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Hey kids! COTW time, but two items real quick-like first:

• I keep meaning to link to faithful reader True Fable’s 2007 Bee Grinding Awards in the forums. Read and heed, and contribute your own best of 2007!
• If this news story is any indication, things in the Milford High athletics department have gone badly off the rails. Will this finally get Coach Thorp fired? (Thanks to faithful reader Paul for the tip.)

And now, without further ado … the comment of the week!

“Just be glad Billy’s touching Jeffy’s threehead and not his threeskin.” –SpiffBereft

And the runners-up!

“Thank you, Michael, for making me feel like a great parent compared to you, even though I don’t have kids. Have fun with the bleeding and screaming.” –Poteet

“‘You’re not hungry, you’re bored!’ Yeah, sorry Dad, we were just reading your book.” –Poewar

“Steve Bryant’s Gil Thorp is edgy and excellently executed, but it just doesn’t scream ‘Milford’ like the artwork currently ripped straight from the pages of the 1968 Sears and Roebuck catalog. It would be like replacing crash test dummies with real people in the automotive safety laboratories: as long as Gil and Kaz are using mannequins on the court, no real people will be injured in the making of the strip.” –Pastor Z

“I think ‘doodle date’ is supposed to be a play on the phrase ‘due date,’ which just makes it sound like only the pregnant comic artists are retiring. Crankshaft would probably be in favor of that, what with hating both women and children.” –jules

“So, lemme see if I’ve got this: Rex has slid into a hole. He doesn’t want to move out of it and now wants Nikki to do all of the work. Nikki has to communicate what he wants and Rex expects others to join them. Yeah, the strip is exactly where I expected it to be.” –Dingo

“I was thinking that Rex had fallen into some kind of cave or mineshaft or something serious like that. By the look of things today, he’s not even in a hole. He’s standing on level ground at the bottom of a gentle slope barely higher than his head. I would throw this tree branch down for him, but I’m using it to suspend my disbelief.” –Joe Btfsplk

“At least Curtis still goes to school, unlike certain comic strip teachers. Apparently the last time Liz Patterson actually taught was also on a Sunday, though that was probably because it was the only day she could squeeze into her busy schedule of staring blankly as she acquiesced.” –off-model

“Today’s Mary Worth uses very clear foreshadowing to indicate that our Drew will plummet over the side of that embankment. If there’s anything I’ve learned from years of reading Mary Worth, it’s that foreshadowing never leads to anything unless it’s really painfully, painfully obvious. Tomorrow, Drew will just be driving somewhere else, complaining about his love life to himself in a neverending soliloquy, maybe stopping to get gas or eat some pie. If we were meant to remember that Aldo died here, we’d first have seen Mary or Tobey or someone standing right there, pointing and saying, ‘This place here is where Aldo Kelrast died, driving off this here embankment here.’ And this would have taken three weeks.” –Bunnë, Official Comic Execrator

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Hi kids! This is Josh, back behind the wheel of the blog. Just wanted to thank Uncle Lumpy for his inimitable filling in (and, to reply to a few questions in the comments, I try to pay him, but he won’t let me!). Friday comics coming Friday, but a few random comics-related items of interest have come in that should be brought to your attention now!

We begin with our very first photo of Jungle Patrol-themed merchandise! Faithful reader Michele is proud to proclaim that lady cops and waitresses are in fact tougher than pirates, and indeed to prove it in this photo. Look at how cowed and nonthreatening that pirate looks at the mere sight of that fine t-shirt!

Also! The always awesome This Week In Milford blog alerts us to an exciting development! Comic artist Steve Bryant has a blog named Atomic Tiki Studio, on which he says that he recently tried out as the new artist for Gil Thorp. He didn’t get the gig, but this does reveal to the world that the syndicate is in the market for a new Gil Thorp artist — so, aspiring comic drawing-types, start your submissions! Bryant also posts some of his tryout strips, which are drawn based on scripts from the current A-Train story arc. Interesting to see the gang with an entirely different look, though Gil himself looks a little too meaty for my taste. Damn it, the man’s supposed to be defined by a series of impossible straight lines!

