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Well, folks, here it is: July 11, 2014, ten years to the day from the moment I wrote some not particularly cogent commentary on Non Sequitur, for some reason, and a blog was born. I was 29 years old then, so I’ve been writing this blog for half of my adult life. It’s given me so much, in terms of learning to be funny, and in terms of connecting with other people, and I’ve loved every minute of it. Before I present the best soap plots of the last year, let me recap a few points:

• Despite the valedictory nature of this anniversary celebration I’ve thrown for myself, I am not stopping blogging, as a few worried correspondents have asked. Far from it! I will continue to make jokes about Mary Worth until the newspaper strips, the Internet, or I cease to exist.
• I will, however, be taking the next two weeks off to bask in my own glory, celebrate my 40th birthday next week, and put the finishing touches on my long-overdue novel. Your comments of the week will be up shortly and then you’ll be in the gentle, capable hands of Uncle Lumpy until Monday, July 28th.
• There are major Josh life changes in the offing, though: Amber and I are moving to Los Angeles at the end of August, where I will be attempting to break into comedy writing and performing in as many hopefully paying forms as possible. If you’ve got a yen to work with me, or if you have the inside scoop on a reasonably priced two-bedroom apartment in Silver Lake or thereabouts, drop me a line.

And now, before we hit Blog Year Ten, the top plots of the previous nine years:

1. Tommy the Tweaker
2. Rex and Troy’s Big Gay Golf Game
3. Aldomania
4. Alan the Dope Fiend
5. Sneaky the Raccoon’s Triumph
6. Wilbur’s Illegitimate Not-Son: The Frolicking
7. They Dressed in the Dark
8. Milford Ink
9. Life Is Brutal

What over the past year has been worthy to share the stage with these greats? Well, I was pleased with the first Mark Trail plot of 2014, a test-drive from new Mark Trail scribe James Allen. A pelican leg band led Mark to saintly Jessica the avian biologist and her evil boyfriend Marlin, who was in league with local turtle murderers. Marlin was poaching sea turtle eggs, which is a thing that happens, I guess, which naturally led to fisticuffs. Mark paused the violence long enough to mourn.

Mary Worth briefly left her California home and supposed boyfriend Dr. Jeff to travel to New York City! Ostensibly she was there to see her friend win a major award, but she ended up spending most of the trip hanging out with handsome Broadway legend Ken Kensington, going to art shows and eating thin-crust pizza and other New York stuff. Ken tried to make Mary fall in love with him with his mind powers, and Mary couldn’t help but notice his need for a woman in his life, and also briefly turned into Gollum.

She almost decided to stay, but then nearly got hit by a car, which is as good a reason as any not to dump your boyfriend, I guess.

But I have to say that for Blog Year Ten, my heart has been won over by Judge Parker’s epic, slo-mo tale of love, marriage, screenwriting, and privilege on the high seas and/or in the jungle, which has been happening for literally the entire year. It’s been full of great moments, like: Katherine going bug-eyed with glee as she wins another few thousand dollars to add to the family vault!

April telling her husband-to-be that yeah, she’s going to kill some people if America needs some killing done, so he’d better get used to it!

Judge Parker Senior humiliating some egghead academic who dared to give his terrible, unreadable book a bad review!

Judge Parker Senior making friends with a snake!

The first appearance of April’s dad Abbott, a delightful Hunter S. Thompson lookalike with a pet tarantula!

April’s dowry: some totally illegal diamonds that would get Randy into a bunch of trouble, if it were possible for bad things to ever happen to a Spencer-Driver-Parker!

An assault on Abbott’s jungle compound by his enemies, mere moments after Randy and April’s wedding, much to Judge Parker Senior’s disgust!

April heading out into the jungle in her wedding dress to do what she does best, which is to straight-up gut people like a fish with her huge knife!

Whoops! Don’t worry! The bad guys love Judge Parker Senior’s book! Everybody is saved!

And Randy is justifiably aroused!

Thank you for ten great years, everybody! I feel as rich as a Spencer-Driver-Parker, thanks to all of you. Be nice to Uncle Lumpy and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks!

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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!