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Your CsOTW momentarily, but first a couple of important items! The first, sent to me by several faithful readers, is from Shortpacked artist David Willis. You may know him as the genius behind the Finger-Quotin’ Margo shirt, and such strips as “Funky CancerCancer” and “My Mother Is F’in Insane.” Today, he brings you “Funky CreepyCreepy.” It’s … pretty much you’d think, based on the title.

Also, fans of soap opera strips (which I assume all of you are) will enjoy these podcastifications of romance strips! Thanks to faithful reader Sage Tyrtle for the tip.

And now … your comment of the week!

“Mary recognizes that a dramatic event has occurred without her involvement and, in mourning, wears black.” –150

And your runners-up:

“As for the Pluggers, they’re all hard-of-hearing, so this all-caps entry is just a more authentic glimpse into their lives. They’ve got to shout at one another just to hear themselves.” –the scientist

“We love how Diana Palmer, power-suited urban sophisticate in real life, lounges around with her spandex-clad hubby. We’re all for dressing nicely, but that designer Oona Oop number and gold armbands looks both uncomfortable and très précieuse for casual cavewear.” –Fashion Police

“As other commenters have suggested, it does seem likely this Janet Brookins is some relative of the Chief Plugger, most likely his wife, I would think. If so, does that mean he thinks of himself as the morose corpulent hound to his wife’s querulous bloated chicken?” –Violet

“IT IS RUSTY! Finally! It’s the BEST DAY EVER!” –TheCasey

“I’m endlessly amused by Margo’s use of a cell phone. She clearly thinks it’s some kind of walkie talkie that she can shout orders into. I haven’t been reading the strip very long, so the only part of her backstory I know is that she was a highly-trained assassin left behind in Vietnam after the war. I like how you can see bits of it in the confused but militaristic way she handles modern technology. It’s brilliantly drawn.” –Les of the Jungle Patrol

“Don’t despair, Dennis’ dad; I think Chicken Lady Plugger might be up for a little action. A handful of feed corn, and you’re in like the Colonel!” –Pozzo

“Actually I would have summed up today’s Pluggers as ‘Pluggers are dying, and they’re dying to tell you about it.'” –Artist formerly known as Ben

“I recommend panel 3 be recycled for a storyline in which Mark does a genital self-examination.” –Joe Blevins

“Pluggers only hock the TV after they run out of redundant organs to sell.” –Muffaroo

“I personally look forward to the strip that reveals Mark Trail has fists that erupt from his eyes.” –Rebochan

“A thought balloon would suggest that Mark has some kind of inner life, which he does not. He climbs, he races, he punches, he looks, he pokes up the fire, he talks aloud. He does not think.” –the good ship thetis

“Marital relations? I was under the impression that Mark Trail releases spores.” –Aging Hipster

“Whoa, Adrian, I don’t know what you put in those cupcakes, but it sure made your kitchen go all non-Euclidean on us.” –wagmore barkless

“You are your mother’s daughter, that’s for sure! Now, stand still while I take a hair sample, because simple math shows how unlikely it is that you’re also mine.” –BigTed

“As Adrian stares into her gloomy future, Jeff obediently repeats the words dictated to him by the tiny device in his ear.” –Poteet

“You have to feel bad for Herb. How can a man who doesn’t understand the concept of proper nouns be expected to explain anything?” –Wasabi Jane

“I like the fact that Jeffy seems mortified by Dolly’s ‘extravagant’ offer of cold cereal to Mommy on her special day. I suspect he suggested to the others that they make pancakes and bacon, or perhaps cheese blintzes, for her, and now he has to wear one of PJ’s snugglies, to hide the bruises.” –bats :[

“Your father told me about Ted. I’m so sorry! Let me recap your personal misfortune here in your workplace, within earshot of all of your friends, co-workers, and patients!” –Harold

“I like the lines of suck coming from the half Spiderman in the throwaway panel. It’s all like ‘We know! He’s terrible. And stinky.'” –Sarah

