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Hey kids! Do you know where mom hides the good scissors? Are you waiting for the day when you’ll graduate from adorable malapropisms and overactive imaginary scenarios into full-on murder? Why not announce it to the world — in t-shirt form?

Yes, merchandise displaying the excellent graphic above, which was created by faithful reader Wille Thompson, is available for purchase at CafePress. As usual, I’ve put a few starter shirts in the store, but if you’d like to see this logo on some other product — shirts, hoodies, mugs, what have you — just e-mail me and let me know.

Also! Another fab blog for your delectation! Plugwatch 200X is another in the ever-growing roster of Blogs That Focus On One Comic Every Day. Blogger JLR takes every day’s Pluggers and transforms it into a little mini-short-story that brings the longing and loss of the cartoon out of the subtext and into the forefront. It’s as if you crossed Pluggers and Funky Winkerbean and put the result into textual form. I just discovered this blog this week, but it hasn’t been updated since November; however, there was a brief notice posted earlier this month that the blogger was struck by personal tragedy. Still, said blogger says that more are coming soon, and even if not, the archives are great.

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Apartment 3-G, 1/19/07

You know who I hope is at the door? Fun Tommie! Yes, the reason Tommie’s been so boring is that, due to a freakish space-time anomaly, she was split into “Dull Tommie” and “Fun Tommie,”
with the former being the one we’ve been watching all this time. As to where “Fun Tommie” went, she’s been boozing and screwing her way up and down Manhattan for most of the last three years, and is finally coming back to take a nap.

Sadly, it’s actually no doubt Gina at the door, come to say something rude and then flit off. Or a boring dark-haired white guy in a blue suit to sweep Tommie off her feet. YAAAAWWWWNNN.

Beetle Bailey, 1/19/07

I think the coloring gnomes are finally forcing the integration of the comics by any means necessary. First TDIET sees its first ever person of color, then suddenly Killer becomes black. We shall overcome!

One Big Happy, 1/19/07

So, as this freezing family trudges ever-deeper into this endless, inescapable forest, who are we betting on being the sole survivor of the inevitable descent into cannibalism? Dad would be the early favorite, since he’s the strongest and a nominal authority figure, but don’t count out Ruthie: she’s scrappy, has a low center of gravity, and is completely batshit insane. Joe — poor surly, none-too-bright Joe — doesn’t really stand a chance.

Marmaduke, 1/19/07

Wow. When Maxi Light and Power celebrates another profitable quarter at its next shareholders’ meeting, and they honor everyone who helped bring the company stock price up another six percent, I hope that, along with the CEO who broke the union and cut unnessecary expenditures on power plant safety equipment, this nameless poodle, who repeatedly and selflessly submitted to sexual slavery just so Maxi’s crack staff could read this damn meter, is singled out for public recognition.

Pluggers, 1/19/07

“You’re know you are really a plugger?” Wow, and I thought this strip’s “Plugger’s/Pluggers” problem earlier this week was bad. Presumably this is meant to distract us from the “content” of this “joke”, which boils down to “You know you’re a plugger if you have a child when you’re relatively young and then live for another sixty years or so.”

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Apartment 3-G, 1/3/07

So, in case you weren’t paying attention, Eric Mills broke Margo’s heart by jetting out of town mysteriously, then just as suddenly set it aflame again by showing up on Apartment 3-G’s doorstep on Christmas in a particularly pointless bit of plotting whiplash. Margo must be getting inured to the pleasures of hot monkey sex romance and such, though, because it isn’t having the same softening effect on her personality as it did a few weeks ago. I love her completely pointless outrage in panel one. “Mr. Gibbs? How dare he have a WASPy, monosyllabic last name!”

Mr. Gibbs has been nothing but avuncular and pleasant to Lu Ann throughout the long Adventure of the Haunted Studio, but that facial expression in panel three pretty much screams, “Hello ladies! Looks like all those hidden cameras I installed throughout this firetrap are about to pay for themselves after all!”

Crankshaft, 1/3/07

You know, today’s Crankshaft is a good example of the strip’s subtle but fierce misanthropy. Because at first you’re grateful that they switched the expression around and didn’t actually show you the mangled corpse of a deer embedded into the hood of this car, but then you realize that he’s implying that somewhere there’s a terribly injured animal running around, with a huge chunk of metal and glass and plastic hanging out of a bloody wound in its side … well, Crankshaft is kind of mean-spirited, is what I’m trying to say.

Mary Worth, 1/3/07

Is this the bitchiest Mary Worth ever? “Yeah, Agent Orange, terribly moved, blah blah blah … but what about MEEEEEEEE????? What about MY NEEDS????”

Who is Mary talking to, exactly? Yesterday’s omniscient narration box noted only that she was calling “Cambodia.” Perhaps she was connected directly to King Norodom Sihamoni, who, being a constitutional monarch, has little better to do with his time than to take phone calls from agitated biddies.

Slylock Fox, 1/3/07

I’m not sure what’s funnier: The cheery, innocent look on the face of the megamagnet-wielding security goon, or the expression of sheer, heart-stopping terror on the face of our innocent traveller — perhaps literally heart-stopping, as his pacemaker slams into his sternum, drawn inexorably by this fiendish device. If I had to guess about the origin of this little drama, I’d wager that a certain cartoonist had his precious collection of gels and liquids confiscated by some jackbooted thug while he was traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday. Well, you crossed the wrong gel aficionado, Mr. TSA Man! I bet you felt pretty foolish when you opened up the paper and found that you had been named and shamed in today’s Slylock Fox!

One Big Happy, 1/3/07

The countdown to Ruthie’s inevitable stabbing frenzy and subsequent trip to juvie begins … now.