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Your COTW coming shortly, but first! You might recall that last fall I was sentenced to prison in the Jumble. Well, according to this past Sunday’s edition, I’ve been freed but sentenced to almost as sad a fate: toiling in the dying print newspaper industry!

Appropriately, the Sunday Jumble is nearly impossible to find online, but faithful reader queek took a picture of his physical “news-paper” and sent it to me! I include the adjacent bridge column so you can get the full experience of reading this the way our primitive forefathers did.

Also, this is not really comics related, but, indulge me: speaking of things that will kill print, I somehow briefly bamboozled my way onto CNN as a “tech analyst” (thanks to one of my other gigs) talking about the supposedly exciting upcoming Apple tablet thingie. My 15 seconds of glory begin at about 0:33 on this video. Despite my unabashed Apple fanboyness, I express some ambivalence about the future success of this device!

If it appears that I’m not looking at anyone in particular, that’s because I’m not! I filmed this in a closet-sized room in CNN’s Washington studio, and the people actually putting the segment together were in New York, so I was just talking to a disembodied voice in my ear. I swear that I said funny things during my filming session, but alas none of them came through in the segment, and I admit to being jealous of the Motley Fool dude’s “iManPurse” line. My tie, at least, looks good. Also, Wolf Blitzer was in line ahead of me at the makeup station, and his beard is even more fluffy and magical in person.

Ahem! And now that that narcissism is out of the way … your COMMENT OF THE WEEK!

“In Rex Morgan, MD, The Movie, I would like the part of Sarah to be played by Danny DeVito.” –Ned Ryerson

And the runners up! Very funny!

“When a goose with a thirty foot wingspan warns me to stay out of his end of the lake, I usually comply.” –AndyL

“Sam’s hands are so furry I’m tempted to believe he’s evolving a sophisticated array of sensitive cilia that warns him when Abbey is getting too close. I shudder to imagine his matted back.” –trey le parc

“Are Rocky and Godiva known to the tabloids as ‘Gocky’, or ‘Rodiva’?” –imperturbe

“It looks to me like Dagwood and Herb have joined one of those door-to-door religious cults — maybe ‘BREAKFAST FOR BUDDHA’ — with their matching bacon-layered briefcases and wacky waffle shoes. There’s no god like a syrupy god.” –R in CT

“Still, there’s something special about the way Mary’s eyes light up in the second panel with all the warmth of xenon laser death beams suddenly acquiring a target. If there’s a problem, yo, she’ll solve it.” –One-eyed Wolfdog

“Mary’s just disturbed because Dawn only gave her a half-baked version of the Nazi salute. ‘Look, Dawn, we’ve gone over this and over this. Do I have to show you how to hail me properly AGAIN?'” –Amateur

“I love the look on Mary’s face in panel two, just like someone who in passing puts a quarter in an airport slot machine and hits a $50,000 jackpot. For the mere investment of a ‘hope you had a nice holiday,’ she receives an e-ticket to the schadenfreude express.” –Sans Sense

“Come now — it’s called ‘foreshadowing.’ Or maybe ‘side-shadowing.'” –Zla’od N

“I can’t be the only one who can’t look past the bizarrely bright nighttime of Blondie? Perhaps the colourists spend so much time bathed in white florescent light while chained to their desks that they have never experienced darkness?” –Anonymous

“For some reason, the artist of Mary Worth thinks that extreme closeup = extreme emotion, usually negative. If ever we see someone in a killing rage, presumably it’ll just be a drawing of enormous eyes, possibly framed by downturned eyebrows.” –Carly

“That Blondie strip is obviously a glimpse into an alternate universe in which Dagwood and Herb are a hilariously argumentative gay couple. And in the daytime, the sky is black.” –Super King

“My growing suspicion that Wilbur Weston has never actually had sex in his life has since led me to suspect that Dawn actually sprang, fully formed, from his forehead. Which would explain the comb-over.” –mojo

“It appears as if the lake itself is yelling at the Parker Brothers in panel one. Perhaps this isn’t a fight between the brothers and the dudes in the canoe, but a violent battle between the personification of water and people who haven’t realized that hairstyles have evolved since 1973.” –Patrick

“I think Chip’s friend works as an organ-grinder’s monkey on the weekends.” –bats :[

“Oh, please. Winter or summer, Chip and friend would be doing the exact same things: playing Wii or surfing for porn. I’d update the septuagenarian writers of Hi and Lois on advances in technology, but I don’t know how to send them a telegram.” –DaveyK

“I’d think the easiest way for Hootin’ Holler residents to care for their personal hygiene is with their disturbingly capacious tongues.” –jvwalt

“Tonight! The Keane Kids and Max Von Sydow star in Ingmar Bergman’s Frosty The Snowman.” –Rachel K

“What, exactly, is Ted Forth wearing? Some kind of Masonic snuggie?” –Joe Blevins

“The Family Circus is turning into Calvin & Hobbes so slowly that we’ll never see them get to the good part.” –Kibo

“Dennis has failed to learn the valuable lessons of this week’s FC: Snowmen are, at best, fleeting friends. To love a snowman is to know death.” –Rusty

“On what planet do teenage comic book nerds NOT already know the history of comic book characters? If this was reality, a ‘back in the good old days’ comment like that would be met with five hours of nitpicking and debate until the old dude just went and shot himself to make the trivia stop.” –Carrie

