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Getting the comment of the week out early, y’all, so I can spend the day celebrating the independence of USA America! WOOO!

“I kinda want to tag whatever Ohio town Westview is supposed to be with ‘LISA LIVES!?’ and perhaps ‘¡¿VIVA LA LISA!?'” –Voyage of the Oversnark

And let’s set off some fireworks for the runners up, who are also very funny!

“Figures that in Id, PETA is more active than Amnesty International.” –Marcus Theory

“I don’t think those are ice chips Mary is adding. I think they’re communion wafers, and she wants to see if the little prophetess Olive bursts into flames when she consumes them.” –Fritz G

“Lust for Lisa is it? Apparently the term ‘cancer porn’ is going to become a whole lot more literal than anyone here ever imagined.” –dmsilev

“My favorite, favorite thing about the Mrs. Pierpont revelation is that it’s happening in the throwaway panels in a Sunday strip. I have a new dream where all of the crime stuff happens in Sunday throwaway panels, gradually leading up to Mrs. Lanning getting gunned down in a warehouse on some random Wednesday, after months of foreshadowing in the two panels per week that a huge chunk of the readership doesn’t even know exists.” –Roto13

“The Cinemax-esque name Lust for Lisa may seem like a dopey joke about Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy, but it’s actually a brilliant illustration of how the humanity of the Funkyverse has diverged from our own. Freud posited that human psychology is formed from two equal but opposing drives: Eros, the drive for life and sex, and Thanatos, the drive for death and self-destruction. In the Funkyverse, however, Thanatos clearly conquered and absorbed Eros long ago, leaving a human race for which lust is inexorably linked to misery and death. That’s why the story of a woman’s lingering death of cancer has a porn title: for this sad alternate humanity, cancer is the only porn they have.” –MisterMahan

Judge Parker: “The narration box suggests that Sam getting the mail is exciting; I respectfully disagree.” –Master Softheart

“No shoes, no service! Get out, by order of the Health Department! Of course, feel free to crap where ever you are.” –hogenmogen

“In the competitive field of slut-shaming, Dennis’ mere words are no match for Margaret’s glare of pure, unadulterated contempt. I assume she’s wearing a black ribbon to show that she’s in mourning for the innocence of the world which is now lost through the wanton behavior of Joey’s dog.” –Joe Blevins

Mary Worth: “Olive’s parents are so wrapped up in each other, they’re totally ignoring her Wednesday Addams cosplay. They should understand she can’t go swimming without a proper black Victorian bathing suit.” –batgirl

“Lisa doesn’t really live, per se, in the rewrite. We’ve decided to go the horror route. Les and Miguel rush forward to greet her, she opens her parched lips and moans ‘caaaaaaaancer.’ Then it’s all fake blood and practical effects involving pig guts from that point on.” –Voshkod

“Apparently pluggers’ favorite musicians also don’t include bands from the 60s who remain popular today, such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or The Who. Are they … hipsters?” –Chyron HR

“Ha ha! The Keane kids are so used to the surveillance state that they just assume that anytime a cat does something funny somewhere in America, the NSA just uploads the footage automatically.” –pugfuggly

“Don’t give up on your dream of YouTube fame so easily. Just this very day, newspapers around the country are publishing a comic strip about a bunch of kids watching a cat in an empty room. So anything is possible!” –Nekrotzar

Thanks to everyone who put some scratch in my tip jar! If you’d like to buy advertising on the site, you can do so on a CPM basis through BuySellAds. To find out more, you can go to my BuySellAds page or just click here.

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One of the fun things about going over my blog history is seeing just how incredibly long it’s taken some plot points to play out. For instance: Judge Parker Senior’s awful unreadable book that everyone loves for some reason? That’s been a plot point in one way or another since 2008! In the first major plotline involving this cursèd tome, Sam was sent to nail down the ludicrous book advance a Parker deserves; he was in the middle of doing just that out on the golf course when his negotiating rival was gunned down by a sniper. The whole thing ended, as you might expect, with Sam standing by stone-faced while a SWAT team unleashed a hail of automatic weapons fire onto murderous, knife-wielding stripper named “Dixie Julep”.

