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Your top comments are coming shortly, everyone, but there are some ITEMS to enjoy first! We begin with an EXCITING NEW BLOG PROJECT brought to you by Rifftrax writer Conor Lastowka and yours truly. It’s called “[Citation Needed]” and it consists of hilariously bad prose culled from Wikipedia and other wikis. It’s updated when we feel like it, more or less daily, sometimes several times a day (depending on how much time either or both of us spending “doing research”) and you’ll read it and you’ll love it. Check it out!

Also! Faithful reader Mr.??? has pointed me in the direction of the University of Nebraska’s Government Comics Collection. Find out what foul propaganda Big Government has forced your favorite comics characters to spout! Highlights include Rex Morgan talking to you about your unborn child, Dennis the Menace learning how to kill with poison, Mark Trail fighting to save America’s waters, and Dagwood taking out his workplace frustrations on his family. Don’t miss ’em!

And now, ladies and gentlemen … your COMMENT OF THE WEEK!

“If you look carefully at Zig’s triangle, it’s clear he’s wearing a thong. He is taking baby steps towards pants-wearing — sexy, tiny baby steps.” –Crankenstank

And the runners up! Very funny!

“I remember when I first laid eyes on her. I had been traveling with the Ringling Brothers Side Show as the World’s Most Boring College Student to make a few bucks. The previous Woman with the World’s Longest Neck had just met an untimely and somewhat grisly end in what would become known throughout the circus world as the Ceiling Fan Incident of 1973. Try as we might, we could never make it work. When it ended I actually thought about taking my own life. Sometimes even now I think back and get despondent. But then, I pick myself up, look around and see that I am with you Dawn, here at Charterstone and realize that suicide would just be redundant.” –Uncle Ritzy Fritz

“Is it just me, or is Wilbur actually attempting to retreat into his sweater as if it were a shell?” –Dragon of Life

“OK, I caught the anachronistic phone, desk lamp, and semi-anachronistic file cabinets, but somehow I totally missed that the desk has no computer! This is like a game, really. ‘Spot the 6 differences between this panel and the present.’ Can I count the haircut?” –MaryAnnTheRest

“The presence of the suit can only mean that this ‘Tim Moore’ fellow has a puppy to give away.” –Drew Funk

“I find myself tickled when strip pretends we care about anything than Mark punching things, especially make-believe things like Mark’s popularity.” –Josharella

“I’m curious just how lax the traffic officers or insane the drivers are in order for a pile-up, multiple cars full of commuters slamming end-on-end in one huge orgy of terror and steel, to occur in what sounds like an intersection downtown, where in most cities its impossible to crawl through at 20 miles an hour on a good day. Or why the carpoolers care, as they are currently miles away on a nearly abandoned suburb road heading away from the city. It can’t be because they give a damn about the heartbreak and loss of life. These are the same people who regularly watch goofy-hair there regularly collide with his postman, and presumably laugh and laugh.” –Taquelli

“Is the angle and placement of Leroy’s fork indicative that this encounter is a prelude to another angry session of Lockhorn lovemaking, with Loretta marching off to the bedroom part of the foreplay? Or is sometimes a fork just a fork?” –R and CT

“I just don’t want to share you with anyone else, which is why I’ve taken a firm hold of your face with my teeth.” –TruthOfAngels

“I’m enjoying an audio fantasy of what those 20 words of Mark Trail-ian dialogue sound like through those grimly mashed lips: ‘Iwowaneyemwowwy, wubiswubahdoo!’ ‘Awuswonwannashwahoowihannywonelsh!'” –Mighty Max King

“Well, of course, Wilbur’s schedule for the remainder of this week is completely booked with sandwich + computer + lustful nostalgic daydreaming. Next week is the earliest possible available time for fishing.” –Fountain Mountain Dew

“No, I hate both of you. I mean, ‘fishing.'” –One-eyed Wolfdog

“It’s as if, by pointing to his own eye, Odie hopes to say, ‘Guess what’s even less subtle than winking.'” –JohnsonDelegate

“Is the wife even in a dressing room? The shocked look on that plugger’s face makes me think it is a very, very public place, or that she has mistaken the sitting area near the dressing room as the dressing room. ‘Hurry … Please! The Mall Security is coming!'” –Jackuul

