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Mary Worth, 12/4/12

Good news, everybody! One-armed Jim didn’t just happen to wander down to the pier because he cured himself of his deep-rooted psychological problems with sheer willpower. No, he overcame his deep terror of the sea and all it represents (i.e., boat-caused amputation and/or death) especially to see Dawn, and rather than using one of the many communication methods she made available to him, he decided to just lurk down by the water until she showed up, so he could startle and unsettle her. Add this to the “I want to protect/sex you because you look like my dead sister” and “I only like you as a friend, that’s why I’m calling you and texting you and emailing you a zillion times a day” and we know that this relationship can only be healthy from here on in!

Crock, 12/4/12

Well, here you have it: what I’m pretty sure is the first Crock I’ve ever laughed at unironically. Naturally it somehow arrives more than six months after the strip stopped being published, which I don’t understand any more than you do.

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Heathcliff, 12/2/12

Ha, what’s this? Something has gone terribly wrong with the Heathcliff coloring process — and by “terribly wrong” I mean “delightfully right,” obviously. Someone who knows more about this than me should chime in, but I’m guessing what we’re looking at is an image file that only contains some of the Photoshop layers that went into the strip. It’s totally incomprehensible and actually amazingly beautiful, as far as I’m concerned, with the pastel-y vibe and the large, unsettling white spaces on the cat’s faces. This should be hanging up in some little avant garde artspace downtown, but instead it will have probably been “corrected” online to the usual Heathcliff banality by the time you read this.

Mary Worth, 12/2/12

Gosh, whaddya know! Jim’s down at the pier and he’s not panicking or freaking out at all! I guess he managed to cure himself of being a trauma-haunted, semi-delusional control freak with years of therapy with a trained professional by just sucking it up and going down to the pier and realizing it’s not so bad. Problem solved! Now he’s going to point at a bunch of people, just to prove that, despite his missing arm, he can point with the best of them, just like any two-armed man would.

Marmaduke, 12/12/12

Marmaduke didn’t like playing cowboy so much. His task was to send humans down the infinitely deep pit to the hell-dimension that was his awful kingdom, not other dogs. Why did the dogs provoke him? Never again, he thought, as he watched the hat fall downward, ever downward, to the chamber of eternal agony. Never again.

Luann, 12/12/12

Yes, Mr. DeGroot! Burn it. Burn it all! Burn everything down.

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Mary Worth, 11/29/12

You know how you can tell you’re in a good psychology program? When your professor has written all kinds of psychology-y stuff on the whiteboard. “Um, ego, id … crap, what’s the third one? I know there’s a third one. Is it dreams? That doesn’t sound right, but half of every lecture is taken up by dumb nineteen-year-olds asking me to interpret their anxiety and/or sex dreams, so I might as well write that up there. Now, Freud and Jung … which one was played by Viggo Mortensen and which by Michael Fassbender? Gotta remember to look that up later.”

You know how else you can tell you’re in a good psychology program? When your professor’s lecture makes you visualize the angry, controlling, emotionally damaged young man whose romantic feelings you don’t reciprocate and think “I wish I could break down his barriers and make him love me — but only as a friend.”

Archie, 11/29/12

The Western calendar, derived as it is from ancient Roman and Egyptian models and tweaked over the centuries to match our increasingly accurate measurements of the earth’s revolution around the sun, contains months of varying lengths, leap days subject to complex rules, and a weekly cycle that doesn’t match up exactly with either the monthly or yearly cycles. This actually makes writing calendaring code a fairly tricky computer programming problem! Nevertheless, the rules for Thanksgiving are relatively simple — it’s the fourth Thursday in November, not the last Thursday, which means that someone on the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000 programming team seems to have made something of a goof.

Crankshaft, 11/29/12

hate contempt rage bitterness misguided attempts to please a mother who can never feel love HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM ALL OF US IN THE FUNKYVERSE, EVERYBODY