly attempted to pass itself off as taking place in some extremely rustic locale in the present, is perhaps a mystery too profound for Wikipedia to answer.

(And thanks to behind-the-scenes Rifftrax genius Conor Lastowka for pointing me in the direction of this particular bit of Wikiwhimsy.)

Marvin, 9/13/09

Considering the kinds of filth this strip routinely serves up as family entertainment, I’m actually kind of surprised that they’re apparently not allowed to use the word “snot.”

Panel from Mary Worth, 9/13/09

As Detective Hewlett drops his simple frontier bride back off at her rustic farmhouse, let’s take a moment to savor the deliciousness of “Operation H-Town.” I’m going to wager that, contrary to the Chief’s gruff commentary, it will be a party — the kind of party where a certain lovelorn police officer gets killed! Will it be Adrian’s fault, because Scott will be so busy figuring out how to diplomatically tell her that she needs to get a haircut that costs more than $8 for the wedding ceremony that he’ll walk right into an ambush set by crazed smack dealers? Probably!

Panel from Apartment 3-G, 9/13/09

“…and so that’s when I decided that I didn’t love them either! Yes, everyone in the world who had ever or would ever live was now officially my enemy. They’d pay. Oh, they’d pay.”