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Your COTW momentarily, but first: a merch pic! I know I’ve neglected my store of late, but that doesn’t meant that faithful readers have neglected to take the fine products for sale therein on worldwide tours! For instance, here you can see faithful reader LouieLouie wearing her Molly the Bear shirt in Hong Kong. Perhaps the Buddha can help Molly understand that the hostility of others arises from their attachment to worldly things, which gives rise to suffering.

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

“I am really thrown by the implications of Dr. Mike’s ‘It’s great to connect after speaking on the phone.’ Are we to understand from this that at some point Mike and Jenna had a telephone conversation and they didn’t show it to us? Where’s the fire, there, Sparky? So far in 2010 there’s been at least a solid four and a half months of watching people read e-mail, or think about e-mail they’ve recently read.” –Violet

And the runners up! Very funny!

“So what would be the purpose of that Billy the Bookworm outfit, anyway? To make sure kids never want to read a book, ever?” –TinLizzie

“I’d rather just wear wet clothes than whatever that is Gunther has on. Wet clothes will dry, but once you wear a prosthetic penis-suit, you can never un-wear it.” –Darkefang

“If tomorrow is terrified swerving and Friday is the actual impact, Funky Winkerbean is going to die on my 40th birthday. It’s like God just glanced over at me and we locked gazes for a brief moment.” –killercoconut

“It’s called a spider-sense, MJ. Peter doesn’t have a ‘commotion-sense.’ Does this seat recline? Ahh, yes. It does.” –John Snyder

“Today’s Luann is … no, just can’t do it. Every time I try to concentrate on today’s strip enough to snark on it, my nose starts to bleed and I smell burning toast.” –Ed Dravecky

“Peter looks suspiciously blissed out for someone who’s squeezed into economy class and just learned that his wife wants to fuck Iron Man. I’d like to know what drugs he’s on.” –Poteet

“Tom Batiuk has confused Chekhov’s Gun with Orwell’s Boot Stamping on a Human Face — Forever.” –Spunde

“Don’t you pity Margo: her glass is half-empty ’cause she’s drinking from it, candy-ass!” –Uncle Lumpy

“‘Hey mom! I kind of wish I felt more romantic about Gunther.’ (ONE DAY PASSES) ‘Hey mom! I just got to see Gunther naked, and I can’t stop thinking about it.'” –Andy L

“It seems Funky has an iPhone 4! I wonder if he knows he could fix the signal attenuation problem by holding it a little differently — which would set up the next ultra-gloomy plot twist perfectly, as he attempts to pass the time waiting for a rescue by hopping online and staring into Rusty’s terrible, soulless eyes.” –GJ

“Given Dr. Mike’s orange blazer (Go Vols!), Jenna’s smudge-dress (Up yours, Big Dry-cleaning!), and their stilted, inane conversation, it’s impressive that the maitre d’ can maintain his professional, placid expression. But look closely at the firm set of his mouth in the second panel. He’s trying to keep from weeping.” –Walker of Dog

“I really can’t wait until they do the talking heads interviews of Tommie’s friends, and Margo and Lu Ann still are able to make Tommy’s wardrobe nightmares all about them. Lu Ann: ‘I think Tommy needs to start dressing hotter — not like a frigid bitch I know whose name rhymes with cargo.’ Margo: ‘I think Tommy would be better off if she’d steal some of my turtlenecks — like Lu Ann steals boyfriends.'” –LogopolisMike

“The Shoe afterlife is KFC.” –Mac

“I am also disturbed by the message from the Beyond: ‘Bring shorts.’ Not only is his late wife telling him that she is in Heck, she’s telling her husband that he is already damned, too. Sorry, Shoe cartoonist, but in the comics John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination is funny only when linked to Thomas Hobbes’s doctrine of the social contract.” –seismic-2

“I think it’s a Mary Worth rule that the ponytail must be in view at all times, probably as a gender marker so we don’t think that Dr. Orangecrush has a date with Drew Corey in drag.” –bourbon babe, unbuckled

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Apartment 3-G, 6/27/10

Oh my goodness, are Kat and Kitty the mother-daughter hosts of I Dressed In The Dark, the awesomely named reality TV show that Tommie sort of tried out for last year and which we haven’t heard about since? This would be fantastic for any number of reasons, but here are my top two:

• It would mean that Tommie’s big success in off-Broadway musicianship has apparently been a scam orchestrated to get her into this theater so she can be humiliated on national television, and has had nothing to do with her singing talents, which are presumably negligible; and
• She’s about to be lectured on couture by Kat, who appears to be wearing the same kind of ultra-starched white dress shirt, buttoned all the way to the very top, to which Tommie is partial, and by Kitty, who is sporting a hideous black v-neck/suspenders combo.

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/27/10

Am I a terrible urban elitist because I giggled at the thought of poor Rusty and Mark referring to the rather mundane sight of birds flying overhead as a “great experience?” I mean, if you don’t have the Internet, or television, or books, or humans outside of your household to entertain you, then, sure, yeah, I guess you need to go out and look at the sky for entertainment. I still mock, though.

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Gil Thorp, 6/26/10

Ought I apologize to you for keeping you criminally out of the loop on happenings in Gil Thorp? Perhaps! (I’m not going to say that I yearn for the day when a lack of basic knowledge of the current Gil Thorp storyline is an offense punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment, but I’m not going to say I don’t yearn for it either.) Anyway, long story short, Milford sports teams continue to play in the final week of June, long after virtually every school in the country has knocked off for summer vacation, and alt-country sensation/fiery pitcher Slim Chance has made a video for his band, which he’s uploaded to YouTube. And now, in a moment that will change both Slim’s life and the face of popular music forever, some chinbearded dude in Chicago is presumably forwarding said amateur YouTube video to some other dude named “Geoff,” because that, apparently, is how the music industry works, in 2010, chinbearded dudes in hipster glasses just stone cold forwarding YouTube clips to each other, all day, every day.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/26/10

Herb desperately hopes for some unimportant daily minutia to distract his friend from his own thoughts, because those thoughts, as is customary for characters in this strip, inevitably turn to death.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/26/10

You know, I can get away with running gags like “Marmaduke is a demon-beast who eats children and torments his supposed ‘owner,’ who is Hitler,” because I can be pretty sure that, no matter how close the subtext is to the surface, the strip will never actually show a child sliding down the dog’s gullet, or depict Phil giving a rousing speech exhorting the invasion of Poland. But trying to make up exaggerated versions of Funky Winkerbean’s next ultra-gloomy plot twist is a more dangerous game. I swear to you that my Friday proposal that Funky is dead and doesn’t know it was meant entirely in jest, but now … I’m not so sure. Either he really is already a specter, or, as the now-classic YouTube montage “No Signal” teaches us, he’s about to be murdered by an ax-wielding maniac.

Oh, and have we been a little short on Rusty-horror lately?

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/26/10

Rusty does not weep saline tears as the humans do; instead, when sad or overjoyed, he cries tears of melting flesh.