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Hey everybody! Just a quick note to let you know that I’m going to be on vacation from the blog from this coming Monday through the following Sunday and your favorite Uncle Lumpy will be here and be in charge. As ever, be nice to him! Also as ever, he’s too nice to try to pick a comment of the week, so this week’s top comment will have a two-week reign:

“These two obviously have no idea what sexytalk is supposed to sound like, so they’re just spouting lines from Waiting for Godot. ‘Is she coming tonight?’ ‘I would think so! Does it matter?’ ‘Yes it does … doesn’t it?’ ‘Of course it does! But things change!'” –BigTed

Your runners up are also worthy of extended approbation!

“In the Smith hills, time moves backwards. Marryin’ in panel 1, new beau in 3 — by panel 7 it’s sadly clear that he doesn’t even know her name.” –Downpuppy

“While JJJ was stuck in early 20th-century print media, Cousin Ruth had leaped ahead to mid-90s ’zine culture.” — Lacey Wooton, on Facebook

“So the sound system isn’t working and the crowd is still going wild? I think I’m with Sly and Max on this one: today’s bands just aren’t about the music anymore, man.” –pugfuggly

“Gil’s speech bubble may say, ‘Disappointing True. Truly,’ but his ass is saying, ‘Do these Dockers give my cheeks any goddamned shape?’” –Bill Peschel

“It’s basic math: If you double dose on a finite prescription, you’ll run out of those heavenly pills twice as fast. Don’t be a fool, stay in school!” –Artist formerly known as Ben

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Pray to an absent and vengeful deity for fish, and one of those kids is going to cast a fishhook in your neck.” –Chareth Cutestory

“Pfft, Tommy’s faking it. If he were really sick, there’d be a lot more ellipses as he struggled to list his symptoms.” –Doctor Handsome

“The fish are agitated by the vague sexuality of the term ‘humpbacks.’ That sort of stuff is highly unusual in Mark Trail.” –nescio

“‘I require an equivalent quantity of images of Ant-Man!’ is what I’m going to yell from now on whenever go surfing for porn.” –Kibo

“Hey hey hey! Don’t you dare skip the third part of Eat, Shit and Die!” -Vulpius

“Joey, like most human-fly hybrids, must first drool enzymes onto his food in order to dissolve and digest it.” –Dood

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.
• Oh, yes, and my novel is something you should buy, in hardback, paperback, or ebook form! It’s called The Enthusiast, and it’s about trains, comics, stealth marketing, capitalism, and joy

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

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Judge Parker, 8/5/16

Ooh, we’ve arrived at the pivotal moment in any Judge Parker storyline: when a large sum of money appears! Usually the large sum of money resolves all the conflicts, but in this case, unusually, it’s the cause of more drama. Why won’t Hank give up his offer of a solid job in a field he loves for the vague promise of partnership Neddy’s crackpot elder-sweatshop scheme? Actually, Hank is almost certainly right to get out while the getting’s good: longtime strip writer Woody Wilson, having handed over the reigns of Rex Morgan, M.D., to Terry Beatty a few months ago, is now getting completely out of the soap opera game, so the endless gravy train might be grinding to a halt! In all seriousness, I obviously have great affection for the work Wilson’s done with both strips and they were a big part of why I started this blog, so I want to thank him and wish him a happy retirement.

Meanwhile, the new Judge Parker writer will be … Sally Forth writer and friend-of-the-blog Ces Marciuliano! This is a secret I’ve known for a few weeks and have been eagerly waiting for you all to find out! Ces’s strips start August 22nd, and I’m excited to see them, and to see how much free money gets handed out in the meantime.

Marvin, 8/5/16

Ha, yes, it’s Marvin talking about pooping, but when it comes right down to it, isn’t this really all of our lives, stripped down to their essence? Makes you think, doesn’t it? It’s no surprise that the colorist changed Marvin’s hair from orange to deep red in that last panel; after all, you don’t expect the protagonist of this strip to be that self-reflective, so they probably assumed it was a different baby.

Beetle Bailey, 8/5/16

The best thing about this strip is how completely devastated the buffet employee in the background looks. “But … we allow ‘all you can eat’ based on certain realistic assumptions about the human appetite! The whole economics of this business relies on nobody doing what he just did! We’ll be ruined! Ruined!”

Dennis the Menace, 8/5/16

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Food Service Worker Emotional Spectrum, that guy overhearing Dennis extolling the virtues of eating processed meat tubes at the beach looks like he just saw his daughter take her first steps. Dial it back, dude.

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Spider-Man, 8/4/16

Ah, yes, the A+ way to convey through dialogue that a newly introduced character is a huge nerdlinger: hilariously stilted phrases like “I’m cognizant,” “I require an equivalent quantity,” etc.! It’s also always fun to be reminded that while Peter whines endlessly about his mistreatment at the hands of J. Jonah Jameson, he is in fact a not particularly good photographer and his only value is his ability to deliver photos of himself. I’m assuming that Ant-Man, like all other superheroes, holds Spider-Man in the appropriate level of disdain, and so Peter’s job just got a lot harder.

Mark Trail, 8/4/16

Hey, remember the last Mark Trail storyline, where Mark spent roughly 17 weeks stuck inside a cave? Well, brace yourself, because he’s about to spend the next who knows how many months stuck inside a whale.