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Hey y’all! If you’re in LA, you’ll get a special chance to see me in a show that’s not my show, for once! There’s improv and character bits, and I’m doing my most beloved (i.e. only) character bit: GARY THE EMOTIONALLY FRAGILE SUBSTITUTE YOGA INSTRUCTOR!!

Gary’s not good at yoga but he tries real hard and if you came to his drop-in class at the Pack Theater next Tuesday, 11/21, from 8:30 to 9 pm, he’d appreciate it. It’s pay what you can! (For this running bit I’m doing, imagine that the yoga class is pay what you can, but in real life the Pack Theater is also pay what you can, so that last sentence is doing double duty.) Here’s the Facebook event with more information!

Oh, but, also, I am of course doing my own show, The Internet Read Aloud, on 12/1, but Thanksgiving is coming up and you need to plan NOW. Here’s the Facebook event for THAT! Doooo it!

And, finally, what you’ve all been waiting for: the comment of the week.

“Say, honey, I know you make all the money in the family now and I haven’t worked in months, but I think once we get to Miami we should skip the Uber and take a chauffeured limousine instead. I would hate for the guy who may or may not be a grotesque supervillain to see us looking less than fancy when he either greets us warmly or tries to kill us.” –BigTed

Oh but you’ve also been waiting for the runners up, which are as always hilarious!

“Is Walt still alive? Or is this strip showing us his personal hell?” –Tom T.

“That mailman has exceeded the OSHA-mandated Maximum Chin Limit by quite some way.” –Hergen

“Maybe it’s just me, but I find the throwaway panel in which Dennis imagines murdering Mr. Wilson in what the old man erroneously thinks is just cosplay pretty menacing.” –Alan

“Of course, what Dolly doesn’t know is that God keeps track of all of our sins on an unsecured database hosted by Amazon Web Services. Sure, it’s in ‘the cloud,’ but the moment Lucifer figures out the right URL, we are all screwed, and He can launch his DDOS attack on Heaven itself.” –Voshkod

“Snuffy and Barlow had a violent argument about who was allowed to wear that outfit. ‘THE HAT IS DIFFERENT!’ ‘IT’S NOT DIFFERENT ENOUGH!!!!’” –Joe Blevins

“Before the Lisa’s Legacy auction begins, I need to visit the Lisa’s Legacy bathroom. My Lisa’s Legacy breakfast isn’t sitting well, especially the undercooked Lisa’s Legacy bacon. I’d better bring an extra roll of Lisa’s Legacy toilet paper with me, just in case. See you in a few Lisa’s Legacy minutes!” –AhClem

“That’s a noble sentiment you’re trying to convey to your husband, April, but before you get into the messy details I think you should review the concept of empathy himself for him. ‘Do I think about the people I put in prison and what it does to them… Wait, do those people continue to exist after I stop thinking about them? Oh god, that’s horrible…'” –pugfuggly

“That’s bad mitten to you, Jeffy. Talk about blowing your teed-up adorable malapropism.” –Spiffy

“Batuik continues working towards his masterplan: eventually all the characters will be dead from cancer, and yet the strip will keep featuring them and never end.” –Horace Broon

“Cacti are not native to north Africa so it’s a bit surprising that A) there are any B) the locals aren’t more interested and C) they’re a a weird shade of neon brown. Get your act together, Crock. Mark Trail would be all over this shit.” –Escape Zeppelin

“The fact that there are four Ys, four Es, four As, four Us, four Gs, but only three Hs in ‘YYYYEEEEAAAAUUUUGGGGHHH!’ indicates that the poor fucker is dead at the end of this episode.” –Mysterious Shirtless Lawyer

“Hmm, Josh thinks that Corbin comes from the French, when I saw that name in the comic, even before reading Josh’s spiel, I wondered if that was a Semitic name coming from Korban, which means dedicated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korban), and since Jesus’ time it had a negative connotation to it: the pharisees couldn’t support their elderly parents because all of their money was already dedicated to the temple, ‘Sorry mom and dad I’d like to put you in a nice nursing home, but I already dedicated that money to the temple.’ So I thought Family Circus was going to take a real dark turn, where Billy neglects his parents out of revenge for a bad meal served 40 years earlier. Revenge is a dish best served cold. Corbin indeed.” –CowKing

“Say what you will about him, it’s nice that Dagwood is warning his coworkers of his psychotic break and how much time they have left before he kills and devours them to satisfy the Void within.” –Dread

“Yeah, I read that as, ‘I’m gonna poop!’” –Pozzo

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Blondie, 11/17/17

Hey, guys, there’s less than a week left until Thanksgiving, so let’s really take a deep analytical dive into Dagwood’s nightmarish turkey fursona! What do you find most unsetting about it? For me, it’s the beak mask, which appears to include a built-in grill of “turkey teeth” in a permanent rictus grin that really drives home the bird-man’s nature as a nightmare chimera-thing, although I suppose that could just be a mouth slot so that Dagwood can feed himself without ever removing any part of his costume. But let’s not sleep on some of the other awful things here, like the fact that the costume’s gloves are designed to make his fingers look like feathers, implying that each of his wings might be covered with dozens of prehensile digits. And, of course, he’s topped the whole thing off with a pilgrim hat, letting the world know that on this, his most beloved holiday, he wants nothing more than to somehow become both the devourer and the devoured, simultaneously experiencing all aspects of this orgiastic rite of consumption.

Six Chix, 11/17/17

Anyway, after all that, the feeder-fetish fan service in today’s Six Chix seems positively wholesome!

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Family Circus, 11/16/17

I have to admit that I’m extremely hung up on Billy proposing to go eat at the home of someone named “Corbin.” Corbin? Is this a thing that Americans are naming their children now? I of course immediately turned to the indispensable Baby Name Wizard for answers, and learned that Corbin has seen a huge uptick in usage recently, beginning the 1980s (presumably with the fame of L.A. Law heartthrob Corbin Bernsen) but really hitting new heights in the 2010s, so … it’s possible? Still, that’s all relative: in 2011, 475 out of every million boys born in the U.S. were named Corbin, whereas William, which has plummeted in popularity from its late 19th century peak, is still bestowed upon boys around ten times as often.

It’s also possible that this is a reference to British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and Billy represents young people turning away from neoliberal austerity policies and towards the promises of socialism. The name “Corbin” derives from the Old French word for “crow,” so we can’t rule out the possibility that Billy is has joined a bird-cult and feels unstoppably drawn to the great Nest of his sinister Raven God, to feed.

Mark Trail, 11/16/17

Dick Tracy just doesn’t serve up graphic, violent deaths on the regular anymore, so it’s good that Mark Trail has stepped into the breach, showing us a man about to be horribly killed by a tornado. Looking forward to him hurtling downward, screaming in terror, his ponytail flapping wildly behind him, until he makes a neat, viscera-filled crater on the ground of ghost town, right in front of Mark and everybody else.

Crock, 11/16/17

Crock: The Strip Where The Cacti Don’t Fuck Anymore™