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Your COTWs (CsOTW? never sure how to pluralize that) coming shortly, but first, a few items of interest! To begin: thanks to many, many tipsters who sent me the link to Bill Watterson’s first interview in more than 20 years. It’s pretty brief, but interesting, and includes this key quote:

It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.

Also! Normally I only post photos of people wearing merchandise from my store, but I genuinely feel a need to give back to all that Mary Worth has done for me over the years, and thus I present to you my first off-store model: faithful reader Rachel in her new Mary Worth t-shirt:

If you haven’t already, you should totally check check the store out! And even if you have, you need to go back, because they aren’t resting on their laurels over there. YOU CAN TOTALLY BUY MARY WORTH VALENTINE’S DAY CARDS YOU GUYS! And if you’re over at CafePress anyway, well, you’ll obviously want to check my store out as well.

Also also! Faithful reader Ed Dravecky recently attended the Dallas Comic Con, where he had this picture snapped with former Judge Parker artist Harold Ledoux:

Back when Mr. Ledoux was drawing this feature, the cast wore baggy, physique-hiding clothing while flirting half-heartedly, and I have to say that if I had met him, the temptation to say something along the lines of “So, the new guy sure likes drawin’ ladies, don’t he?” would have been overpowering. Ed says that Ledoux talked about Sam Driver’s introduction to the strip, which pushed out its title character; the syndicate apparently wanted “somebody who could do some punching,” presumably to compete with Mark Trail’s fisticuff-driven popularity.

And now, without further ado: your comment of the week!

“If Mary-Jane whipped ’em out whenever the storyline got dull, Spider-Man would make Judge Parker look positively Amish.” –commodorejohn

And the also funny runners up!

“Or maybe Family Circus has had a coloring error, and Billy has buried his younger brother in concrete. ‘Mommy’ is no doubt just out of range as well, laughing hysterically at her moron son’s imminent starvation.” –Captain Hammer

“Great Caruso’s ghost! If there’s one strip with more potential than Spider-Man for inaction and inanity, it has to be Spider-Man: Miami.” –Ed Dravecky

“Is … is Dawn going to break up with her father? I could get into this story yet.” –Rita Lake and the Special Goddesses

“MJ’s actually looking pretty ripped herself, albeit only in her left arm. Perhaps the Parker household TV-remote-lifting exercise regimen is finally paying off.” –Dan

“Maybe Pete should go along, in case there’s a production of Nippleless Nippleby.” –Muffaroo

“If the girls in A3G would just stop turning away from the person they’re in the middle of a conversation with, forcing them to violently snap their head backwards when the other person responds to what they just said, they’d save a lot of strain on their necks. I imagine the whole scarf fascination is just to hide the surprise-take stretch marks that all A3G regulars must have by now.” –AndyL

“Well, it could be a boom box. Judging by how that mutant talking camel-thing has a head in place of its left foreleg and a bizarre abdominal protrusion forcing both of its hind legs to its right side, that oddly spherical lump could be anything, really.” –Rhekarid

“And what’s with MJ wasting an entire word balloon on an exclamation point? If the rest of us could actually utter a punctuation mark, there might not be any more wars.” –Mr. Paul Maul

“I hope Wilbur can find one of those newfangled DNA clinics that does cheek-swab testing. Otherwise, he’ll have to decide which of his four hairs he’s willing to sacrifice.” –BigTed

“At last. No longer must I yell ‘Paternity test!’ every time I read MW. Now it’s back to ‘Haircut!'” –Joolz

“By ‘encore’ he means a quick round of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Let all those that bear the kerchief rejoice and let the Gods themselves regret their scarfless immortality tonight!” –lunarhalo

“What is it with Gil Thorp and shiny, shiny floors? I know basketball courts are well-polished, but today’s strip looks like Walt Disney’s Hackneyed Basketball Advice On Ice!” –Patrick

“A plugger’s doc is even less pleased when his patient tries to pay the bill with a mason jar full of pennies, five tattered books of Blue Chip stamps, and a stale Dorito that looks a little like Jesus.” –Mr. E.Z. Mark

“Crankshaft: Pam is just now noticing that her father is an annoying dope who makes the English language cry? Only now? Has she spent the last 20 years on a ketamine high?” –Artist formerly known as Ben