“Has … has Tommie’s entire life been leading up to Han Solo cosplay? The haircut, like Harrison Ford … the face that would look more appropriate on Harrison Ford … the complete lack of femininity, like Harrison Ford…” –Dragon of Life

“The economy is hurting the Hi and Lois characters worse than I thought: Hi is drinking cold beans straight from the can. I think Ditto’s reaction is a double whammy of ‘They buried Beethoven ALIVE?!’ and stepping into the noxious plume behind his father’s ass.” –survivor

“Wow, Brad is flushing his shot at pity sex right down the toilet. And Toni won’t even help him.” –Digger

And you should actually go back to yesterday’s thread and read Captain Thunder and Comrade Denny’s on-the-fly collaborative opus They Buried Beethoven Alive!, which takes my one-off joke to its hilarious conclusion over multiple posts. Just search on their names, alternatingly.

I give prodigious thanks to those who put some money in my tip jar — you know who you are! I’d also thank our advertisers … if there were any who bought BlogAds ads, and who thus get thanked every week! Sadly, there aren’t any this week — maybe next week I’ll be thanking you! To find out more about advertising on this site, click here.

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Comments of the week coming shortly, but first, a few items of interest! The first comes from faithful reader Zamboni Rodeo, who found and scanned a classic Dick Tracy Sunday strip from Reminisce magazine. (“Mostly it is what you suspect it might be,” he says, “people submitting stories about things from their childhoods and talking about how much better things were way back when. It’s a whole magazine of ‘you kids get off my lawn’ to a certain degree.”) I won’t attempt to make like modern newspapers and shrink the size down to fit the page; you can see the whole thing here if you want. Here’s the best/most terrifying panel:

That creepy child, born with a Crystal Gayle-length mane of hair and held up by some sort of mad scientist in black rubber gloves, is the spawn of B.O. Plenty and Gravel Gertie, two characters who still figure into Dick Tracy’s madness. The baby is named Sparkle. Sparkle Plenty. You cannot tell me that drugs aren’t involved in this.

Also! Faithful reader Clare points me to Garfield: Lost in Translation, in which the titular fat cat’s dialogue is translated from English to Japanese and back by computer, with generally funny results.

Also also! Faithful Reader Jesse C is preparing his strip, All Too Human, for submission to the syndicates. Help him out by voting on the best ones!

And now, your comment of the week!

“What kind of little boy has a dog named ‘Sassy’? Even I wasn’t that gay.” –Li’l Bunnë FooFoo

And your runners up! There are a lot of them, but there was a lot of good material to work with this week:

“Phantom, Phantom, stripes on his butt/ The ladies like how his jib’s cut.” –Mel

“And so, because Electro couldn’t succeed in sufficiently humiliating himself with that outfit, Spiderman must finish the task for him.” –buckyswife

“If those cleaning chemicals are as caustic as Ruby wanted them to be, we’re probably witnessing the genesis of A3G’s first Batman-style supervillain. Hideously deformed, Doc Joe will wander the criminal underworld for years, resurfacing in a later plotline, to the horror of all: ‘My God, his face! It’s … it’s … actually, he still looks exactly like all the other cleanshaven males I know.'” –Howlin’ Wolf

“Thank goodness for all those expository captions and speech balloons in Apartment 3-G. Based solely on the pictures, it looks like the goodwife upends her milk bucket over a man’s head while James Coburn gives him a shoulder massage. In the final panel, Dame Edna shows up with a cell phone. So much like my dreams, it’s scary.” –Steve S

“It was somewhere between ‘Back off, Joe, or I’ll shoot,’ ‘WHACK WHACK WHACK,’ and ‘Do you girls want me to taser him?’ that I realized I had found my Apartment 3-G Spot.” –Melissa G

“Mrs. Bloom’s soliloquy: I was the flower of the building yes when I put the rag on my hair like the Staten Island girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Tibetan wall in all my red silk yes and I thought well as well him as another and in the harsh glare of the Dakota sun I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my apartment flower how will you Bathroom for me and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume and solvents yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will pull that Tazer from under the pillow and place it like a scapular to his chest and find my trigger and yes Yes.” –Uncle Lumpy

