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Wow! I go away for a few days to spend a little quality time with my mom and now I’ve sat down to do some bloggy stuff and found that you guys have made … some comments. A lot of comments. An extra large number of very funny comments.

I bow down to your comics obsessiveness. I was going to skip over the days I flaked out on, but now I see that you all deserve better than that. Thus, today I offer you quick takes on the weekend’s strips just past.

Judge Parker, 8/11/06

As has been widely noted, the new Judge Parker artist, after a very strong start, seemed to suddenly come to the totally understandable conclusion of “Holy crap, this is Judge Parker, why the hell am I putting any work into it?”, and the quality of the lettering and, to a lesser extent, art suddenly declined. It’s still an improvement over the previous artist, who made everyone look vaguely like one another and not-so-vaguely like monkeys. He also deserves kudos for making Horace look at least quasi-human. For your reference, here’s old-artist Horace:

Yeesh.

By the way, if the phrase “more than just a business relationship” doesn’t make your gaydar ping just a little, then you and I have very different agendas in reading Judge Parker, my friend. It adds a particularly twisted twist to Horace’s desperate attempt to get randy young Randy married off to somebody — anybody — before enduring the public scrutiny of an election.

Mark Trail, 8/11/06

Like any true Mark Trail aficionado, I find this strip totally unrealistic. Everyone knows that Kelly Welly wouldn’t beat around the bush, but would just say “bear penis.”

For Better Or For Worse, 8/12/06

You know, I think this strip is really sweet. I mean, in this go-go, youth-focused world, it’s nice to see a depiction of the sort of gentle, loving, but still very deep intimacy that builds up over the decades of an essentially decent marri… oh, who am I kidding. PLEASE GOD DON’T MAKE ME THINK ABOUT ELLIE AND JOHN DOING IT NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Gil Thorp, 8/12/06

You know, for a strip as manic as Gil Thorp, the wordless final panel here is almost shocking. It really brings home the sad and quiet desperation behind a character who’s usually full of bluster. It almost makes you feel sorr… oh, who am I kidding. WEEP, MOON, WEEP! YOU’RE SCREWED! SOON YOU’LL BE IN THE POORHOUSE! MOO HA HA HA HA HA!

Apartment 3-G, 8/14/06

You know what’s important to creating a storyline about underlying sexual tension? Having it involve at least one character who we might believe to have some sort of inner sexual persona. I’m not sure how either of these sad sacks would react to some sort of potential romantic relationship, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be sexy. Tommie’s look of panic and confusion in the final panel seems about right.

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Garfield and For Better Or For Worse, 7/28/06

I know I haven’t really said anything about it, but Garfield has had a real actual storyline going on for, like, two weeks or something now, and there are non-Garfield/Jon/Odie characters, and backgrounds other than the featureless void of Jon’s house, and dynamic tension and Jon even kisses a girl! The reason I haven’t said anything about this is that despite what appears to be some sort of real effort to inject some energy into the strip, it’s still excruciatingly lame and not funny. There, I said it. Sorry, Paws, Inc., toilers, but my reaction to this plotline has been a sort of tepid “Huh, that’s weird,” for about three seconds each day, promptly forgotten until the next day’s strip persists with the weirdness.

Meanwhile, much as so many of us love to hate For Better Or For Worse, it still undeniably drives passions. I have to admit rather shamefully that I’ve been totally involved in this week’s horrifying Liz-Anthony meet-cute at the car dealership, and I said a little cheer at Lizardbreath’s thought balloon which I hope — oh dear God of Canada PLEASE — means that she’s afraid of leading him on because she doesn’t want to break his heart again. Let him down easy now, Liz! For his good! For your good! FOR OUR GOOD!

Apartment 3-G, 7/28/06

“Hello! I’m Eric Mills. You know, I’m not the most attractive man in the world, I’m not really much of a dresser, and, let’s be honest, I frankly don’t have a personality that makes up for either of those factors. And yet I get more action than Don Juan and Casanova put together. I bet you’re wondering how I do it! Well, to find out all my secrets, you’ll need to subscribe to my once-a-month series of cassette tapes, Eric Mills Tells You How To Succeed With The Ladies. But let me give you an example of one of my sure-fire techniques now. Let’s say you’re at a party. What you do is, you find a halfway good-looking girl at the bar, and you check out how much she drinks. Does she drink a lot? Is she by herself? You’re in like flynn! The next thing you do is invite her out for lunch — an early lunch, if you can swing it — and get her good and drunk on whatever second-rate hard liquor she seems to like. I’ll tell you, gents, boozy floozies love it when you can remember their drug of choice; if you have to choose between keeping track of their mother’s name or whether they prefer Smirnoff or Absolut, go with the vodka. Anyway, by the end of the lunch, she’ll be way too drunk to go back to work, and as a gentleman you’ll have to walk her back to her apartment, and so … well, if you can’t take it from there, you need more help than I can give you!

“Oh, one more thing. Did I ever mention I’m a hat man? I love me a drunk girl in a hat. Yowza!”

Marvin, 7/28/06

So is this supposed to mean that Ming Ming has taken such a profoundly satisfying dump that she briefly transcended her individual consciousness and glimpsed a higher plane of reality? Or just that she’s pushed a certain amount of excrement “out” of her “body”? Either way, Marvin makes us long for last week, when it was just being racist.

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The good people at InstantSignsOnline.com will let you design your own custom license plate. Faithful reader rata2e received the following gift from her daughter, also a faithful reader:

Isn’t that nice? I love it when families come together to mock the comics.

(By the way, if your tastes run less towards novelty license plates and more towards, say, novelty intimate wear, you can get more “Roadside”-themed items at the Comics Curmudgeon store. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with making your own stuff, but I’m just sayin’ that that’s one place you can get it.)

Also, on the subject of obsessive comics blogs, someone who I believe to be faithful reader and sometime poster Pelagius (correct me if I’m wrong) has started a new obsessive comics blog: What’s so funny? Not golf. It’s dedicated to the numerous unfunny golf jokes that golf-mad comics writers force upon us. Good luck to you, blogger!

Also also, TDIET fans owe it to themselves to check out this hilarious and very, very filthy spoof from Tom McHenry.