“Also, in spite of having ‘connected on many levels’ with Wilbur, Kurt seems not to be quite connected to himself in panel one, where his torso is improbably shifted to the left of his hips and legs. If he were a horse, he would probably be put down.” –Charterstoned

“Is Sarah still in a car seat? Unless she’s biologically short for her age, in which case I apologize. Maybe I’m still jaded by the time Sam and Abby’s kid went to bed in footie pajamas and woke up as jailbait, but I think it might be time for Sarah’s height to catch up with her college-level elocution.” –Black Drazon

“Any guesses as to why Wilbur has unicorn bookends? My current theory is he’s actually an eight-year-old girl.” –Anonymous

“Dawn: ‘Wilbur! We’re out of Miracle Whip!’ Wilbur: ‘It matters! It matters! Oh, dear Lord, it matters! Quickly, to the BreadMobile!'” -KarMann

“What IS going on with that Family Circus blanket? Did the real-life Keanes just mess up drawing her hands and say, ‘Fuck it, let’s just make her hold some laundry. Chicks do that, right?’ Or is it covering something, like a sculpture or a prize ham that she was about to reveal with a dramatic flourish when she found her children pilfering sweets from the cabinet?” –Revenge of Chesnut

“In many contexts, Wilbur’s statement would be an affirmation of the value of the relationships we create over those which societal convention predetermines for us. In Mary Worth, it probably means he’s afraid of needles.” –perchingpath

“I wonder if Eula would take any comfort in living in the Family Circus, where angels watch over their survivors like giant voyeuristic harpies.” –bunivasal

“No wonder Steve Luhm is poised for a coaching breakthrough; Coach Kaz has been damn scarce since he took on a second job as Randy Parker’s hetero sex-double. Now I’m left to ponder what Marty-Moon-related money hemorrhage caused this temporary drop in finances, one so sharp that he would throw himself willy-nilly into the tit-crazy world of JP.” –rocketbride

“I can’t explain it to you, Dawn. There’s not even room for another ‘we’ in this speech bubble.” –Comics Fan

“I’m going to give the Perfesser the benefit of the doubt and assume that this is just the first day his newspaper will be published entirely in tweet form.” –Naked Bunny with a Whip

“At breakfast, Sam continues to spout racist diatribes against cobbling elves!” –Chyron HR

Big thanks to everyone who put cash in my tip jar! And we must of course give thanks to our advertisers:

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Shoe, 2/1/10

Say what you will about Funky Winkerbean, but at least it’s totally upfront with its non-stop cavalcade of misery. Some strips hide a core of intense gloom that occasionally peeks out from underneath the cheery front end of a gag-a-day strip. Take today’s Shoe, for instance. The Perfesser thought-balloons that “mama said there’d be days like this” as his morning alarm goes off. In other words, he’s already written the day off as terrible in his first few seconds of wakefulness. “Oh, look, I didn’t die painlessly in my sleep. Yep, it looks like it’s gonna be one of those days!”

It’s also possible that the alarm has been going off for hours now, and the Perfesser is simply unable to move close enough to the clock to turn it off, due to some combination of obesity and decrepitude.

Gil Thorp, 2/1/10

Like many an angry, aimless dropout of his generation, Steve Luhm uses sarcasm to get in little digs at his elders that they’re too irony-deficient to catch. “My dad taught me there’s honor in any job if you work at hard at it … even coaching! And you know what’s a good sign that someone’s a hard worker? When they just hand off part of their workload to some other random person at the first opportunity! Anyway, I’ll be sure to thank my dad for that pearl of wisdom.”

Judge Parker, 2/1/10

Speaking of sarcasm, the Judge Parker narration box’s is particularly transparent today. At breakfast, Sam is still talking about Neddy’s live-in boyfriend! Still! The guy just will not shut up about it! Come on, dude, move on into the 21st century with the rest of us, OK?

Curtis, 2/1/10

I admit to being charmed by the enormous unblinking eye on Michelle’s t-shirt today. Curtis’s romantic ardor must be intense indeed, as it would instill a major case of the heebie-jeebies in the soul of a lesser suitor.