“Oh, come now, we all know lady pluggers don’t have their own credit cards! That’s why Mr. Plugger has to be there, to pay for whatever his wife decides to purchase (with a heavy sigh and a comical roll of the eyes toward heaven, no doubt). There’s nothing in that purse but crumpled-up tissues, a lipstick and a compact, and the latest issue of Women’s Day.” –Mollie

“And let’s not forget the General’s red, irritated, inflamed anus.” –Calico

“I think it says something profound about comics that crazy Bobbie from A3G is holding up a whole page full of swatches of colors and they’re all the exact same shade of yellow.” –Andy L

“You can learn a lot about a man based on the hat he chooses to wear fishing. However, in Kurt’s case, the bridesmaid white pumps tell me that all is not right here.” –Dingo, the Essence of Purity and Virtue Incarnate™

“The desert in Crock is bright yellow because it’s pure sulfur, as they are in Hell.” –DeGroot of All Evil

“I swear to God, if Kurt’s next line is something about how sometimes he doesn’t feel ‘fresh,’ I’m punching this strip in the face.” –Ringo Beaumont III

“‘An uneasy restlessness’ = ‘No matter how well I hide the bodies, someone eventually finds them.'” –TheDiva

Big thanks to everyone who put cash in my tip jar! And we must of course give thanks to our advertisers:

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Apologies to everyone who contributed to the monstrously long holiday thread, but I generally don’t include comments posted in my absence in my considerations for COTW. I was going to give Icepick Jones another week at the top, but there’s been a rash of comments that made me laugh from the last couple of days, most of them Wilbur-related; thus, I give you your comment of the … well, the last 48 hours or so, really:

“I gotta say, most of Wilbur and Kurt’s dialog reads more like ‘online affair awkwardly transitioning to the real world’ than ‘father and son reunion.'” –Steve S

And the funny runners up!

“The Sunday FW lately always appears to have been dipped in tea or something to give it the look of a movie shot through a nostalgic filter. It’s probably been dipped in Summer’s tears.” –Rusty

“In that outfit, Dawn looks like she parties like it’s 1899.” –zerowolf

“I propose an exercise: Every time the word ‘know’ shows up in the strip from now on, we read it as Wilbur here intends it. ‘Ah, yes, I know Tommy the Tweaker!’ ‘Yes, Mary and Aldo knew each other quite well!’ It’s fun for the whole family! Good Biblical fun!” –Wasabi Jane

“The Mary Worth holiday strip is the best Christmas card I got this year. We’ve seen some amazingly inappropriate song choices in 2009 (the Frames, anyone?), but ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’ as a commentary on the ‘did Wilbur knock up his hippie girlfriend?’ plot line takes the cake. If I’m interpreting this correctly, ‘home,’ for Wilbur, is his college romance with Abby, about whom he had completely forgotten until he signed up for Facebook this week. And now he can only dream of spending the holidays at ‘home’ with his lost love, because he is stuck in his actual home with his daughter from a later relationship, toasting in phony merriment while he thinks about how much better his life could have been. Season’s Greetings, everyone!” –Mollie

“I believe the ‘demon’ Kurt is hunting is the man-thing that impregnated his angelic sainted mother in her younger days by blinding her with his devil’s tonic (Boone’s Farm Cherry Wine). Watch out Wilbur — I think Kurt will only be happy when you are ‘resting’ at the bottom of the Santa Royale pool.” –Rachel211

“I’ll note that even in his college days, Wilbur had a forehead combover, which is presumably catnip to coeds.” –Jym

Re: the Curtis “Crazy-ass Kwanzaa Jamboree”: “If only Edge City could go off on a post-Hanukkah Jew Tales of Insanity binge every year, I could truly be proud of my own heritage.” –GirlyQ

Big thanks to everyone who put cash in my tip jar! And we must of course give thanks to our advertisers:

• Advertise your t-shirts here: Find out more about the BlogAds t-shirt hive! Connect with young adults eager to sport your shirts! Reaching a tremendously expansive audience at a very low cost, the BlogAds T-Shirt Hive is comprised of a well-rounded set of over 30 social media elite blogs, who speak to a young hip male and female audience of clothing enthusiasts. These readers are seeking back to school threads, everyday wear and tear shirts, and any clothes that are stylish or humorous.

To find out more about advertising on this site, click here.

