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OK, your comments of the week coming … eventually! But this week I have an unusual number of items to share with you!

First off: if you’ve ever wanted to hear me jaw with Tall Tale Radio podcaster Tom Racine and Sally Forth writer/Medium Large creator Ces Marculiano, well now’s your chance! We take on the hard-hitting questions in the world of comics, such as “If Tommie from Apartment 3-G had an iPod, would that tear a hole in the fabric of space-time?” and “Has Josh ever made Ces cry?” and “Can you you do a successful podcast when one party is standing on the street in Brooklyn talking into his cell phone?” (The answers are probably, yes, and barely, respectively.)

Also! This Marmaduke is presumably burned so deeply in your brain that you probably can’t remember a time when the image didn’t haunt you. But as faithful reader Jake points out, it’s merely another entry in the awful cycle of Marmadukean eternal return. Here’s the strip from April 1, 2009:

“Marmaduke can barely wait a whole year before it decided to just re-hash the same joke,” Jake says. “Don’t ancient strips like these usually take old material from the 50s, and not from twelve months prior? Oh, and it still kind of looks like the owner-man is trying to have sex with Marm. It has simply gotten worse with time. Much, much worse.”

And yet perhaps we are lucky that the Marmaduke creative team has chosen not to go too deep into the archives! After all, their fancy might have settled on this entry, which faithful reader Brian saved when it first ran in the late ’90s for his own inscrutable purposes:

OK, uh, let’s clear that out of our mind, shall we? Today’s Mark Trail features Mark beginning to discuss his overpowering love for canoeing and fly-fishing in blessed motor-free silence. Thus it may come as a shock to learn that in 1971 he served as the narrator for a book offering “tips” on operating the very motorboats whose noise pollution he claims to abhor!

1971 was of course a very different time. Check out Mark, stone-cold smoking a pipe, engaging in a little battery maintenance while a comely swimsuited lass who may or may not be Cherry looks on in obvious arousal. (Mark is ignoring her, proving that 1971 wasn’t that different.)

Curious otters! Jovial portly dudes in inner tubes! Uh, yeah, I have no idea either.

Thanks to faithful reader Randy for this stunning find.

And now, after all that delay: your comment of the week!

“Remember when Mark was going on about finding a solution to this Paradise Lake problem that would make everyone happy? It looks like the ‘everyone’ Mark was referring to is himself and the Justice Twins, Lefty and Righty. I look forward to tomorrow’s episode, when one of the paper-pushing weenies in glasses tries to interrupt Mark to ask a clarifying question about fly fishing and gets an up close and personal meeting with Righty, followed by a closing remark from Lefty. Sit down, geek, a real man’s talking about nature!” –Krazy Kat

And your runners up! Very funny!

“Yes, Roberta used her maiden name: ‘Bobbie.'” –Aesahaettr

“I think that Tobey is actually jealous that Mary is meddling someone else, and is trying to get some attention. ‘Excessive shopping, is that all? Look at me, I don’t even know how to pick up a teacup. See, I’ve dislocated my shoulder and broken several fingers during the attempt! I need your help, Mary. Help ME!'” –peabody

“‘The Professor agreed to keep the police out of the matter.’ Wait, the Professor had to be persuaded? He more than anyone should want the police way the hell up out and away from his little fraud sex dope skank party. Also, the NYPD now takes orders from shrinks? This is Bloomberg again, right?” –Uncle Lumpy

“Martin’s smile is a dazzling mix of Crest, Bobbie’s leftover happy pills, and ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead!’ Ah, the blissful highs of institutionalizing loved ones, ammirite?” –Black Drazon

“Of all the insane depraved mutant animals and plotlines that Mark Trail has put out, a career politician profusely sweating under questioning HAS to be the most absurd and unlikely. The affection between Mark and Cherry is more realistic.” –Pingu

“Too bad the Hitler family does not have a sectional to accommodate the missus in what could have been a menage-a-trois of hellish, poorly-drawn proportions. As it stands, she just has to wait her turn with arms crossed and looking thoroughly bored/disgusted/misshapen.” –Skeltometer

“Confess, Senator! You’ve been illegally trapping spotted owls and turning them into fabulous bow ties.” –One-eyed Wolfdog

“The neat thing about basing a movie on a pre-existing franchise is the knowledge that the franchise brings its own fans, who simultaneous serve as guaranteed seat fillers and unpaid viral promoters. Whoever greenlit the Marmaduke movie apparently didn’t realize that this is not the case with Marmaduke and rushed to correct it by forcing Mr. Anderson to appeal to whatever grim demographic is drawn in by the horror presented today.” –bunivasal

“In Mark Trail news, the Honorable Senator Badguy McSweatballs sure did grab that hanky fast. Where was it, spring-loaded in his sleeve?” –Paddy

“It looks like the Senator’s political career will soon be over. Luckily, he’s already dressed for his next job, Ice Cream Man! ” –Digger

“Oh, that’s rage alright in Funky Winkerbean. Just entirely internalised rage. The kind of rage that smoulders inside you, pulling you tighter and tighter, burning you from the inside out until you’re nothing but an exhausted hollow human-shaped casket full of ashes and despair. (I may have just spoiled the eventual final Funky Winkerbean storyarc.)” –Lolsworth

“Stripey butt is just a random collection of muscles flying a helicopter. It’s like the artist carefully cut out every muscle from several anatomy books and then sprinkled them over a torso-like shape, making a collage of them where they fell. He’s the John Cage of newspaper comics.” –Les of the Jungle Patrol

“I don’t read Funky Winkerbean except when it appears here. It seems like a sitcom with a ‘very special episode’ that just won’t end.” –Dingo, the Essence of Purity and Virtue Incarnate™

