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Without any ado at all: here’s your comment of the week!

“‘The Falcon & Guzzwanker’ are a ‘Morning Zoo’-style radio team. What ‘Morning Zoo’ means in the Shoeverse is anybody’s guess.” –Horn O’Plenty, on Twitter

And here are your runners up! Very funny.

“Precinct is a funny word. Try it. Precinct. Precinct, precinct, precinct. See? I daresay it’s the funniest part of this strip.” –Proteus454

“A 3 month time jump and two people directly involved in an event that would certainly involve multiple criminal cases and civil lawsuits are living in Alaska, presumably far, far from the scene. Sam must be a much better lawyer than we thought.” –UncleJeff

“Finally, Ces’s master plan is revealed: He’s going to turn Judge Parker into a grittier, more realistic remake of Moose and Molly. It has always bugged the hell out of him that Moose Miller is not an actual moose.” –Peanut Gallery

“Looks like someone’s getting his penis hot-glued to his thigh while he sleeps!” –Steve S

“Uh, Vic, when you make copies of money you should get color copies.” –Liam

“And with control of the newspaper comes control of the NATION! Stop laughing, guys, I’m serious.” –Chyron HR

“The fire ants have not only developed trebuchets, but they understand the danger enemy air supremacy poses.” –Voshkod

“Interesting choice for Wilbur to channel Darth Vader. ‘If you came with me, we could explore the world together as blogger and mom.’” –Mr. Bunn

“I like how Wilbur is pitching this as a fun voyage of exploration instead of what it actually is: a miserable global search for survivors of tragedy. C’mon, Iris, don’t you want to be able to learn the phrase for ‘Sorry for your loss but can you please speak into the mic’ in a dozen different languages?” –pugfuggly

“I’ve never realized this before, but Charterstone is apparently a gated community. I’m certainly glad that its fixed-income retirees, food-service workers, and mid-level university and newspaper employees are safe from having their belongings stolen by the criminal underworld that surely infests this idyllic beach town. (Oh, but P.S.: The drug addicts are on the inside!)” –BigTed

“I never thought it’d be Mark Trail that’d fill the Mythbusters-shaped hole in my life, but I’m not going to look a gift horse shown exploding from multiple angles in the mouth.” –Truckosaurus

“OK, so in this bird-society that practices the death penalty, what exactly is this ‘electric chair’? A Kenny Rogers Roaster?” –Dood

“I know I could have just said I put a camera here, but I’m the insufferable type. So really, it’s a delayed-action camera. I use a Leica M-series rangefinder, and recently I upgraded to a Leica Monochrom M because I like the shutter speed. I like a good lens and something to indicate depth of field — hey, wait, where are you guys going??” –Chareth Cutestory

“Hoping that boat explodes too. In fact, hoping Mark Trail becomes a never-ending roll of amusing onomatopoeic transport-splosions. ‘Hey, Abbey’s hovercraft!’ BLOOOSH ‘Hey, Abbey’s zeppelin!’ WHAAANG ‘Hey, Abbey’s ekranoplan!’ KLAAAAM” –Schroduck

“It comforts me slightly to know that Crankshaft will be made wretched by the inexorable march of progress until the day death takes him.” –TheDiva

“He may have ripped out the back or his coat, but I’m glad he can still wear his belt of big toes. Wear it with pride, Snuffy.” –greenantler

Thanks to everyone who put some scratch in my tip jar! And let’s give thanks to our advertisers:

• Bluebeards Original is proud to join The Comics Curmudgeon as an advertiser! Company owner Paul Kaniewski is a longtime follower of this site, to the point that it inspired him to created the famed Aldo Kelrast MySpace profile. Bluebeards has been making top-rated beard care products for ten years now, so any bearded folks or those that love them, please check out the site and try their stuff.
• Two Party Opera: A daily comic that features the Presidents of the United States as they live on the stage of history with the day-to-day news of political mudslinging.
• And if you haven’t bought my novel yet, you should! You can get it in hardback, paperback, or ebook forms. It’s called The Enthusiast, and it’s about trains, comics, stealth marketing, capitalism, and joy.