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Do not rub your eyes, O Comics Curmudgeon readers, as they do not deceive you: you are in fact gazing upon the newly redesigned version of this site! (If you’re not looking at the redesigned version of the site, reload the page while holding down your shift key to clear your browser’s cache.) Yes, I have returned, and have brought this new design as a Hanuchrismwanzaa gift to you. Three cheers to Adam Norwood for all his hard work on it, and to those of you who volunteered to beta test for helping me track down bugs!

So, what’s new with the site? Well, obviously, it looks a bit different. I’m very pleased with the new appearance. Hopefully our beta testing has stamped out any outright bugs with the new design, but if you spot any, please email me at bio@jfruh.com to let me know. (Please include the operating system and browser you’re using, along with a screenshot if you can.)

But the new site doesn’t just have a pretty face! There’s also some excitingly updated bits of functionality that you can explore!

Replying to comments. Way back when I was polling readers about what they’d like to see in the redesign, the majority came out fairly strongly against having threaded comments, so we didn’t add them; however, we have implemented functionality that makes replies a bit easier. At the top of each comment you’ll see the word “[Reply]”; click on this and a bit of HTML will be put into your commenting text box, which, when you post your comment, creates a link back to the original comment. This is easier to understand when you’ve actually played with it, but I think you’ll find it makes it a little easier to navigate through long comment threads.

The advanced archives. You’ll note that the “Archives by Comic” and “Archives by Month” menus have been relocated to the top of the site. Next to them you’ll see a link labelled “More archives”. Click on this (or just click here) and you’ll be taken to the spiffy new advanced archives page! (On the mobile version of the site — more on which in a moment — you can get here by clicking on the “Archives” link at the bottom of the page.) You can get much more granular with your searching using this page than you could before — for instance, you can find all Apartment 3-G posts from the summer of 2005 that contain the word “Margo.” Play around with it and let me know what you think! And let me know if you encounter anything that seems like an error.

Also, in my attempt to keep the front page less cluttered I moved the Random Post O’ Mystery to the advanced archives page; however, this would be easy enough to move back to the front page, if enough people request it.

The mobile/low-bandwidth version of the site. This isn’t quite new — I added a mobile version to the current live site a few weeks ago — but it’s been tweaked a bit and made to look more like the regular version of the site. It contains all the same content as the regular site, and any comments you add there will be visible to all, but it’s stripped down and optimized for smaller screens.

If you’re accessing the site using something that the Web server interprets as a mobile device — generally a cell phone or PDA — you’ll be directed to this version of the site automatically, and should already be looking at it. There is a prominent link on each page that will redirect you to the standard, non-mobile version of the beta site; you can click (tap?) on that and see which works better for you.

I’m calling this the “mobile/low-bandwidth” version of the site because I’m also thinking that people using regular computers who have smaller screens or slow Internet connections might find it an easier way to read the blog. You can switch to this version of the site by scrolling to the bottom of the screen and clicking the link that says “Mobile/lo-fi version.” So, if you’ve ever despaired that your old computer/small screen/slow Internet connection makes it harder for you to enjoy the Comics Curmudgeon, I’d like you to try this out and let me know if you think it’s a viable alternative.

Once you’ve chosen to view either the main site or the mobile site, you should always see that version until you choose to go back to the other. Let me know if you don’t!

Update: There’s currently a bug on the mobile site that seems to prevent comment posting from working there … will keep you posted on when that’s fixed. Update to the update: This is now fixed, huzzah!

New logo. OK, this isn’t “new functionality” per se, but … well, look at it up there! Isn’t it lovely? Discerning eyes will recognize the work of Francesco Marciuliano of Sally Forth and Medium Large fame. Upon looking at it, you’re probably thinking, “Geez, I’d sure like to show my love of this site by proudly wearing a garment of some sort bearing that logo!” Well, your wish has been answered, my friend. (As always, let me know if there’s another form of merchandise that you’d like the logo on, as I can add it easily.)

And that’s about it! I hope you enjoy the new design, as, if this site’s history is any indication, you’re going to be looking at it for another four to five years. I will be getting back to the serious business of comics mocking at some point this weekend — today? tomorrow? WHO KNOWS! But soon! I am looking forward to spending 2010 with all of you and Wilbur’s bastard spawn!