“And to think we all scoffed when the FAA had us drill for an attack by a purple-clad ghost flying a helicopter.” –skullcrusherjones

“Good God, I know the despair never really lets up, but this week, FW has been RELENTLESS. Are barbiturates Funky’s ‘secret ingredient’ in his pizza sauce? Well, actually, that doesn’t make sense, since drug-laced pizza would have been a hit in New York (Boom! Fancy city-types are all junkies! I gotta write to Pluggers!).” –bartcow

“Of course, as everyone knows, too-bad-your-crazy-ass-girlfriend-whom-you-unethically-enabled-and-who-nearly-killed-our-friends-and-was-sent-to-a-‘facility’-‘upstate’ sex is the best kind of sex.” –bourbon babe, unbuckled

“School of bad choices: those earrings.” –Cooby

“This does explain why Bonnie doesn’t have the ready cash to tip her stylist, which is an object lesson in itself as we can all see the terrible havoc a pissed-off and resentful hairdresser can wreak on one’s orange helmet-head coiffure.” –curlyfries

“What’s the problem? An addiction to shopping or a morbid obsession with clothing the color of baby shit? Either is bad, but one is worse. ” –Who Is Dick Player?

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

• Neverland: In a shack they call Neverland, two boys learn that all gods demand sacrifice. From NYT bestselling author Douglas Clegg comes a gothic tale of family secrets and games of innocence turned to darkness.

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Funky Winkerbean, 4/21/10

Funky Winkerbean’s trip to New York featured a few moments of publishing hope for long-suffering victim Les (though surely we’ll see those dreams get squashed later), but we’ve quickly moved back to familiar territory: impotent, misplaced rage. Actually, “rage” is the wrong word: the dialogue seems rage-y enough, but the slouchy body language and numb faces denote a total absence of the passion that is rage’s necessary prerequisite. I stand by the impotence, though.

And the misplacement. There are any number of greedy, amoral morons who can be blamed for our current macroeconomic state of affairs; but, assuming that Funky is maundering about the failure of the Montoni’s franchise in New York to take off, I think it’s unlikely that, even in the best of economies, crappy midwestern pizza would have been a big hit in a city well known for its many well-established and much-loved pizza vendors. It’s not like Goldman Sachs was nefariously creating synthetic CDOs based on pizza futures and then betting against them.

Beetle Bailey, 4/21/10

Towards the end of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, God is briefly depicted as an enormous flaming aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The God of Beetle Bailey is much less impressive, consisting merely of the tiny and non-fiery Name of the strip’s creator. Today, God is attempting to make Beetle sound like someone you might actually want to go on a date with, with mixed results.

Mark Trail, 4/21/10

From my long and dedicated observation of the fauna in this strip, I’ve learned that when a senator starts emitting visible sweatballs, he is on the verge of a heart attack. This is a good illustration of the moral difference between our two rival lawmakers: Senator Good Senator only suffered a cardiac event after engaging in righteous fisticuffs with some longhair, while Senator Bad Senator’s heart is going south as soon as he realizes that arrest and/or punching might be in his future.

B.C., 4/21/10

Ha ha! The bird is afraid of being killed and eaten, but the snake thinks that the bird is afraid of being sexually assaulted!

Marmaduke, 4/21/10

Yeah, so, uh, this happened. Let’s never speak of it again, shall we?

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Apartment 3-G, 4/20/10

Oh, goody, Apartment 3-G is revisiting an important plot point from Sunday that I neglected to mention, namely the “private psychiatric facility upstate” into which the so-called “sane” characters in this strip are bamboozling our poor Bobbie. The Professor, of course, was the one who was prescribing pills to Bobbie and screwing her, possibly not in that order, so he’s the most suitable candidate for disposing of her in a way that’s convenient for everyone, without the pesky police getting involved. One wonders who’s paying for this fancy private facility! Martin, with his alimony checks? The Professor, out of guilt? Actually, if my suspicions are correct, it may be the sort of institution where she can earn her keep just like Margo did.

Crock, 4/20/10

Oh, look, Crock is trying to capture that awful yet moving vibe of yesterday’s Hagar the Horrible. Unfortunately, the sort of little grace notes that made that other strip work in spite of itself are wholly missing from this one, and the details that are present are just jarring and wrong (vultures do not have teeth, for instance). But mostly a steaming, bloated corpse being picked apart by a grotesque scavenger bird just doesn’t have the same grim majesty as a good burning at the stake, I’m afraid.

Gil Thorp, 4/20/10

Against all odds and logic, teen alt-country sensation “Slim” Chance has decided to spend his spring afternoons with the losers and yahoos on the Mudlark baseball team, possibly because he hopes to use their pathetic dreams and broken lives as material for his songwriting. He’s already blowing the kids’ minds with his crazy musical stylings; I’m assuming one of the major spring plots will involve his teammates, who have grown up on a diet of the terrible rap-metal, learning about good, wholesome music, like this country standard about adultery and murder.

Marmaduke, 4/20/10

Marmaduke is the last creature one would expect to see engaging in the sort of nonviolent passive resistance that Gandhi and Martin Luther King used to effect social and political change. It’s more likely that he’s hoping to lure unwary passersby close enough for him to kill and eat.

Mary Worth, 4/20/10

Tobey is overjoyed that Mary has at last made another friend, which takes the pressure off her, and is thus trying to minimize any potential flaws Mary might see in her. “Oh, she’s a big shopper? Is that all? That’s no reason why you two shouldn’t be thick as thieves and spend all your free time together. Whoa, is it 1:30 already? Gotta go! Later Mary! Say hi to Bonnie for me!” In panel two her hand is shaking in anticipation of freedom, sweet freedom.