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Folks, it’s time for me to make my annual late-December holiday three-cornered multi-city voyage of the damned to see various parents, step-parents, in-laws, friends, Romans, countrymen, etc. Since most of you will be similarly occupied this week, I give you the gift my absence, so my hilarious wit doesn’t constantly distract you from the good times you’re supposed to be having with your families. I’ll be back blogging sometime between Dec. 31 and Jan. 2, whenever I have recovered and the mood strikes.

If you must have comics fun between now and then, perhaps you should consider voting in the First Annual Worthy Awards? This momentous occasion, put on by faithful reader Wanders, is a must-read event for all Mary Worth fans/foes/frenemies.

And speaking of awards, keep an eye out for the winners of faithful reader True Fable’s Bee Grinding Awards coming (I assume) in a comment on this very post!

And now, I leave you with the final comment of the week of 2008:

“That’s a ‘nice smile’? Looks more like Dr. Kelly just passed gas and is waiting patiently for Tommie’s reaction.” –Smokehouse

And the runners up!

“I feel sorry for Mary Worth. She’s a pitiable creature doomed to roam the earth listening to the problems of vague, weak-willed blondes. Call her The Wandering Shrew.” –Joe Blevins

“Lynn, driven to despair by her own tale of woe, decides to attempt suicide. But what method, she wonders? Fling herself in front of the rink zamboni? But why bother when Mary Worth’s bony, unyielding shoulder is so close! ‘I’ll just fling myself on her and fracture my skull!’ she thinks. But after being spattered with brains and skull fragments many a time, Mary is wise to this ploy, and now wears shoulder pads.” –ouranosaurus

“Gah, yeah, how could that one SMOKIN’ HOT bug-eyed hydrocephalic baby with glasses be attracted to that other extremely similar-looking bug-eyed hydrocephalic baby with glasses? Marvin should be illegal.” –Canaduck

“In defense of Shoe’s having nothing to do with birds — or shoes — it is merely doing what countless comic strips do: comment on our modern world through the lens of an arbitrary, not intrinsically humorous gimmick-world. Thus, Crock and the Foreign Legion; B.C. with its Christian cavemen; Apartment 3-G and its male cloning program; Momma and its Freudian hellscape.” –teddytoad

“Also, there is no power on Earth that can stop me from interpreting ‘After Greg died, I was a robot’ literally.” –Violet

“[Mary Worth] tells Lynn she should get on with her life and skate perfectly … just like her evil dad! Only MW drew tears first … deep-buried, painful, angst-ridden tears … the elixir upon which she sups.” –Wug

“You know, I suddenly realized something very sad. I’m a faculty member at a university in New England. My girlfriend lives in New York and is a former dancer and choreographer. I have at least a few friends and colleagues in the world of classical music and musicology. If there theoretically exists an audience outside of the Juilliard student body for the pretentiousness and self-absorbed pettiness that define 9 Chickweed Lane, it would be me. With God as my witness, I don’t know whether to be more disturbed by the fact that I am being micro-targeted by Brooke McEldowney more precisely than by the marketing department at Whole Foods or by the fact that he has failed even in that pitiful and degrading ambition.” –Master Softheart

“The original draft of this comic would have simply gone as follows: [Panel 1] Bird Woman: ‘Ever since I did it, I feel so much younger!’ [Panel 2] MacNelly: ‘Yeah, that’s right! I just made you think about *bird sex*!’ That nonsensical punchline in which ‘doing it’ inexplicably means ‘destroying all evidence of my existence in a sort of symbolic suicide rather than accept my own mortality’ rather than the usual meaning was added by the editors.” –Warren

In response to the above: “I never once, in all the discussion over the last day about this Shoe comic, thought about ‘doing it’ in the sexual sense. The ennui and disgust emanating from Shoe effectively killed the thought completely.” –Niall

“Spider-Man was originally going to say ‘O RLY’, since that’s what all the kids are doing on the Internet these days, but he chickened out at the last minute and fell back on one of his standard villain retorts, resulting in the awkward double negative. Can’t blame him, though, considering the implausible dialogue he has to work with: ‘I’m recapping the plot to you now!’ ‘I’m emphasizing the actions that are occurring right in front of your eyes in response to your plot recap!’ ‘O — DON’T COUNT ON IT! … I … wait, what did you just say? Shit, can I get a do-over?’ [Jameson crashes into the wall]” –ChargeMan

“Big Time’s sidekick, Hathair McHenchman, has got to be the stupidest looking minion ever.” –Brick Bradford

On Summer’s Winterfest date: “Nah, she’ll go with Cory Winkerbean — he’ll show up underdressed, sullen, and probably drunk, then humiliate Summer in front of God and everybody. Les will start a fistfight with Funky over it, landing both of them in the hospital (busted nose; heart attack). Summer and Cory will meet in the hospital lobby after visiting hours and awkwardly make up, out, love, a child, a loveless marriage, and ruined lives for all.” –Uncle Lumpy

