Metapost: Mighty comments of the week
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Your comment of the week moment but first: faithful reader/Maryland-area standup/cool guy/personal friend Isaac Hirsch pointed me in the direction of this AMAZING animated Mark Trail GIF. It’s animated, and it takes a minute to get going, but for God’s sake wait for it, because it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.
Are you the anonymous mad genius who made this beautiful thing? If so, please email me at bio at jfruh dot com and let me know so you can get the credit you deserve!
Update: Some light shed on the subject by faithful reader Mathew Walls, aka Something Awful forums user Tiggum and Twitter user @blindomics (please note that if you’re not a registered Something Awful forums user these links will go to a registration page that plays audio):
As far as I’m aware, all that is known about the creator of that gif (other than by the individual themself, obviously) is that they go by R Ubbish on the Something Awful forums, which I believe is where that gif was originally posted. They post only in two threads (the Comic Strip Megathread and the Political Cartoons thread) and never say anything, just post an edited comic and that’s it. They’ve never responded to anything anyone else posts, or given any hint of their identity, but obviously follow the threads regularly as they’re aware of the in-jokes and memes. Any more than this would be wild speculation.
Anyway! This week’s top comment is also super-hilarious, by the way!
“To his credit, Slick Smitty looks so damn happy about everything. I’m not sure if that’s because he’s actually an apple-stealing criminal mastermind, or if his mind has snapped from being the only human in a world of anthro animals. ‘Hey, fox friend!’ he gleefully says to the one animal he sees on a regular basis. ‘Hey! I have apples. My hands are in so much pain!! What are you barking about? Oh, is it time for my mauling? Okay!!! Ha ha painful animal hugs are the only love I know!!'” –Tophat
And the runners up are also hilarious!
“‘It’s a joke!’ ‘No, it’s not. Why would you expect to find a joke in this comic?'” –hogenmogen
“It’s always really interesting to see what they decide to show in this strip. Tommie goes to visit the sights of Italy? Not one panel. Tommie goes to a farm in Pennsylvania? Three months of agonizing, manure-shoveling detail. I don’t know what Margo and Lu Ann are up to in NY at the moment, but it must be something extremely hard to draw.” –pugfuggly
“Mrs. the Menace thinks that if she keeps baking delicious flapjacks, maybe her son will give her nose back. He will not.” –C. Sandy Cyst
“I was sad that I had to wear the same pink turtleneck for mucking out the stables every day for 3 months, until I met a retiring high school English teacher who had to wear the same plaid jacket every day for 30 years.” –seismic-2
“I honestly can’t tell if that‘s supposed to be a lady groundhog or if it’s supposed to be some kind of hip, devil may care groundhog who doesn’t conform to traditional groundhog grooming standards.” –beardiemcwarren
“Oops, got Tommie confused with Tommy. The MW Tommy has a ‘Y’ as in ‘Why are you sitting around all day?’ A3G has an ‘IE’ as in ‘IEEEE! would you please change your clothes and take a bath?’ Now I can keep them straight.” –Kevin on Earth
“My God, isn’t that exactly what all of us imagined a personal trainer in the Funkyverse would look like? The body one needs to smugly look down on the less fit as they fail to live up to their dreams, a facial expression worn down by constant tragedy and depression, and workout attire that’s entirely black so that the work/funeral/work schedule runs more smoothly.” –Alex Blaze
“Down in midtown? Over in downtown? East of the playdowns? No wonder Mary didn’t want to stay in New York, what with its reasonably understandable spatial orientation and everything.” –WeatherServo9
“‘What? I thought you told me to toss the salad.’ That’s the punchline. I mean, I’m not happy about it, I’m not suggesting it makes the comic good, it’s certainly not funny, but, well, we’re all on the same page here, right? With that set up, and with the joke being a pun on ‘toss’ meaning both ‘to mix the ingredients of a salad so as to equally distribute them’ and ‘to deposit in a garbage receptacle,’ that’s the joke. I understand it has its own problems — why would Alice Mitchell ever ask her careless, filth-covered offspring to toss a salad? But, again, I’m not suggesting the joke is perfect, or even good. I’m just acknowledging what we all know to be the truth. That was the joke. ‘What? I thought you told me to toss the salad.’ As it stands, it’s not even a joke. Yes, it’s good fodder for Josh here, it’s even better for our purposes that it has no joke, that it’s just Dennis staring his mother down and he tosses food in the garbage, presumably without permission or in open defiance of authority. But it’s better for us because of how clearly misguided it is. The robot authors of Dennis the Menace (unlike the irony grand-warlocks behind Heathcliff) are not playing along with us here. They just fucked up is all, just flat-out fucked up. And we’re well past the point of just rolling our eyes and moving on. It’s wrong what they’re doing here, it’s immoral. And I don’t know whether the answer is a letter-writing campaign, or a firebombing stint, or whether we just seethe with hatred until the end of our days. I don’t come to you with solutions. But I’m saying, we can’t pretend this didn’t happen. We can’t just sit here and do nothing.” –Vincent Watkins
“What I find to be truly menacing about Dennis is that he doesn’t seem to have a salad bowl that he dumping the salad from. Rather, he seems to have found a hand-held portal connected to a world of infinite salad. ‘The game is up, mother. May this be mechanical or demonic, your trans-dimensional salad preparation days are over. Now you prepare salads like the rest of the mothers in this neighborhood. Then I shall throw those away too, but this time by a physics that is meant to be understood!!'” –Sean Franco
“The logical conclusion of this story line is a succession of ever larger bears being used to scare off the last bear Mark ran into. Eventually, there will have to be some sort of Platonic Uber Bear, an Ursa Major, if you will, which no other bear can surpass. After years of running, Mark will gratefully surrender himself to the sweet release of death. Finally, he can stop running.” –Tori
“The Jungle Patrol must be the strangest paramilitary organization in the world. I would love to hear how they are integrated with the rest of Bangalla’s military institutions and what mechanisms of civilian control and parliamentary oversight they operate under. Maybe the reporter from the last storyline would have done better by writing a story about the chain of command in the Jungle Patrol. Readers of International Geography would have loved it.” –Master Softheart
“She named the mare Mary? Lily should be glad she didn’t get named Fawny, apparently.” –Laura
“‘Then what is she ready for?’ asked Tommie, naively. ‘This,’ said Jack as he leaned in to kiss her on her dry, thin, peach-colored lips. She then backed away awkwardly, pretending to clear her throat, and they went about their work in stony silence. Later, they would have an uncomfortable lunch of tuna sandwiches, skim milk, and soda crackers. THE END.” –Joe Blevins
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