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So, longer, more effusive thanks, plus more info on the phrase “Hot Blogger” and what it means for you, when I do the COTW post tonight, but: a huge THANKS! for Uncle Lumpy’s turn as guest blogger, and an even HUGER THANKS for everyone who gave money to the fund drive. Aw, you guys! You’re the best! Blush, etc.

Anyway, on to Monday’s comics!

Archie, 10/6/08

The AJGLU 3000 may not know much, but it knows this: a couple of old people talking about raising the prices of nitrate-laden cafeteria food isn’t enough to sustain a strip. It also knows that depictions of pretty teenage girls move product. Unfortunately, its grasp of “pretty” is fairly loose, as panel two indicates. Yes, my vacuum-tube-driven friend, large breasts are generally considered attractive on human females, but not when they only emphasize how freakishly tiny the skull of such female is. And even if one has a tiny pinhead perched at the end one’s neck, generally a true nose, rather than some barely visible lump just north of the upper lip, is an important element on a face. Sadly, what we have here is less “easy on the eyes” and more “candidate for the freak show.”

On the other hand, she has distracted me from the terrible punchline.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/6/8

White rural voters are apparently up for grabs in swing states like Virginia and Missouri this year, so here’s a bit of advice for Barack Obama and John McCain: when campaigning in the Blue Ridge Mountains, promise that the perpetrators of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith will be jailed and tried for crimes against humanity. Today’s strip encapsulates a number of this feature’s common tropes about the noble hillbilly — that he is mooch who will ask random strangers for money; that he’s so dumb that he doesn’t immediately recognize someone who’s new in town, despite “town” having a population of roughly 150; that he wears patched shirts and hideous overalls; that he considers “Mistofer” some kind of acceptable form of address — all of which amount to nothing more than slanderous hate speech.

Curtis, 10/6/08

Nothing would have made me happier than if Michelle had on carried her usual contemptuous conversation with Curtis with her clothing going completely unremarked upon. I must admit to being both amused and unsettled by the final panel, though, in which we learn that she’s not wearing a fencing outfit, but a “fencing” outfit.

Momma, 10/6/08

I tried really hard to figure how, or why, this might be about Hillary Clinton and/or Sarah Palin, but then I decided, why bother? Just enjoy a Momma that consists of one dotty old lady saying something inscrutable to another, and not, say, Oedipal horror.

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Blondie, 8/15/08

Having apparently decided that his nonstop regimen of bingeing and (I assume, based on his rail-thin physique) purging isn’t punishment enough for his poor body, Dagwood has now taken to torturing his innocent bladder.

Crankshaft, 8/15/08

Truth in labeling laws ought to require that every single installment of Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean contain the phrase “an undercurrent of melancholy that I can’t quite seem to put into words.”

Marmaduke, 8/15/08

Marmaduke is overplaying his hand here: his owner has made the baffling decision to try to balance a good-sized sandwich on a plate, a bowl of potato chips, and, um, a plate of some sort of cube-things on his lap with no tray or other support of any kind, so at least half of that food is going to be on the floor in short order.

Momma, 8/15/08

Ha ha! Momma’s doctor is a monstrous cannibalistic fiend who feasts on the organs of the elderly.

In unrelated news, for everyone who has been able to endure the Foob Wedding Of The Century by consoling themselves that once the vows have been uttered, it will all be over: Ha ha ha ha ha.

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Momma, 8/4/08

Whoa there, Francis! Unless “cheese I can serve my buds” is code for “bud I can serve whatever cheep floozy I bring home tonight” and the gentleman behind the counter is the nattiest drug dealer outside of Apartment 3-G, you have officially lost your spot as the comics’ number one “bad boy” — I don’t care how cheap you are about it. Of course, everything else about this comic is puzzling as well. For instance, even the elitists at Whole Foods will sell you cheese for less than $14 a pound that would be wholly acceptable for a party with your loser friends in your filthy apartment. Then there’s the question of why the deli man offered you the cheapest kind in the first place, and … oh, wait, what was that? I’m sorry I’ve just been informed that the amount of time it’s considered healthy to think about Momma in any given 24-hour-period has long since elapsed. We’ll be moving on now.

For Better Or For Worse, 8/4/08

Just FYI, the long, turbulence-ridden, nausea-inducing flight towards the Lizthony union of souls is beginning its final descent. Do you like weddings? Do you like it when people realize that adventure is for other people and the best thing to do is be exactly like their boring parents? Do you like passive-aggressive emotional adulterers with clammy hands? Then the next three to eight weeks are for you, my friends.

Family Circus, 8/4/08

“And the brown liquors are best for numbing the humiliation you feel every time your freakish melon-headed grandchildren open their fool mouths!”