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We must begin our review of Blog Year Eight with a discussion of that time one of Rex’s charming drunk old patients died and left Rex all his money. There was a mysterious screenplay-novel hybrid involved, as well as a sexy alcoholic daughter, and it climaxed, naturally, with an ugly scene at a funeral. Honestly, can’t we have one funeral in this town that doesn’t end in drunken violence?

Apparently not! Don’t worry, everything worked out fine, by which I mean that Rex cashed a check.

Judge Parker featured a long, weird storyline in which Sam Driver spent thirty seconds negotiating with Hollywood big-shot Avery Blackstone to get an insanely generous movie deal for Judge Parker Senior’s terrible, unreadable book. This was followed by weeks and weeks of an ill-fated fishing trip, during which they stumbled on a massive marijuana grow operation, whose proprietor eventually captured Avery. This sequence was most notable for intense narrative whiplash: At one point Avery was about to be dismembered by a chainsaw-wielding maniac:

But mere moments later Avery and said maniac were sipping fine scotch and discussing art.

In the end, everything worked out fine, by which I mean that Sam cashed a check.

Apartment 3-G featured the return of beloved ancillary characters Scott Gaines (erstwhile billionaire janitor/Lu Ann fiancé) and his high-powered wife Nina, whose wedding Margo planned. They had decided to have a baby despite Nina’s ambivalence, and Tommie, who had accidentally become a midwife, was in charge! There were some dumb misunderstandings that arose because Margo maybe kissed Scott a little, but eventually they made up and gave birth on their own terms, which is to say in their own apartment, with an inexperienced midwife overseeing a difficult birth. Why didn’t they just call the paramedics to take Nina to the hospital, you might ask, but that would be a pretty stupid question.

But for sheer insanity, it was hard to top Gil Thorp basketball season plot. It all started with this sexy scene:

Yes, Milford had a new tattoo parlor, run by Ransom Hale, who in addition to being very handsome was extremely good at business.

Sounds like a winning marketing strat, Ransom! Milford’s dopey basketball players couldn’t get the Mudlarks’ logo tattooed on themselves fast enough, despite the fact that Coach Kaz has a tattoo and Coach Kaz is in all ways aesthetically embarrassing. Milford Ink also provided nose-piercing services and hot Kiwi accents and bootleg DVDs, which gave Ransom another opportunity to be extremely good at business.

No, wait, that one actually worked:

Anyway, eventually Gil got miffed at all the tattoos adorning his players, did some half-assed psychoanalysis, then used the excuse that one of the underage Mudlarks forged his dad’s signature to get permission to get a tattoo to bust up this little operation. He discovered that Ransom Hale the New Zealander was really Rupert Hall from Dayton, Ohio, but the most shocking revelation was yet to come: those bootleg DVDs? They weren’t bootleg at all. Behold just how amazingly good at business Rupert Hall is:

Man, is that a 100% guaranteed massively lucrative money-making scheme or what? Anyway, Gil successfully shamed this wholly legal small business into shutting down, and its downtown storefront remains empty and a burden on the city’s tax base to this day, the end. Tomorrow, in Blog Year Nine: senility in the squared circle, stripper hotel, and, of course, life’s brutality.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/7/14

The arrival of Loweezy and li’l Bizzy Buzz Buzz at Snuffy’s Den of Bachelor Squalor is such a proudly announced non-sequitur that I immediately assumed Bizzy Buzz Buzz is a beloved recurring character in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, if by “recurring” you mean “hasn’t appeared once in the 10 years I’ve been reading this strip but they’ve been publishing the damn thing since 1919, so who knows.” Some cursory Googling (ha) didn’t bring up any evidence of this, though it did reveal that Bizzy Buzz Buzz was some kind of motorized pen that looked like a bird that was a popular toy in the ’60s and ’70s. By the way, if you’re looking for some super-depressing anecdotes, you could do worse than looking at classic toy discussion forums, apparently:

Funky Winkerbean, 7/7/14

Funky Winkerbean is sadly cutting away from Les’s artistic despair to focus on its suuuuper boring comics collecting plot, but I do like the fact that Holly is giving a shout-out to Crankshaft in the final panel here. “Hey, remember that monstrous old hatebag who used to drive the bus, who made all the stupid puns? Whatever happened to him?” (Spoiler: he’s a vegetative husk in a nursing home, dying unloved and alone).

Judge Parker, 7/7/14

This is all the same stuff from yesterday, which I’m glad about because yesterday I forgot to make a joke about the fact that Neddy is wearing a sleeveless t-shirt that just says “FRANCE” across the front. Do you think she got it in France? Do you think the French make them specifically to sell to Americans, and then laugh and laugh whenever anyone buys one?

Pluggers, 7/7/14

Not sure how many of you have ever clicked on the “MORE” link next to the archive drop-downs at the top of the site. It takes you to the advanced archives page, where you can search the site for posts with specific comics, on specific dates, and with specific keywords. It’s a nice system, built by my fantastic web developer Adam Norwood, and you should use it to your heart’s content, but really I had it set up for my own use. Sometimes I get a little nagging feeling in the back of my mind to the effect of “did I do this joke before?” and the answer is just a search away:

Anyway, feel free to enjoy the joke I wrote on this subject in October of 2012!

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Judge Parker, 7/6/14

Oh boy oh boy, we’ve reached the best part of any Judge Parker storyline: the part where the smug, upper-crust protagonists get paid. Remember last year when Neddy befriended do-gooders Ross and Thalia and also invested in their dubious water filtration scheme, and Ross supposedly got kidnapped in Niger and it looked like maybe it was all a scam, but it turned out it wasn’t and our heroes were able to call in some shadowy black-ops extraction team to save him? Well, Neddy just got her first check for her trouble. Plus interest! Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

Speaking of gettin’ paid, remember how April’s dad Abbott had gone down to his heavily armed Yucatan jungle compound, to die? Well, apparently that’s for suckers, so he’s going to come back to the states and be Judge Parker Senior’s highly paid script consultant/the strip’s wacky neighbor instead. Come on board, Abbott! There’s room on this gravy train for everybody!

Shoe, 7/6/14

A good strategy for writing a comic strip is to take a joke your 10-year-old nephew heard in school, but then have one of your characters describe it, ashen-faced, as a terrible nightmare he had, to emphasize the intrinsic horror of the narrative.

Panel from Spider-Man, 7/6/14

Now that Spider-Man has been displaced from his super-heroic role by Doc Ock, Peter needs to find new employment — so why not as a mashgiach? “Wait, was this cow butchered improperly? My trayf-sense is tingling!”