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Hey kids! Before we launch into today’s comics, I need to back up a bit, because I didn’t give credit where it was due yesterday. Seems that Monday’s TDIET was submitted by faithful reader Klipper an his wife, better known no doubt as Zoe‘s parents!

They’ll Do It Every Time, 9/24/07

It’s OK, Klipper! You can just get up and change the channels with the little buttons on the TV set itself, you know. No need to cuss. Kudos on the green plaid pants, by the way — most people wouldn’t have the nerve to pull that off.

And now on to today!

Archie, 9/25/07

Ignoring the glaring problem with the dates (perhaps the AJGLU 3000 refuses to embrace the papist conspiracy that is the so-called “Gregorian calendar”?), I am quite pleased by the vision of these four teens lined up at the Learning Bar, each with an iconic symbol of their favorite summer activity, to wit:

• Jughead: Surfing.
• Archie: Naked basketball.
• Betty: Being carried aloft on a litter by a team of manservants, one of whom is extra-hunky and shielding her from the hot sun with a fringed umbrella of the type employed the by the queens of the Orient in days of yore.
• Veronica: Putting on her cleverest disguise and prowling the night as the Black Cat, Riverdale’s greatest — and sexiest — rug thief!

Mary Worth, 9/25/07

“Mary, please don’t say ‘I told you so…'” HA HA HA HA HA HA

Poor Drew! He’s managed to botch relationships with two perfectly nice women, he has to go admit to his father’s awful not-girlfriend that she was right, and if this little couch scene is any indication, he probably just walked in on a little Dr. Jeff-Mary make-out time. So in panel two, he’s responding the only way he knows how: by shrugging the most epic shrug that human shoulders have ever attempted. I mean, look at that thing. He’s even putting his knees into it. He’s going to need some long hours at the chiropractor afterwards, but his form is so perfect, it’ll totally be worth it.

Luann, 9/25/07

Actual, not-made-up discussion my wife and I had last night as we were falling asleep:

Me: Hey, does TJ have a job or anything?

Her: He’s a vest salesman! …no, a vest model.

TJ apparently only uses his snazzy sweater vests as formalwear, though: when he’s cooking for his hard-working man, he wears a more casual black button-up white collared number. Today, Brad suggests that his friend might make some extra money by serving as the firehouse’s sexual plaything, a proposal that’s not being dismissed out of hand. Oh, TJ! You’ll do anything to avoid getting a real job!

Apartment 3-G, 9/25/07

Yeah, you know, “family matters.” Like in junior high, when they separated the boys and the girls and showed them filmstrips about “family matters.”

True Margo-watchers know what that vibrating index finger presages. Eric and Nora need to get down on the floor now and cover their heads with their arms if they want to have any hope of coming out of this with their pretty faces intact.

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Ahh, a new week stretches before us! And what better way to avoid the degradation and sleaze that’s oozed into every corner of American life than to spend a little time with those good, old-fashioned entertainments: the soap opera comic strips! Let’s check out the narration box in today’s Judge Parker! It certainly won’t be a series of thinly veiled innuendos.

Er. Well, uh, how about Mary Worth? The chances of some seemingly random object in the background being carefully placed so that one of the characters will appear to have an enormous erection are pretty slim, right?

Jesus, for once I’m really glad I read this feature in color.

Well, what about Rex Morgan, that handsome, upright representative of all that is good about American manhood?

Wow. I don’t know what that means, but it sounds … it sounds very, very wrong. OK, screw you, soap opera comic strips!

Dick Tracy, 9/24/07

Boy, this sure is an exciting episode in the adventures of America’s toughest crime fighter! There’s something naggingly familiar about it, though…

Dick Tracy, 9/22/07

See, this is another thing that I have grown sort of fascinated with in Dick Tracy. I wouldn’t say I like it per se, but it also doesn’t anger me as much as you might think it would. I’m pretty sure that continuity strips by mandate must include some repeated information for the benefit of those who only tune in every third day or so. You could take the Gil Thorp hackery route and just use this as an excuse to repeat panels from the previous day. Or you could do what Dick Tracy does, which is to recreate the same basic sequence of events that occurred in the previous strip, with all newly drawn panels featuring slightly different dialog and “camera” angles. It gives the strip a dreamlike quality in which the narrative thread slips backwards and forwards in time, sometimes echoing back at us slightly different versions of the same moment for days or even weeks, and sometimes lurching violently forward into action that seems to violate all laws of logic and continuity. In something of a bravura performance, today’s strip actually manages to leave the plot less advanced than it was at the end of Friday; fortunately, the Baron will probably manage to mention sotto voce that he’s already set the fuse for at least two of the next four days.

Dennis the Menace, 9/24/07

Dennis is actually a being a lot more menacing here than you might think at first: he’s essentially telling the good reverend that he’d make a better savior than Jesus. And since the combination of peanut butter, jelly, and fish would taste vile beyond imagining, we get a good look at the sadistic impulses that underlie his fantasies of omnipotence. Imagine the multitude sitting around on the grass, choking down the weird combination of fish and jam and peanut butter, while Dennis the Messiah glares down at them saying, “Whassamatter, you don’t like the feast I’ve prepared for you? Are you a bunch of ingrates?” They’d have no choice but to avoid his gaze and say “It’s good that you did that, Dennis.”

For Better Or For Worse, 9/24/07

Today’s Foob flashback reveals the most harrowing aspect of Grandpa Jim’s stroke-induced aphasia: it renders him incapable of bending his grandchildren to his will with threats of violence, as is his wont.

Pluggers, 9/24/07

Thanks to their court-mandated rehab program, pluggers have had their one pleasure in life taken away from them. Also, they’re badly constipated.

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Mary Worth, 9/23/07

This week’s object lesson in How Not To Dump A Lady has all in all been pretty satisfying. Admittedly, it could have been much more demented, but, seeing as this is Mary Worth, we really ought to be satisfied with a big smack and some pointin’ and quotin’, and Vera angrily driving off in her tiny, tiny magenta car. And of course there’s still more to come in this plot. Maybe Drew will set the next chapter in motion by doing a little thinking as he stares mournfully after Departing Girlfriend #2: “…wait, ‘that kind of drama anymore’? Didn’t she say that all of her drama was with her brother? Hmm, dodged a bullet there, Cory…”

Apartment 3-G, 9/23/07

As Mary Worth’s drama has hit the afterburners, Apartment 3-G has uncharacteristically spun its wheels, running out the clock with stupid dates involving ancillary characters when we all know that the epic Spurned Margo Moment Of Truth is coming eventually. Presumably King Features feared that if both strips were at maximum awesome simultaneously, the comics-reading public wouldn’t be able to handle the excitement. It looks like we won’t have much longer to wait, though: as soon as she determines that one of the voices she hears is Eric’s and the other belongs to a human female, all portions of Margo’s brain will shut down except for the little red throbbing one in the corner marked “KILL”. Nora’s Majestic Noble Tears power will be no match for Margo’s Savage And Repeated Punches To The Face And Throat fighting technique.

And say, let’s check in with today’s out-of-context suggestive Rex Morgan, M.D., panel!

Panel from Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/23/07

Jesus, Rex Morgan, M.D., can’t you at least make this kind of challenging for me?