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I admit to having been slack over the past few days, forcing you to hit Refresh on your browser over and over again, hoping to see a new post here and being mocked by an ad for Comics Curmudgeon tchotchkes. (An offer almost nobody has taken up, incidentally. Come on, don’t you know that everyone will worship you like a new god if you wear a “More zippers, mule!” t-shirt?) To make it up to you, I offer you not one, not two, but three fresh comics for today.

B.C., 2/1/05

I don’t think Jesus likes that punchline very much, Johnny. Also, I don’t really get the grandpa angle of the joke, nor the being-hip angle. If you’re going to set up this joke — and, I need to emphasize, I really don’t think you should — then you could probably find a better way to go about doing it.

Luann, 2/1/05

To my mind, this is the funniest Luann in weeks. It’s also evidence that a strip doesn’t need to have a punchline per se to be funny. Things I like about it: Brad casually saying “Whatev.” (complete with period) while raising one eyebrow, in panel one; T.J. solemnly offering a box of Oreos to Brad’s grave; the poem on Brad’s imaginary tombstone (you probably can’t read it in this graphic, but it reads “Brad DeGroot/ Ran out of luck/ Fell in love/ Forgot to duck); and the fact that T.J. hasn’t felt the need to dress up for his visit to the graveyard.

T.J. appears to have an earing, something I never noticed before. You’ll also notice that he’s entirely mum on the subject of dealing with sexual pressure.

Mark Trail, 2/1/05

Never mind the thrashing around, Mark; maybe you should STOP SHOUTING! I swear, if I were a shark, I’d eat him just to shut him up.

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Faithful readers, the day you’ve been waiting for pretty much your whole lives is here. Now, thanks to the good people at CafePress.com, you can purchase high-quality shirts and mugs with your favorite bizarre and incomprehensible quotes from the daily comics. First up is are t-shirts commemorating the catchphrase that swept the nation after it was bellowed at Margo, Apartment 3-G’s enslaved brunette:

Next are some shirts that salute north-of-the-border jive talk from For Better Or For Worse. If you wear this shirt, your friends and school will know that you’re no foob:

And finally, enjoy a little stimulation with your morning coffee when you drink out of a mug adorned with one of Mark Trail’s pearls of pharmacological wisdom:

Act fast if you like these: since I’m too cheap to upgrade beyond the free version of CafePress.com’s story, I can only have one graphic per type of shirt, so I will probably be rotating in new stuff as it comes up. To see what these images would look like actually on the products themselves (and, of course, to buy said products) just visit the Comics Curmudgeon store at http://www.cafepress.com/joshreads. Remember, every penny of profit goes to help pay for my bandwidth costs, and, if I cover that, to help pay for my sweet, sweet booze.

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Mark Trail, 1/27/05

Obviously I couldn’t let yesterday’s jive-talkin’ For Better Or For Worse go unremarked, but it was actually kind of a tough call, as it’s been quite a fascinating week around the serial comics. In Mary Worth, Dr. Brian’s ex-wife announced her intention of effecting a reconciliation with him by any means necessary, possibly involving somehow conniving him into impregnating her. In Apartment 3-G, Margo stormed out of dinner with FBI Pete after he asked her if she had “personal relationship” (that is, whether she had “gone there”) with her evil captor Mr. Eldon. And in Mark Trail, Birdie whacked Mark in the back of the head with a bottle.

I had always sort of thought that the mountain of circumstantial evidence against Birdie and Barracuda would turn out to be not what it seemed: after all, Birdie loves animals, and Barracuda doesn’t have facial hair, which all seems to point to “good” in the Mark Trail universe. And sure, they seem like nice people: after all, they don’t like turning from drug dealing to murder; they only do it when they have no choice. In an earlier strip this week, they talked about dumping “the body” in the bay, and I thought it would be interesting if every Mark Trail strip for the next three years were just three panels of his waterlogged corpse, decaying imperceptibly day by day until eventually there’s nothing left but a barnacle-encrusted skeleton. But the authorial voice here lets us know that Mark is only unconscious, and to be sure we (and Birdie and Barracuda) should have known that it takes more than a single blow to the head to finish off America’s premier nature journalist/adventurer. I mean, he’s been hit in the head before. Often. The only question left in my mind whether or not we’ll get to see him hit a woman.

I like the pelican close-up in panel two. Of course, random foreground animals are one of Mark Trail’s stocks in trade, but this bird seems to be keeping a beady little eye on things. Maybe Mark’s myriad feathered friends will save him, descending on his drug-dealing enemies and pecking them to death. Then, with an army of killer birds at his back, he will march forth and take over the world! He will rule us all as our king, with a harem of dark-haired women dressed in pink polo shirts, which is how he likes them! I mean, that probably won’t happen, but a guy can dream, can’t he?