Mary Worth spent the summer of 2009 trying her best to prevent a forbidden love between neglected wife Delilah and Charterstone resident lech Charlie. Despite Mary’s best efforts to physically separate them, Delilah only turned away from the road to harlotry when she saw the hellscape that was Charlie’s bachelor pad.

But my personal favorite plot of this year was a weird, rambling Mark Trail story where one of the weird but virtuous backwoods families Mark is friends with for some reason decided to call our hero in to take care of a problem with the local water table, somehow. The little girl in this family had a pet raccoon named Sneaky, and Mark shook its hand even though he was told up front that it was a filthy little criminal.

The lady in charge of the company draining the swamp met Sneaky too! Doesn’t he look adorable? Doesn’t he look not at all rabid or like he’s just thinking about biting you all the time?

Sneaky later escaped (to the extent that a wild animal leaving a house and going back into the woods can really be construed as “escaping”) and was eventually captured by a band of sinister backwoods folk who ran an illicit dog vs. raccoon fighting ring. There was log-chaining involved.

Mark intervened with both his fists and some opinions about the legality of the whole scene.

This was, hilariously, local front page news, and the raccoon fightmaster, who was named “Rabbit,” was hired by sinister corporate interests to run Mark out of town. This failed, obviously, though Andy the dog did have to lick Mark free from some kidnappers. In the end, water was restored to the swamp, and Sneaky was free … free to plot against us. He’s still plotting today. They say in the night you can hear his sinister chittering.

Anniversaposts will return on Monday! Stay tuned for a review of year six of this blog, which I dubbed “The Year of the Bastard” for reasons that will become delightfully apparent.

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Ugggh, everybody, much as sorting through all these plots has been a genuine joy of (re)discovery, it’s also meant some hard choices, and in going back over the 2007-08 blog year, I had an extremely hard time even cutting things back to a winner and three runners up. I could not ignore, for instance, the time that Mary Worth’s boyfriend Jeff’s son Drew “Dr. McHottie” Corey tried to simultaneously romance Wilbur’s daughter Dawn and Mary meddlee Vera, with predictably violent results:

Later, he was forced to admit that Mary and Jeff represented what true love was all about, which, barf.

Over in Gil Thorp, Coach Kaz went on an exciting summer adventure as an undercover detective in the entourage of Gail Martin, the “rock and roll Carole King” and performer of the smash hit “Tarzana Nights.” Kaz punched some dude in the brain and figured out who the rat in Gail’s entourage was (it turned out to be her drummer, aka Burnout Ben Franklin).

And let’s not forget the time that Abbey was secretly fed pot brownies, by her kindly elderly pot-growing next-door neighbors, and then she got super high and she and Sam tried to have sex but she passed out first and this image was involved and it was the worst kind of surreal nightmare.

But when it came to hard-hitting stories about drugs and how they are bad, the winner was definitely Apartment 3-G, which spent much of the year on the saga of Lu Ann’s ne’er-do-well boyfriend Alan, who was addicted to … drugs, of some kind, it was “rock” or “dope” or something, and he got it from “Jones,” his vest-wearing beatnik dealer and eventually tried becoming a dealer himself, but the important thing is that this plot gifted us with some of the dorkiest drug talk ever committed to print. For instance: how does dope make you feel? Does it make you feel super?

How much would you say drugs cost you? Just a part of your paycheck, or most of it, maybe?

When you’re super into dope, are there things other than getting high that you care about?

And, finally, when you’re really worked up about drugs, what is it that can make you calm down?

Alan was eventually gunned down by this crazed bald drug fiend, so, you know, drugs are bad and you should not do them, no matter how sexy Judge Parker makes them seem, the end.