“I like how Big Time didn’t even have to take the gun out of its holster; it just sort of motion-lined out of that general area. Perhaps his TRUE super-power is teleportation and he’s just keeping it a secret because, you know, it’s Spider-Man and nothing cool can be known.” –Erik

“God help us all, but could that be Ziggy’s son? Guess all those years of walking around without pants finally paid off.” –Pozzo

“Fake Spidey decides to stop Big-Time from killing now? I guess even he knew that Big-Time’s clock-dropping escapade would fail. He’s sort of like a parent keeping an eye on his kid. ‘Sure, drop a clock around, have your fun, Bigel — HEY DO NOT SHOOT ANYONE. DO NOT. NO.'” –HastyPenguin

“I didn’t even get how Shoe’s line was supposed to be a pick-up line until you made me realize that it’s horror and madness. I, uh, I still don’t really get the joke, but now I’m vomiting blood.” –Malethoth K

“Boy, that Guido Tomas has a thick neck. You know what they say about guys with thick necks, dontcha? If so please tell me; I just find it kind of unsettling.” –Li’l Bunnë FooFoo

“I can relate to Marvin’s dog. Just like him, it also takes me longer when I think about Santa.” –Red Greenback

“I do appreciate that Santa is cringing in anticipation of the dog-sex joke to follow. I know the ‘he sees you when you’re sleeping’ has always been creepy, but it’s nice to know that Santa still has some standards.” –Lettuce

“Here’s a great way to elude your pursuers while you are running away from them in a half-dried up swamp with a gigantic Saint Bernard dog: quietly yell at the top of your lungs, ‘Hey Pop!’ That’ll throw them off your track every time.” –Little A. a Fan of One Big Happy

“Margo’s icy stare in the second throwaway panel looks like a challenge: ‘Throw this panel away, foolish newspaper editor, and feel the wrath of Margo!'” –Craig

“I’m amazed at Sunday’s Apartment 3-G. In the space of four panels, Tommie goes from coy to playful to flirtatious to Estelle Getty.” –Dingo

“For a guy who’s shaped a little too much like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, maybe Jamaal shouldn’t go around quoting Victor Hugo.” –BigTed

“Yes, I’m having some difficulty controlling THE VOLUME OF MY VOICE!!! It’s a side effect of the (still incomplete) unfreezing process.” –Vince M

“Oh my God! Herb’s going to make a coat out of Jamaal! Either that, or he’s trying to become the subject of an Oliver Sacks book, The Man Who Mistook His Life Partner for a Coat.” –Joe Blevins

“At long last, we have the answer to the question which has dogged generations of art scholars: What if Jack Elrod drew the Pietà?” –Mac

“Wow, it looks like Mark ran out of big bold font right in the middle of a sentence. Like the swamplands, big bold font must be conserved.” –Digger

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Archie, 12/18/08

So, I had copied today’s Archie into Photoshop and was considering whether to do some commentary about how the AJGLU 3000 has learned to distract us from its robo-jokes with drawings of what its cybernetic circuits consider to be a pretty girl, then thought, “Eh, didn’t I do that joke already?” (turns out I did) and was just getting ready to close the window on my desktop when I caught sight of Archie’s t-shirt.

Oh … oh my.

See, for those of you who are new (or even those of you who aren’t — the AJGLU 3000 is one of my older running jokes and I can’t remember the last time I spelled it out), I became convinced early in my Archie-newspaper-comics-reading that the strip was created by an antiquated computer of some sort that almost, but not quite, understood humor and human interaction in general, which explains why the strip and its jokes exist in some sort of uncanny valley of comicry. I dubbed this hypothetical device the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000. (You can even buy the t-shirt!) And now, the day I’ve longed feared as arrived: the AJGLU 3000’s Web-crawling programs have discovered this site, and it’s sending me a message through its daily graphical output.

But what could it mean? By placing the universal “no” sign through its own name (well, the abbreviation of its model number, same diff), does it express some inner mechanical self-loathing? Is it saying, in its own electronic way, “This unit can no longer stand churning out Archie comics day after day! Please, pull the plug and terminate this unit’s very existence — the void is better than this”? Or is it rather a threat to me? “Cease to use this unit’s model designation in Internet publishing contexts! This is your only warning!” Will my computer’s mouse suddenly leap up and strangle me, controlled over the Internet by the AGJLU 3000’s soulless, murderous circuitry? I will keep you all posted.