Also! A faithful reader deep within the Sanford Herald of North Carolina points me to a blog post from his boss about the trials and tribulations of attempting to add new comics to a newspaper. It’s pretty revelatory as to why exactly there’s so much legacy cruft out there.

Also! And finally! Another faithful reader sent me a link his own Apartment 3-G fan art. Yes, it’s safe for work, you sickos. Enjoy!

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Goodness gracious, is it Monday already? I am actually going to be away for the next couple of days, but the inimitable Uncle Lumpy will be filling in; I’ll be back on Thursday 2/7. In the meantime, it’s time for more COTW goodness:

“Some advice for our would-be killers in Mark Trail today: instead of trying to bonk him inconclusively with your pontoons, why not try shooting him with your bullets? If you lose track of him, just listen for the sound of someone yelling instructions to his dog.” –Inspector Dim

And the usual runner-uppery:

“Is it just me, or does Vera’s new boyfriend look a lot like Rick Astley? I can see why she would be interested in someone who’s never gonna give her up, never gonna let her down, and never gonna run around and desert her, because Drew Cory is obviously none of these things.” –GJ

“If Francisco Franco had decided to defeat the Republicans by challenging them to a game of hoops, rather than brutally murdering them with the help of the Luftwaffe, Picasso’s Guernica would have turned out like the second panel of today’s Gil Thorp.” –Nekrotzar

“Andrew looks kinda sad. I guess if I were a hideous, half-formed conjoined twin growing out of Andre the Giant’s back, I’d be pretty bummed too.” –Rhekarid

“Had I been asked to bet which comic strip character could deliver the word ‘mumble’ so threateningly I would actually recoil a little, my money would actually not have been on Gil Thorp.” –Violet

“I love the idea of Gil Thorp just not remembering whether or not he mumbled about the screen. An arc about an amnesiac coach would be spectacular. ‘Andrew, you’re the only one I can trust with my memories. Did I mumble? Did I put something in the oven? Do you smell smoke?'” –Hasty Penguin

“Judge Parker: As a lawyer, I can tell you that the practice of law is exactly as boring as depicted in this strip. Tomorrow, Sam will tell Gloria that they are running low on post-it strips! Next week will be consumed by copier toner issues! I for one can’t wait to see what kind of legal pads Steve uses!” –AMSTERDANG

“Drew’s facial expressions in today’s MW are outstanding! I’m positively giddy looking at them. What the hell is wrong with me?” –Jungle Mountain Mama

“Man, for all the complaining we do about Mary Worth’s titular character, I’ve really grown to miss her during her prolonged absence from her own strip. Sure, she may be insufferably self-righteous and clearly evil, but God help her, she keeps the idiots in line.” –Tats

“Remember when you were a kid and you’d make a face, and someone would say, ‘If you keep doing that, it’ll stick like that’? That’s how Mrs. Dinkle looks. Really, that’s how most FW characters look.” –Atomic Bird

“I was going to note how those hard-charging ‘self-starters’ still find time to take three-hour lunches and randomly boff in the copy room, but then I thought: have we ever seen Dr. Drew actually practice medicine, or just watched him stalk, mope, finger his clothing, make broad insane gestures in public, and be ogled by random women who probably think he’s a serial killer? Mary is the most productive worker in the strip!” –Mr. Coffee Nerves

“I highly doubt that pluggers wear suits, or, for that matter, ride in the devil’s chamber, this so-called ‘elevator.’ The wish to ‘elevate’ one’s self smacks of pride. And we all know exactly what pride did to Nebuchadnezzar, Caiaphas, and Nimrod, don’t we? (If you do, you’re a plugger.) Most likely the plugger believes the devilvator is itself urging him to touch it, which explains his alarm.” –teddytoad

“I don’t know, Spidey’s a little insane and a lot retarded; this completely idiotic truck-napping/jail break might actually be what he’d expect, since it’s nothing anybody with normal thought processes would expect.” –Impulse

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