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Let’s send January off with a bang in the form of this week’s top comment!

“Hi is in sales? He is the dourest sales guy ever. He’s the opposite of Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. A B C: Always Be Crying.” –Lawyerbob

And the runners up! Very funny!

” I’d say that Dawn is attracted to men like her father, but I simply can’t imagine Wilbur having the gall to tell someone else to wipe their mouth, or even knowing it was something people did.” –But What Do I Know?

“‘Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z’: Wilson closes his eyes and daydreams of the buzzsaw cutting through Dennis’ torso.” –Hibbleton

“God damn it Slylock, don’t google the answer in front of everyone.” –Dan Carroll

“Wait, Pardon My Planet has been set in North Carolina this whole time? Did I miss the strip where our cast of depressed post-hippie Gen X hipsters go to a Panthers game or obsess about the Wright Brothers or [third North Carolina stereotype not found].” –Schroduck

“I think the real question here is why, if Burford Bear found the chest of coins in Death Valley yesterday, he’s showing them off in a completely different area today. Death Valley is famously hot and dry, and, like much of California, experienced very little rainfall over the past year. Yet the pictured location is nothing but greenery as far as the eye can see! Combine that with the fact that a large trunk full of gold coins would weigh hundreds of pounds — heck, even the chest itself seems to be made of pure gold! Did Burford really transport it here overnight, then drag it out to the side of a secluded road, away from any onlookers or cars? Why does the supposedly professional news cameraman have no idea how to position his camera for a good shot? Honestly, I think this is all an elaborate scheme in which someone is about to get whacked. Does Max have heavy gambling debts? I bet Max has heavy gambling debts.” –BigTed

“Josh, Josh, Josh. As the world’s foremost Dark Hi and Lois connoisseur, I … God this is literally true. I should rethink my life. Anyway, look how unhappy they are! This rocks!” –matt w

“Dagwood looks so stunned at Dithers stealing the whole case of pastries. Is it like a ‘Eating way too much is my thing’ identity crisis or did he somehow never imagine the possibility of one man trying to shove down [squints at art, making optimistic estimation] eight? eclairs while they’re still hot?” –Amelie Wikström

“I’m trying to gauge how big Hi’s responsibilities are. Is he tasked with sales in the eastern part of the town? The eastern part of the state? The East Coast? Or the East, meaning all the realms outside Christianity that the Pope assigned to Portugal in the Treaty of Tordesillas? Because these things are very different!” –Ettorre

“Blondie is trying to get in on this whole Inception fad with a visualization of a visualization. I hope in a few years as that other woman is telling a co-worker about a past job, we get her visualization of this scene with both other visualizations intact.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“Josh, just wanted to say thank you for bringing Alice into our lives. As a long time reader, sometimes I think I’ve seen it all in the funny pages, but Alice proves to me that actually I know nothing and I’m an idiot. For years we’ve seen instances of comics that don’t really add up or make sense, but now I’m realizing, maybe they never had to! It’s kind of like hearing grunge for the first time.” –Maggie

“Well, we can’t agree on much as Americans these days, but I think we can all agree that Dagwood totally fucked their wedding cake.” –Old Man Shadow

“My favorite detail of this is that the witch on TV looks so depressed. She’s been a witch so long that she’s just over it, and she’s discovered that the only real magic in this world is day drinking.” –Joe Blevins

“The witch is pouring the poison into a traditional cauldron filled with some sort of ominous brew, but the beleaguered wife is using it to season a salad. I appreciate a cook who is able to adapt to whatever they have on hand.” –TheDiva

“I was a teacher for many years. I can attest that the only thing that would cause me to remember a parent from a conference is if they were remarkably unpleasant. So, yes, this tracks. Good job with the realism!” –McCapwell

“There is no in-universe storytelling reason this guy needs to be in his underwear, ergo we must assume the artist just wanted to draw a lot of body hair that day.” –Rex Thrillho, on BlueSky

“Hopefully the rich, green tones in Jeffy’s bedroom are achieved with arsenic.” –nescio

“Having a kid hampers adults ability to do things like visit friends or engage in hobbies requiring attention like reading. Jenny throwing out the books, totems of a time when Jeff had free time for good narratives or exploring interesting topics, is his personal burning of the Library of Alexandria. Now even his past pleasures have been taken over by that wretched child.” –Philip

“OK, I’ve never thought about this before, but do each of the four Keane Kids have their own separate bedrooms? If so, does the priority list for storytime vary throughout the day based on who has displeased their parents the least? That would explain why Jeffy is nodding off; he’s been riding the bottom tier for weeks now, and it’s after 11:30 before Ma or Pa make an appearance. Dolly keeps requesting middle chapters of Moby-Dick just to twist the knife.” –Navigator

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Pluggers, 1/31/25

I actually sleep with a second pillow — not because it prevents me from falling out of bed, how would that even work, honestly it makes no sense to me and looking at the drawing doesn’t make it make more sense, also do grown adults fall out of bed, this is insane — but just because I like to hold onto something while I sleep, probably a habit I picked up with stuffed animals as a kid and never truly grew out of. Very early in our relationship my wife started referring to this pillow as my “girlfriend,” a term that has stuck to this day. Anyway, that’s a long way to explain why the first thing I thought when I saw this panel was “the caption should be ‘plugger polyamory,’” which is bad, but you have to admit a lot less bad than a lot of Pluggers panels that could be captioned “plugger polyamory” might be.

Marvin, 1/31/25

Honestly if I had to pick a favorite kind of Marvin strip, it would be the ones where it’s made obvious how much Marvin’s parents dislike each other. I presume it’s because each holds the other primarily responsible for the creation of Marvin, whom they dislike even more.

Family Circus, 1/31/25

God, look at how happy she is. He’s almost asleep! Several blessed hours of unconscious Jeffy time, coming right up!

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Pardon My Planet, 1/30/25

There’s a joke at the core of this panel that is, if not good per se, at least perfectly serviceable — ha ha, her husband is a dick about her cooking so she’s going to poison him! — but it’s assembled in such a shambolic and confusing way that it actually loops all the way through “bad” to “fascinating.” I love the idea of the husband sitting at the dinner table, white-knuckle gripping his silverware and waiting patiently for his wife to prepare his meal, which he already assumes he’ll hate, because of the shows she watches on TV, but also he declines or perhaps refuses to turn around and look at the TV to see if it’s that show that gets his wife to make the food he hates. Add in the fact that the wife apparently needs advice from a literal witch, a woman skilled in chthonic folk magic and also green, to know that pouring liquid from a bottle labeled with a prominent skull and crossbones is what’s going to kill her husband. I dunno, I think if I had that on hand already, I could’ve guessed it’d be bad to use as salad dressing (or good, depending on your end goal) without the TV witch telling me. I’m just an “independent thinker” like that.

Rex Morgan, 1/30/25

Hey, remember back when Estelle in Mary Worth went on a series of internet dates, each more comically unpleasant than the last? Well, Rex Morgan tried to recapture that magic but instead of Summer’s dates being “fun” bad, they were “boring” bad. Classic Rex Morgan! Anyway, as we all know, Estelle ended up in Wilbur’s sweaty arms at the end of the process, but apparently Rex Morgan is pitching as an alternative to the app scene going to a bar and hooking up with your daughter’s English teacher, who’s been harboring many a sexual thought about you since you came to a parent-teacher conference two years ago that you barely remember, what a coincidence, he definitely wasn’t sitting outside the restaurant watching your internet date unravel and plotting his next move.