“‘Steve Luhm’s been giving Micah Huang some pointers’? Is that what the kids are calling it these days? And by ‘it’, I mean being thrust into the world of womanhood by a janitor in a closet that that smells of bleach and dashed dreams.” –skullcrusherjones

“Dagwood, stop bothering that poor man about the bird and get to the real burning issue: what on Earth is he wearing? Are they making mustard-yellow maternity wear for men now?” –Roger

“If I were that little guy, I’d be concerned about what Billy’s got in his pocket. Never bring a snowball to a knife fight.” –Makya

“I’m in luck! Sabretooth can’t find me! Or hear someone yelling from ten feet away, because his four evenly-spaced faces leave no room for ears!” –He Brought Queenie Baby Jesus

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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Mary Worth, 1/11/10

You’d think that after, what, five and a half years of analyzing this nonsense “professionally,” my capacity to be amused and delighted by the total inability of Mary Worth characters to speak the way that the humans do would have slowly been dulled. But you would be mistaken, as nothing in today’s comics got as big a laugh out of me as “I suffer from an uneasy restlessness” did. It might actually seem here that scruffy neo-hobo Kurt is going to offer a radical alternative to this strip’s suffocating bourgeois values, and will lure Wilbur away from his comfortable condo life towards a new less stable and more vital existence, traveling from town to town to see what experiences the world has in store. But Kurt came into Wilbur’s life via the Internet, and everything associated with the Internet in Mary Worth is bad, so clearly this storyline will end with that sort of disaster averted and Wilbur returned safely to his ordinary soul-numbing life.

More proof that Kurt and Wilbur may actually be related by blood: their shared impulse to wear jackets and hats of precisely the same hue.

Jumble, 1/11/10

Speaking of suffocating bourgeois values, there’s something quite poignant about today’s Jumble, in which a group of crazed shoppers respond to a half-off sale on sodium-laden processed semi-food with a level of frenzy usually reserved for the Beatles circa 1964. I’m particularly saddened by the dude in the background, who’s cheerfully running over to the freezer case to make sure that he can bring home as many trays of microwaveable goop as possible, unaware of his life’s essential emptiness.

Crock, 1/11/10

I have many gripes against the creative team behind Crock, but one particular unlikable aspect of the strip as I encounter it is beyond their control: the fact that the desert setting is routinely slathered with a neon yellow unlike any found in nature must be blamed on the post-production colorists, not the credited artists. Still, it’s distracting, as in today’s strip, where it appears that Kerwood is being worked to death in some kind of sand mine.

Marvin, 1/11/10

For decades scientists have wondered: Would it be possible to create a character less appealing than Marvin? Well, the creators of this long running crime against humanity strip have decided to take that challenge head-on, by creating a Tyler Durden-style alternate personality for the titular hell-infant that encapsulates all of his worst qualities. The horrible little pig-faced monster is wearing his hat backwards for no good reason, which I suppose is a start.

Ziggy, 1/11/10

Thanks to a challenge from Stephan Pastis, Ziggy briefly experimented late last year with putting pants on its title character. That experiment has now thankfully been abandoned, but today we can see why Ziggy usually eschews trousers, as even a few weeks of wearing them has horribly mangled his legs. Are his feet pointing backwards?

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Well, kids, as happens every year, I’m about to depart for my annual multi-city Christmas travelganza. I will start posting again on January 2, or thereabouts! But, as has become my wont, I have some fun things to share with you before I sign off for the year.

First up is an awesomely ambitious offering from faithful reader commodorejohn! You may have heard some of this comics-themed music before; now he’s completed an entire concept album called The Funnies, the cover art to which I dearly hope he doesn’t mind that I reproduce here:

With song titles like “Mary Worth Told Me To,” “Bösendorfer Bop,” and “Rockin’ The Armory (Recorded live at the Bucket, August 4th, 2009.)”, how could you go wrong? And it’s downloadable for free! What are you waiting for?

Also! I got a note from faithful reader Kattack about a recent trip she took to Monterey, California, where she encountered a playground dedicated to Dennis the Menace. Here she is, high-fiving and frolicking with the cartoon scamp in an extremely non-menacing fashion:

As is generally the case, the missing menace was provided by raccoons, who have decided to blanket the park with their delicious-looking feces:

“I actually made my whole family go out of their way to find this park once I saw it on a map because I knew you would appreciate it,” Kattack says. “The raccoon shit sign was just a bonus.”

Also! We’ve all been watching in mingled horror and fascination as the Pearls Before Swine characters have, with apparent success, agitated for Ziggy to start wearing pants. But what if things had gone … the other way? The Jumble’s Jeff Knurek dares to visualize it!

And finally! Faithful reader Susan sent me some pics of one of her delightful finds: a Mark Trail coloring book!

Wait, who’s this little blonde girl? A friend for Rusty? Ha ha, just kidding, it’s well known that Rusty has no friends.

What says “good, wholesome fun for kids” more than the severed heads of their favorite comics characters surrounding a personal message from Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior?

The most unsettling thing to me about this image is Mark and Rusty’s white hair. Kids, do you have an extremely black crayon? One that’s blacker than black? One that’s so black it appears to shine with its own dark, mysterious inner light?

Let me just step in here and say that you don’t own any of America, Rusty. It’s exactly this sort of commie “holding land in common” talk that led directly to Mark’s brutal assault on a duly appointed law enforcement officer.

And on that note, I leave you to your own holiday fun. See ya in 2010, everybody!