If you would like to buy advertising on the Comics Curmudgeon, you can do so on a CPM basis through BuySellAds. To find out more, you can go to the site’s BuySellAds page or just click here.

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Shoe, 11/11/16

Happy November 11th, everyone! Do you remember that this is the anniversary of the day the guns of the Great War went silent, and there was a brief, idealistic window of hope that the slaughter had been so terrible that humanity would never fight a war again? And November 11th was supposed to be remembered forever as Armistice Day, the day the killing stopped? Ringing a bell? For anyone? The dashed optimism? No?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/11/16

After it became clear that we were going to keep fighting wars and making more veterans, November 11th got rebranded as Veterans Day, and so it’s often an opportunity for comic strips to make you uncomfortable by reminding you that their protagonists fought in World War II, which ended more than 70 years ago. Please enjoy this depiction of Snuffy Smith bursting out of his threadbare uniform, and when you’re done with that, please enjoy Snuffy Smith in Hillbilly Blitzkrieg, now available in its entirety on YouTube. The movie is so unwatchably bad I was wasn’t able to get through more than a few minutes of it, but I checked the Wikipedia summary and I need to steel you for disappointment: despite the promise of the title, Snuffy does not actually fight for Nazi Germany in the film.

Crankshaft, 11/11/16

Ed Crankshaft is also a World War II vet, but on this day he’s chosen not to dwell on the past. Instead, he’s thinking about the future, the future where cold, soulless machines will displace human warmth, and it fills him with despair.

Mark Trail, 11/11/16

Well, we all knew the chopperslosions couldn’t go on forever, so I’m glad Mark Trail is allowing us to taper off by at least showing us some hot (literally) smoldering wreckage action. It’s extremely funny to me how quickly Cal’s mind turns from “rescuing Mark and Abbey” to “fleeing in this boat, Mark and Abbey will be fine, probably.”

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Hagar the Horrible, 11/10/16

Well, it looks like someone at Hagar the Horrible likes to stoke my fascination with where the Hagarverse falls on the timeline of the Christianization of Scandinavia. Fun fact: the ritual slaughter of horses and eating of horsemeat was deeply ingrained into Germanic pagan ritual, so much so that the Vatican banned the practice in the 8th century as a means to promote Christianity; this is the origin of the modern-day Western taboo on eating horse. Anyway, Helga and the waiter look appalled by Hagar’s discovery, but Hagar himself is more quizzical than anything else. Maybe he’s cautiously feeling out the possibility that this restaurant is a secret hideout for crypto-pagans — and he’s interested in joining them in returning to the Old Ways, where you celebrated blót to gain fertility and good health, and then got to eat some tasty horse.

Shoe, 11/10/16

I love the weird, fossilized cultural nuggets and attitudes you can find embedded in the structural material used to build comic strip punchlines. How ancient is the use of “Wayne Newton” as a signifier for “very bad music,” do you think? Honestly, I would’ve gone with “Justin Bieber,” which is still a solid five years out of date but might tickle the irritation that the old people who read comic strips harbor for anything that’s happened in pop culture since they turned 45.

Meanwhile, I want a lot more information about these two condemned criminals, the Falcon and Guzzwanker. “Guzzwanker and the Falcon” has a better ring to it in my opinion, but maybe they aren’t a criminal duo but just happen to be scheduled for execution on the same day. Guzzwanker is a mild-mannered accountant who, if he hadn’t slipped up and left fingerprints on the murder weapon, nobody would’ve suspected of killing his parents to speed his inheritance. The Falcon, meanwhile, is a notorious international terrorist, and also an actual falcon.

Spider-Man, 11/10/16

“Maybe we’ll never get you convicted for murder, Starr … [one panel of dialogue that distracts you from how this sentence started] … and all four of us heard you confess to murder, so we will definitely get you convicted for it!” God, I hope that camera is still recording. The whole world needs concrete evidence of what dipshits these guys are! And, uh, evidence that Egghead is a murderer, I guess.

Mark Trail, 11/10/16

Ahhh yes, the helicopter explosion will be continuing indefinitely, just as I requested. That’s the stuff we need in these troubled times. That’s the stuff.