“So is Montoni’s like the Michael Patterson of the pizza world, or do the Funkians only eat there because there are no other restaurants? I’m kind of picturing that scene in 1984 where Winston wonders if there ever was such a thing as food that tasted better than what he gets, only with pizza.” –commodorejohn

“Tommie’s stupefaction in panel two is entirely justified by the sudden tone shift. ‘Um, hello guys? I just went through some serious Cape Fear/The Shining bullshit, and now suddenly we’re all sitcom-laughable with the wacky taser-happy neighbor? Come on, when Lu Ann hallucinated that swirly pastel painter and fainted everyone was sober and concerned for weeks, but I have to Rorschach my way out of a bathroom and all of a sudden it’s Marmaduke??’” –teddytoad

“I don’t think Margo is as much taken aback as jealous that Mrs Bloom is packing superior weaponry. All Margo has on her is her umbrella, a shiv, and a small thermonuclear device, which is not so useful at short range.” –Les of the Jungle Patrol

“All that’s left is for Mary to swoop in and send Adrian to Vietnam. She probably won’t see any red flags there either.” –Uncle Fritzy Ritz

“Ah A3G, where everyone shows just the right level of childish glee at the opportunity to test out a brand new taser. Except of course for Tommie, who hasn’t felt anything since 1997.” –sak

“It’s the extra-large, cop-size tissue box — for manly, police-oriented tears!” –Gadge Cubic, Mole Preener

“At least he didn’t mention that the specter of his dead wife also thinks he’s dating.” –rhymes with puck

“Oh, now I get it. Cayla’s sort of drunk. That’s what makes these ‘dates’ with Les just barely endurable. Good for her.” –sugarpie

“The curious twist in Apartment 3-G is that this entire scenario is a complicated sex game engineered by the secretly-involved Mrs. Bloom and Dr. Kelly. ‘And then they’ll tie you up and put a bucket on your head.’ ‘Yes! And then what?’ ‘Then I’ll use the taser!’ ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!'” –yeff (Jeff Soesbe)

“If you were trying to choose the exact shade of beige that dogs aren’t, you could not choose any better than Jack Elrod has chosen.” –One-eyed Wolfdog

“I have no criticisms or snide remarks for Dick Tracy today. Today’s DT is a thing of beauty, wonder and joy. I only wish that all strips had the brilliant audacity to turn themselves into a constant stream of disorienting, mindless violence perpetuated by the titular characters. It’d make both Cathy and Marvin worth reading, I know that.” –Alan’s Addiction

“I think Toni and Brad are about to have sex! Either she will land face first into Brad’s crotch with her big, plump lips smashed into his junk, or her uniform will come undone as she flies into Brad’s waiting … uh … appendage? Either way, it will be involuntary.” –Desert Ghost

“I see in the third panel that Mark Trail has now morphed into a new comic, The Adventures of Young Karl Malden.” –Capn Gravy

“I’m convinced Pluggers is a stealth campaign to destroy the furry lifestyle. What else could so effectively turn people off to the idea of being a furry? Certainly not prejudice and rejection from mainstream culture!” –avatarjk137

“Which of Brad’s squishy innards did Toni Daytona rupture or lacerate when she flopped off the ladder, driving her oxygen tank into Brad’s barrelly torso?? What, all of them? Good answer!” –Spotted HØrse, Jungle Steed

“I dunno, there is something refreshing about the straightforward laziness of today’s Pluggers. It is like the author just got up on the wrong side of the bed one day and when asking himself for the one millionth time ‘What the hell is a Plugger, anyway?’ he snapped back, ‘Douchebags who still use dial-up! Leave me alone and let me get back to trolling mininova for leaked footage of Wolverine.'” –Reepicheep-chan