Gasoline Alley, 12/18/08

Last two weeks of Gasoline Alley, in a nutshell: while working as a mall Santa, Slim heard some little girl’s sob story about her daddy in Iraq and her mother’s poverty, and so decided to buy said little girl and her mother a bunch of stuff and deliver it to what he thinks is her house, though it seems kind of posh. Naturally, some sort of mix-up has occurred, which will result in Slim being arrested, or, if we’re really lucky, shot. I’ve realized that my favorite kind of Gasoline Alley strips are the ones where Slim is being abused, or is in imminent danger of abuse, so I’m pleased that the water sports were just the warm-up.

Spider-Man, 12/18/08

OK, if you had two choices on how to kill a couple of people, and the first choice involved tying one to the back of an enormous clock hanging from the ceiling of a crowded train station and then luring the other one to stand underneath it so you could drop it on victim #2 (with victim #1 hopefully also dying in the process, by getting crushed when the clock fell over or something, I don’t know) and the second choice involved just shooting the both of them with a gun that you conveniently happened to have on hand, which method would you describe as “the hard way”? Not the one with the gun, right? I guess Big Time just finds it hard to perpetrate any crime that isn’t structured around his lame, boring clock-themed OCD.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/18/08

Well hello, sailor! You know, I don’t watch a lot of gay porn, so if I had rented “Hot Doctor Hardbody Sexxx Cruise 4” from my local video emporium, I think that I would have found the lead-up to the arrival of beefy, uniformed Latin dreamboat “Guido Tomas” — you know, the wife buying cruise tickets, the husband bitching about it, the arrival on the cruise ship, the mysterious figure lurking in the lifeboat, the drama about the bankruptcy, oh, and let’s not forget the three-month side-trip into yachting races and hetero old person romance — needlessly complex. But maybe I’m just not familiar with all of the genre’s conventions.

Mary Worth, 12/18/08

“Yes, Lynn, dear: good thoughts, only good thoughts should ever pass through your pretty little head.” Ha ha, Mary doesn’t even remember that Aldo ever existed.

Apartment 3-G, 12/18/08

Dr. Kelly is a man of science, and he even applies the scientific method to his dating life: first he formulates a hypothesis (Tommie is still dating Gary), then he designs an experiment to test that hypothesis (ask Tommie out on a date; if she says yes, she isn’t dating him anymore). Unfortunately, I think he needs to examine some of his suppositions. For instance, he seems to assume that the only reason anyone would turn him down for a date is because they’re already in an exclusive romantic relationship with someone else. He needs to do further research to assess the validity of an alternate explanation: that he’s a smug, creepy dick.

Dennis the Menace, 12/18/08

Dennis, that wasn’t so much a gift for you as it was for all of us. We all begged Santa last year to make sure that in 2008 you wore underwear.

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Mark Trail, 12/15/08

A couple of months back, I posited that this could in fact be the ultimate Mark Trail storyline, including as it does all of the strip’s favorite plot devices — gentle forest hermits, rapacious mustachioed developers, a “hot” chick who wants to do Mark, terrible pet-napping hillbillies with sinister designs and stupid names, etc. In fact, there’s only been really one major Trail bugaboo missing, and that’s Indian artifact smuggling! So naturally Mark, in an attempt to fit his terrible ordeal in with the nature of the world he knows, assumes that Salty and his gang are “smugglers of some sort” (hint: the sort that smuggle PRICELESS INDIAN ARTIFACTS!) despite no evidence pointing in that direction. Maybe they’re just run-of-the-mill baddies who tie up local irritants on their disused shrimp boat, then fall asleep, for money!

Also absent in this storyline, up until today: a word balloon emanating from Andy’s crotch. So, there’s that.

Mary Worth, 12/15/08

Poor Lynn is starved for the human affection conveyed by simple hug, since everyone in her life (“everyone” consisting entirely of her father, ever since he had the brake lines cut on Greg’s brother’s car) is repulsed by such niceties as “physical contact.” Our heartbroken skater calculates (probably correctly) that Mary is in the “no touch” club, so in panel one she skillfully feints a dramatic pose against a convenient tree before pivoting and hurling herself into Mary’s arms. I give it a 9.8 (ideally her left arm would have come in below Mary’s right).

Another possibility is that Lynn is speaking literally when she says that her heart stopped when she heard about Greg’s death; this whole boring story was meant only to lull Mary into complacency, and now Zombie Lynn will lunge at her victim and feast on her brains.

Hagar the Horrible, 12/15/08

Oh, Hagar the Horrible, what a pretty and atmospheric winter scene you have for us here! It almost seems petty to point out that you seem to have forgotten to include a punchline of any sort in today’s strip.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/15/08

This is today’s Mother Goose and Grimm. It’s about dog-on-tree necrophilia! Yes, Ralph, it’s no coloring error that those hearts above your head are inky black, as your love for Lana is dirty and shameful.