Luann, 2/1/10

Wait, they wish they had more time together? Every time we see them in this God-damned strip, they’re endless hashing out the terms of their perfectly gross relationship. Admittedly, each panel featuring Brand and/or Toni is one that doesn’t feature Luann and/or Gunther, but one shouldn’t have to settle for the lesser evil. Why not just retool the strip around Knute, Puddles the dog, Shannon, and Mr. Fogarty, and do everyone a favor?

Mary Worth, 2/1/10

Dear young people everywhere: do not ask either of your parents why he or she cannot forget a past lover unless you want to hear things about his or her past sexytimes that will shake you to your core. Fortunately, Wilbur is such a negative nelly that he goes straight to the arguments while meaningfully adjusting his glasses, though this may only presage tomorrow’s vivid recounting of the mind-blowing post-argument make-up sex. The description will blow Dawn’s socks off, assuming that purple bands of gauze wrapped around the middle of one’s feet can be said to constitute “socks.”

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Apartment 3-G, 1/31/10

Margo has been largely absent from the A3G panels of late, privately mourning the death of her fiance in her own way (which way I assume involves equal parts cocaine and fisticuffs). While Sunday installments of this strip usually just consist of recaps of the previous week’s action, today we at least get a welcome Margo cameo. Her mind clouded by grief and/or drugs, she takes the opportunity to berate Tommie for no good reason, just screaming things at her that may or may not actually be responses to anything Tommie is actually saying.

Meanwhile, Professor Papagoras, realizing the implications of his sexy affair with a pill addict, contemplates two asprin and wonders if they’ll be a gateway to the hard stuff. Will he be on the street in a few weeks, desperately seeking a connection who can supply him with some black market Nuprin?

Mark Trail, 1/31/10

Mark extols the cleverness of the fisher without really dwelling on what its plans for that adorable old porcupine are now that it’s been flipped over on its back. The Wikipedia article on the subject assures us that stories that the fisher will “scoop out [the porcupine’s] belly like a ripe melon” are exaggerated; however, actually observed behavior, in which the fisher kills the porcupine over the course of half an hour by biting it on the face, is no less unsettling. Such a scene would be inappropriate for the Sunday funnies, though it might be amusing to depict Rusty watching on and weeping in terror at the end of the gruesome process.

Judge Parker, 1/31/10

Today’s Judge Parker is pretty much all about fucking! Sam, who lived in sin with Abbey for years before she made an honest man out of him, shows further hypocrisy by fulminating about Neddy’s sexual autonomy while crowing over Rocky and Godiva re-energizing their Hollywood sham marriage out in the guest house’s bed. Meanwhile, Randy Parker has arrived at April’s, for sex. Unfortunately, his disastrous new brush cut and ill-advised decision to pair a brown jacket with a black t-shirt may mitigate against this desired outcome; April is already openly fantasizing that he had decided not to show up.

Panels from Blondie, 1/31/10

Dagwood’s odd gait, with his unnaturally low shin-to-thigh ratio and his knees perpetually bent even in situations where normal people would stand upright, is one of this strip’s most striking artistic conventions. I believe it was a commentor on this blog who suggested that Mr. Dithers at some point had Dagwood’s hamstrings cut to limit his mobility and prevent him from fleeing his sinister employer. However, in this final panel, we see that his unusual leg structure may be an evolutionary adaptation that allows him to sleep comfortably on the family’s too-short couch.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/31/10

The throwaway panels of today’s Snuffy Smith offer an explanation of the strange mixture of modern and archaic that defines the strip’s universe. At some point, perhaps several generations before the action began, the America we know was destroyed in some terrible cataclysm, possibly a nuclear war, leaving behind a ragtag, malnourished group of survivors attempting to rebuild their civilization, using their dim memory of the previous golden age as a guide. The disaster has also left its mark on the language these characters speak; just as the English language changed rapidly in the Middle Ages, when the ruling Norman aristocracy spoke French and English was used only by uneducated peasants, so too have these hardy survivors been too busy over the past decades rebuilding their smashed world to worry about the niceties of a bygone era’s grammatical rules. Thus, it’s not too surprising that the polity just beginning to arise in the aftermath of this destruction has the neologistic name of the “Newnited States”.

In unrelated news, the Smith (or “Smif,” in the new orthography) family gene pool is lousy with criminality.