“9CL: Like the unholy hybrid offspring of Love is… and a thesaurus.” –Winky’s Spleen

“Everyone thinks Brad is seriously injured, but he’s really just trying to hide the huge erection he got from actually touching his groin to the ass of a woman he isn’t related to.” –Hank

“CAYLA!! WATCH THE ROAD!! WATCH THE ROAD!! YOU’RE A CHARACTER ON DEATHY WINKERDEATH FOR CRYIN’ OUT LOUD!!” –The Mighty Captian E

“Dead Lisa, being dead, is the only character in FW who is allowed happiness. And as far as I know, dead people don’t get cancer. I say make her the main character.” –Mac

“‘Twitter’ is the sound Sally makes when Ted wrists her. (His hands are too dainty to make a good fist.)” –Comrade Denny

“You hoped Rex Morgan would devolve into gay porn? I was hoping it would rise to gay porn’s level.” –cranky

“That last GT panel is haunting me. It looks like the lead-in to a CSI episode. After analyzing the freeze frame, I can only conclude that Coach fired a blazing fastball directly into Robb’s mouth (note the impact lines), which has come out the back of his skull and evidently is now propelling his baseball cap offstage left as he flails in his death seizure. Bits of flying bone and/or teeth litter the scene for the final grisly touch.” –Talking Squirrel

“I’d like to think, with the way Cayla is holding Les’ head in both hands, that she’s about to say, ‘If you’re still so into your dead wife, why don’t you JOIN HER IN THE BACK SEAT?!’ and then she snaps his neck with military precision.” –Patrick

“Paranormal necrophilia sounds so good when I say it out loud but I’m sure to be disappointed. This is, after all, Funky Winkerbean, the strip that delights in reader disappointment.” –thurston unger

“I predict Funky laying off Les to save money. Les won’t be able to afford Summer’s college and Summer will start taking steroids in order to play better and get a scholarship and… I could go on, but I won’t. Let’s just assume it ends in tragedy, shall we? Mime death for everyone!” –zooby

“Speaking of 24/7 Big Brother style monitoring, Skyler has just realized his technologically incompetent uncle, unable to get news from anywhere but the long since cancelled newspapers, is unaware that The Regime has banned making jokes forever on pain of death, and that he is watching the old man’s mercifully short final moments.” –Black Drazon

Big thanks go to those who put some cash into my tip jar! And thanks must also go to my advertisers:

• Willie Barcena: DEAL WITH IT!: Available on DVD Cinco de Mayo (May 5th). Pre-Order Now! Watch clips at WillieBarcena.com

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Those of you who are up this late deserve your comment of the week without preamble, so here it is:

“Today’s Marvin is confusing. When did he begin disliking the smell of his own poop?” –Naked Bunny with a Whip

And the hilarious runners-up!

“Oh please God, let Dr. Kelly die! It’s time for A3G to graduate to the women’s prison serial it’s always aspired to be.” –Judas Peckerwood

“So now Tommie is trapped in the bathroom and desperately searching through the medicine cabinet, apparently in the belief that she can fight off a violent drug addict in withdrawal with a nail file. We know someone’s going to come through the door, but who? Tommie’s creepy boyfriend, who will probably talk the attacker to sleep? Lu Ann, who will get herself and Tommie both killed so we spend the next six weeks watching Margo find new roommates? Or Margo herself, who, let’s face it, is the only one in an A3G universe who can possibly do any good in this situation? Personally I’m cheering for Lu Ann, mostly because I want to hear what Margo will say at the double funeral.” –flodnak

“‘A child who can make his way to a military surplus store, purchase a gas mask, and correctly fit it to himself, is a child who can change his own diaper, or for preference not shit himself in the first place’ has been my long-standing policy.” –One-eyed Wolfdog

“You’re wrong, Ditto. Color is not making you any funnier.” –Digger

“If you can see an obvious, direct connection between a pseudo-holiday established to raise awareness and physically battling spandex-clad man-children, then, congratulations, you’re qualified to write for Spider-Man. Either that or you’re on some powerful hallucinogens.” –Alan’s Addiction

