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So ends the Comics Curmudgeon 2008 Fall Fundraiser. A sincere thank you to all the many contributors for your generous donations, and to all our faithful readers for your patience. Ads and fundraisers help keep CC going, but we know it’s not why you’re here. So here’s an extra-large serving of tasty, tasty comics for your Saturday enjoyment!

Mark Trail, 10/4/08

See? See? This is why Little Miss “Daddy Died and Gave Me His Big Ol’ Company” Sue Butler will never break that glass ceiling into the top echelon of rapacious capitalism. You can see it in panel two, where she’s all “Oh, I am in Mortal Danger” and “Oh, I hope some oddly affectless Man of Action with waxy hair hears my anguished cries!” A true Titan of Industry would be thinking, “Hey, this is great! Now we can say we’re draining the wetlands to save the children from gators!”

Oh, and “Go Blue and Orange!”

Gasoline Alley, 10/4/08

Rover’s got potential, though: “Oh, thank Heaven, my benefactor died before he could discover my fraud!” (Let’s not dwell on the fact that if Sultan P. had in fact been trying to install Rover’s invention on a fuel-injected car, he would have discovered the fraud.) But genius inventor or not, I wonder if Rover really has the smarts for the top job — most folks wipe the side of the face on which they’re actually sweating.

Beetle Bailey, 10/4/08

At last, the Beetle Bailey/Marmaduke crossover. This one goes on the fridge!

The Phantom, 10/4/08

Looks like Ghost-Who-Hemmorrhages has a grim mission for Ol’ Doc Poor-but-Noble here. But inquiring minds want to know, what’s Ol’ Doc reading?

Aha! One imagines that entire panel-one bookcase is stuffed with Phantom-related literature like this, this, and this. Probably some correspondence course he’s taking for when he takes over from Stripey in a couple days. NEXT!

Archie, 10/4/08

OMG TEH KIDZ + TEH TECHNOLOGY ROFLMAO!

Archie archivists will note that the child is Leroy, Veronica’s cousin* and, in the comic books and digests, Archie’s tormentor. Of course, the ALGU-3000 knows none of this beyond:

PROCEDURE CHAR_LOC.
Begin.
DISPLAY "Enter location and character.".
ACCEPT Loc.
ACCEPT Char.
PERFORM UNTIL NOT ValidLoc.
EVALUATE TRUE
WHEN Lodge_Mansion DISPLAY "Location is valid."
WHEN Char_Residence DISPLAY "Character residence is valid."
WHEN OTHER DISPLAY "HA HA HA -- O TEH KIDZ!"
END-EVALUATE
END-PERFORM
STOP RUN.

* Update: Not “brother” as originally posted. Thank you, faithful readers!

Sally Forth, 10/4/08

Hey, Sally’s finally ready for her makeover — Let’s help!

1. Lose the jumper
2. Hairstyle, sweetie. For the love of God.
3. [Reader input!]

Apartment 3-G, 10/4/08

So, they’re investigating drug abuse by a dead guy? What’re they gonna do, put him in Hell Jail?

Blondie, 10/4/08

Poor, desperate Blondie’s sexytalk and coy strapslip lure Dagwood into the kitchen, not out of his pyjamas. His bagel-themed pyjamas. I swear she’d have better luck with frickin’ Sam Driver.

Judge Parker, 10/4/08

Well, speak of the devil! Alas, this is all just boring exposition (ha ha!), but lest anyone forget, Abby Spencer is headed to Scottsdale for some damn plot-device horse show. I’m praying her arrival will coincide with writer Woody Wilson’s departure on a long journey, stopping the plot cold and leaving Abby, Heidi, Dixie, and us-y in the strong but supple and surprisingly tender hands of artist Eduardo Barreto. Masterful hands! Maybe a long and fatal journey?

Hey — it’s Broderick Crawford Day! Enjoy!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Hi and Lois, 9/14/08

Here’s a rare case of a Sunday strip being radically altered by the presence or absence of the throwaway panels in the top row of the comic. If, like me as I read my physical dead-tree comic section, you saw the strip beginning with Dot asking Ditto “What do you want to do today?” you get a fairly pedestrian parable about young boredom. But with those first two panels, the strip suddenly stands at one step removed, with Dot setting her Dale Carnegie-like powers of persuasion against Ditto’s persistent and chronic ennui. Dot isn’t trying to have fun with her brother; she’s set herself up in mortal combat with his own shapeless self, trying — and, as you can see by Ditto’s state at the end of the strip, supine and refusing even to move, failing — to mold her brother into a man of some semblance of action.

Crankshaft, 9/14/08

Much as I enjoy the thought of Crankshaft spending a week alone stewing in his own old-man filth, I must object to his barber’s use of the neologism “batching it” in the third panel. I’m assuming the terms derives from the word “bachelor,” but I fear that it may also somehow involve Crankshaft’s batch.

And here’s a couple of amusing out-of-context-panels for you:

Panel from Beetle Bailey, 9/14/08

This is a charming and whimsical scene, as Corporal Yo regresses into nonsense child-talk as he drifts aimlessly through the sky.

Blondie, 9/14/08

This is funny because it makes it look like Dagwood is paying for sex.

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Gil Thorp, 9/1/08

Hey everyone! The incredibly long long boring long non-exciting long story of Elmer appears to have finally ended, with Elmer getting to stay in America because he has a new job doing bilingual outreach for the Kalamazoo Kings, even though it was repeatedly established that Elmer is entirely monolingual. But whatever! Don’t question it, or they’ll drag him back and try to explain away his happy ending some more.

Anyway, it’s September, which means it’s football season, which means that we get to see Matt Rogers and Jeff Ponczak head off to Central City to get a “football physical”, for some reason. Matt and Jeff (which sounds just like Mutt and Jeff — one’s short and one’s tall, get it) are a couple of nattily dressed buds who are no doubt destined to be this strip’s most lovable pair of totally platonic dude friends since Bill Ritter and Stormy Hicks. I’m sure there will be delightful antics, with more hilarious malapropisms from the Widow Ponczak, the batty Bratislavan!

Apartment 3-G and Blondie, 9/1/08

Since the harrowing real-life effects of drug abuse — the violence, the terrible mood swings, the neglect for hygiene and the resulting oozing open sores — are considered too intense to depict on the comics page, there’s only one way left to depict Alan as the desperate addict we all know he is: by establishing via a narration box and dialog that he was asleep in the middle of the afternoon! Damn you, demon dope! (Of course, we can’t actually show him sleeping, as that would be simply too shocking.)

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that I think Dagwood has been a junkie for quite a while now.

Gasoline Alley, 9/1/08

I was going to make fun of Gasoline Alley for taking a day off, but then I realized that the chain link fence depicted here has had more work put into it than a week’s worth of this strip’s usual hillbilly antics.

Pluggers, 9/1/08

You know, if you’ve gotta repeat a joke every four months or so, pluggers ain’t gonna hold it against you or nothin’.