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You comment of the week is coming in a moment, but first, an unpaid pre-endorsement: Your favorite anthropomorphic crime-solving fox will soon be available in puzzle book form, for the kids, from beloved Slylock Fox cartoonist/faithful Comics Curmudgeon reader Bob Weber, Jr.! You can pre-order Go Fun! Slylock Fox Mystery Puzzles or Go Fun! Spot Six Differences from Amazon! Don’t worry, I’ll let you know again when they’re published, but why not pre-order now? (There is no reason not to pre-order now.)

And there’s no reason not to enjoy today’s comment of the week!

“If there’s anything that gets Mary more excited than old people having sex, it’s when her meddling leads to old people having sex. Those potatoes are in for some mashing tonight!” –BigTed

Or the runners up! Very funny!

“You see, Rusty, I’m trying to explain how you were born. You and your brethren are the bluegills, and the largemouth ate all of them but you, then choked and died. Then, you ate all the babies. I realize that this metaphor has likely made things more confusing, but I assure you it’s accurate. You ate a lot of babies.” –rbmalpha

“Margo, it’s two in the morning. I’m in my sleepin’ polo!” –Shoe Substitutes

“The security camera POV in the first panel suggests that Marty Moon is going to get ‘the scoop’ whether or not Maxwell agrees to that interview or not. ‘You haven’t seen anything yet, Mr. Moon,’ the lad foolishly says. Oh, yes, he has. More than you’ll know.” –Joe Blevins

“Sure, Mark Trail loves nature, but Mark Trail isn’t one of those hippie, hairy Greenpeace PETA environmentalist pansies, no sireebob. Mark Trail is a conservationist! What’s a conservationist? It’s a little like an environmentalist, but Mark Trail won’t hesitate to burn hippos or beat the shit out of alligators to show them who’s boss. Also, clean shaven. Mark Trail will punch your hippie beard right the fuck off your face, you filthy commie.” –Comrade Dread

“There is so much right about the artwork in today’s strip, from Joey’s ‘I’m-gonna-puke’ squiggle of a mouth to Dennis’s menacing ‘eyes behind the bangs’ to the cookie bloat of both boys’ bellies, but the very best is the script on the cookie jar — very 50s/60s, the time that these boys are frozen in. I wonder if this artist could render ‘bourbon’ just as evocatively when rendering these same two experimenters a few years older, in their teens.” –handsome Harry Backstayge, idol of a million other women

“I could understand humans in The Flintstones universe using animals as tools due to man’s dominion over beast, but I find animals using each other as tools far more fascinating. Those stares are signs of the breakdown of their social order. This sudden realization makes them plot using each other for all sorts of daily tasks. The feeling would be comparable to walking down the aisles of Home Depot after buying a new house.” –sporknpork

“Having Lu Ann tell you she trusts your good sense is not much of a compliment. It’s like having a tree stump admire your thumbs.” –Gabacho

“The owner-kid’s quirkily-clothed pal looks positively terrified to witness the wrath of Heathcliff, unsurprisingly. ‘Hey, I might be an aspiring clown who comes to your house to escape my dysfunctional home life, but even I think this is strange!’ While the owner-kid’s attitude is more ‘I have been emotionally deadened by years of this. Just remember not to swear unless you want that beanie of yours bloodstained and hanging in the den.'” –Jack loves comics

“So what exactly do people dream about in this strip? Turkey and a bottle of wine? Let’s hope it wasn’t a wet dream.” –Wave Man

“As the herd thins, plugger-isms will also get strangely specific. ‘U know ur a Plugger when Louise needs to help you cut your food'” –inaflash, on Twitter

“First it was nothing below the waist; now it’s nothing below the shoulders. If Frank Bolle lasts much longer this strip will just depict talking scalps. The only way to tell them apart will be the color, and apparently even that will get screwed up.” –Tom the Sailor Man

“Welcome back to cooking with Mary Worth. In the first part of the show, I showed you how to defur a tribble. Now, I’ll demonstrate peeling off the tough outer skin. After that, you can bake them for 25 minutes at 350 degrees and feast on the goo within! Remember, keep your tribble alive as long as possible — the fear makes them tender!” –Voshkod

“And now the truth comes out: Hannah has never actually held a flute before in her life, much less played one. ‘Let’s see, I guess I just clutch my right hand around here like so, then delicately hold this key down with my left index finger, then bite down on the mouthpiece while holding my body as if I’m in the throes of a severe neck spasm…'” –TheDiva

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Apartment 3-G, 1/16/15

This is kind of a delicate subject, but: I feel like there’s been a marked decline in the quality of the Apartment 3-G art over the past year or so; artist Frank Bolle will be turning 91 this year and I wonder how much longer he’ll be up for doing the strip. Today Tommie has wandered so far off-model that it seems that even the syndicate colorists have failed to recognize her and given her the wrong hair color. Honestly, the strip could use the infusion of new energy from a younger artist like the ones who took over Judge Parker and Gil Thorp in the past decade. It would’ve been particularly nice to have someone new in place in time for the steamy shower lesbian three-way Apartment 3-G fans have been waiting for literally since the day the strip launched in 1961.

Mary Worth, 1/16/15

I honestly did not think I was going to see anything in today’s comics funnier than Hanna in panel two of today’s Mary Worth, her flute at the ready and her face demonstrating her grim determination to make beautiful music with it.

Spider-Man, 1/16/15

But then I saw panel three of today’s Spider-Man, in which Peter shows his steely resolve to not have sex with his wife like he wanted but instead show up for some publicity photos for her lucrative job that pays his bills, presumably sulking visibly the entire time.

Herb and Jamaal, 1/16/15

Hey, are you wondering what Herb’s mother-in-law is doing on this fine Friday? Well, she’s just sitting in an armchair, silently contemplating her own inevitable death!

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Pluggers, 1/15/15

Philosophical question: are there young pluggers? Probably not. But: are new pluggers being formed as pluggerism-susceptible youth age into a plugger-appropriate range? Even this seems unlikely, as pluggerism seems founded not just on old age and cantankerousness but on a fairly specific nexus of cultural consumption. What I’m trying to get at here is that pluggers are dying, going extinct, never to be replaced. And those surviving pluggers are going to become more and more acutely aware of their thinning numbers, and eventually will eventually spend every waking minute haunted by the grim specter of their own death. The next decade or so of Pluggers will be amazing, in other words.

Crock, 1/15/15

If I had to guess, I’d say this was an awkward attempt to graft the hip and in-the-news term “hack” onto a strip that never depicts characters using computers and that indeed takes place in some ill-defined but definitely early-to-mid-20th-century past. But still, by giving the title character the sinister power to access and alter his men’s very minds, this “joke” has made Crock more terrifying than he’s been for years.