“Miss Buxley’s just doing her thing, hanging out in a featureless void, sitting at her completely empty desk wearing pearls and a black cocktail dress, when Zero shows up with a miniature treasure chest full of dirt. The army is really different than I imagined.” –Patrick

“In a better comic, this plot would evolve into a wacky ‘Ransom of Red Chief’ story, with our hapless criminals slowly worn down by the predations of their ‘victim.’ Instead, they’ll blather while Rusty manages to look both wide-eyed and glum — but I can still fantasize that they’ll suddenly become aware of the horrific creepiness of his face, and strangle him with his kerchief.” –buckyswife

“I wish they’d reimagine A3G based on today’s strip. They could have a crime fighting trio. The Professor: Master of the criminal mind, planning, and cooking. ‘Here’s the plan. Unlock the door. You go high and you go low and I’ll go make some spanokopita.’ The New Dolly Madison, and her scrub brush of retribution. ‘Unhand her or feel the wrath of the original American Revolution.’ The Claw and her optional umbrella fighting stick (keys sold separately). ‘I have a question, Mule … Should I disembowel you with my umbrella or just use my lacquered fingernails? Hmmm. Why not both.'” –These Strange Worlds

“Do you think God will think less of me if I pray for Margo to whack Dr. Joe with that umbrella?” –Natalie

“I think the Prof is just using tried and true tactics. After witnessing first hand the devastating effects of German shock troops (hell, the Prof. probably saw the bashi-bazouk torture his homeland) he knows the power of the disorganized but overwhelming initial onslaught. Send in the Margo! Tommie as collateral damage is a risk … no, not really. You can send in Ruby later on to clean up. At least she’s dressed for it.” –Big Sims

“I learned years ago, in Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), that men sometimes think about baseball to keep from coming too soon and disappointing their lady love. I’m just now finding out that thinking about baseball in connection with Crankshaft’s joyless mug is enough to keep me from having any sort of erotic thoughts for three or four hours.” –Muffaroo

“JP: I hope skinny ties are making a comeback, ’cause I got a closet full of them. Both Sams have rather fetching ones on today, or both Randys, or whatever.” –Sans Sense

“My door could use a good scrubbin’! It’s a good thing no one can see into my head to observe how miserably stilted and lifeless my internal monologue is! Entertainment value and realism are for saints and fools!” –Dragon of Life

“Feel free to ask me about other parts of Luann’s backstory. Apparantly, I have no shame!” –Chyron HR

“I find the dead, soulless eyes of Junior Snuffy Smith’s friend disturbing. It’s like you can see through the back of his head, to the back of the newspaper, to the back of his soul, which he doesn’t have, because he’s a god-forsaken cartoon character in a cartoon that was never funny. Ever.” –ksilver

“If Adrian has any lingering doubts about Ted’s double life, the Sansabelt pants and the tucked-in polo shirt should set her straight.” –membargo

“Add ‘visible panty lines’ to Tedward’s list of crimes.” –scamps

“As usual, Marvin’s irony is heavy-handed: We can see from the title panel that the other members of the family, right down to the pets, are coked out of their skulls.” –Howlin’ Wolf

“I think the implication in that last panel is that when wood becomes unavailable, Mark would like to see bats made out of bunnies.” –BigTed

“My god, I hate Marvin. I am going to break into Tom Armstrong’s house and take a giant dump on his Xerox machine in a form of juvenile, yet mildly poetic, protest.” –Jesse C

“You know, it might be a little late in the telling, but Jeffy looks a little like a terrier dog who’s being taken to be neutered. On the ride home I figure all their expressions are will be different.” –kippetje2000

I give prodigious thanks to those who put some money in my tip jar — you know who you are! I’d also thank our advertisers … if there were any who bought BlogAds ads, and who thus get thanked every week! Sadly, there aren’t any this week — maybe next week I’ll be thanking you! To find out more about advertising on this site, click here.