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So ends the Comics Curmudgeon Spring 2014 Fundraiser! Thanks, generous readers one and all!

Phantom, 3/22/14

Oh hey it’s time for Uncle Lumpy Reads Comics that Even Josh Won’t Read, So Nobody Has To Except for Poor Sad Me, a regular feature. Spunky reporter Lara Bell recruited lowlife adventurer Rick Grubber to take her into the Deep Woods, where they were set upon by the Bandar and brought to the Phantom at his Skull Cave. Phantom gave Lara an interminable tour of his Treasure Rooms, interspersed with braggy vignettes illustrating his complete awesomeness and coy little asides to Guran about how they were going to amnesiate Rick and Lara using Powerful Bandar Medicine®.

So Lara got all “You’re so hot, let us wed!” but the Phantom was like “Nuh uh I’m all married ‘n’ stuff”, and that night Grubber tried to steal stuff but it wasn’t even the right stuff and [WHOOSH!] the bush pilot went back to Bangalla and surrendered to the Jungle Patrol, and the mysterious aeronaut reappeared in his balloon to thank the Phantom for saving his descendants.

I feel much better, somehow.

Dennis the Menace, 3/22/14

Oh, Dennis – I knew Buckaroo Banzai. Buckaroo Banzai was a friend of mine. And you, kid, are no Buckaroo Banzai.

Funky Winkerbean, 3/22/14

Oh look – wordplay. “I wasn’t making a considerate comment about my father’s condition. I was making a commonplace observation about my own reaction to it. Um, ha ha, see?”

Judge Parker, 3/22/14

Ooh, we’re in the lair of the Hat Guys, Flico and Flaco. Flico jerked on the stick and spilled his drone upon the ground, so now he and Flaco will have to make contact up close and personal at the party tonight. They’ll probably run into Randy, who will chat them up for hours waiting in vain for his bribe.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/22/14

If you won’t listen to your own daughter, Rex, your readers would like a word with you.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Six Chix, 3/21/14

Comic Sans: Origins

I always knew it went something like this. The grinning, disfigured jester, seducing his unsuspecting queen into forcing her court monks to create a new font, an abomination whose every blasphemous curve traces the foul arc of Baphomet’s own horn. The trembling monk, sighing “Yes, Majesty” as he struggles to ignore far-off laughter and the whiff of sulfur rising from his quill where it scratches the parchment.

B.C., 3/21/14

The original joke, “I don’t need to outrun him, I just need to outrun you” is at least as old as the human race, which, if you read Genesis 1:31 literally, is just six days less than the age of the universe. The implication is that if dinosaurs existed at all, they must have coexisted with humans — though not for long, if that determined-looking velociraptor has anything to say about it.

Marvin, 3/21/14

Wow, Marvin’s callous abuse of his family is even more repulsive viewed through the lens of post-Edwardian British class structures. And you can bet Team Marvin is right now putting the finishing touches on their next miniseries, Slavemaster Marvin: a Tale of the Old South.

Pluggers, 3/21/14

Pluggers are beyond shame, and no longer even try to hide their depravity. Please, if you know the first thirteen Plugger Theories, in the name of everything holy keep them to yourself.

Pluggers put Comics Curmudgeon tote bags over their heads – their only hope of looking stylish! Send your generous contribution today!

P.S. Comments of the Week will appear Monday, when Josh gets back.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Judge Parker, 3/20/14

The Bowers/Abbotts père et fille share a private moment and a little shop talk. The thought of simply declaring her Dad’s gift and paying import duties and taxes on it never crossed April’s mind. “Can money even move in that direction — ‘away’?”, she muses. Somehow it doesn’t seem physically possible!

Welcome to the family, girlfriend – a true Parker at last!

Or maybe not? Long-running strips need to be really careful about irrevocable steps like marriages, graduations, and deaths. They upset a strip’s balance, limiting the ways characters can contribute. And if there’s one constant in Judge Parker over the last fifty years, it’s that Randy Parker is a clueless, self-satisfied tool, perpetually used and discarded by women. This principle is so much a part of the strip’s bedrock that even on the eve of his wedding, I can’t believe they’ll go through with it. I fully expect that April will die in a hail of gunfire or (more likely) disappear into the jungle at the last possible moment. Anyway, stay tuned — we’ll know in mere months!

Luann, 3/20/14

That said, what on earth is going on in Luann? Everybody’s been moving through middle-school and high school over the strip’s 29 years, and now they’re seniors announcing college plans for the fall. Ethnic ciphers Rosa and Delta are off to Yale and Howard, most of the cast to nearby “Moony Uni” (OK sure, some kind of Unification Church outfit, I guess), and Luann to the local Community College.

Is Luann really just six months away from becoming a “college hijinks” strip, or a soaper about declining academic standards and unsustainable student debt? Is inert, self-absorbed, academically dishonest Luann even remotely plausible as a college student? All these questions will have to wait, because: OMG YOU GUYS PROM!

Herb and Jamaal, 3/20/14

Yet another newspaper drops Herb and Jamaal, and Herb blames his son for it.

Spider-Man, 3/20/14

“I was going to save those men — but their plight has flushed Spider-Man out of hiding! Now they can just die for all I care, for putting that stink on my beloved city!”

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— Uncle Lumpy