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How are you celebrating America’s Birthday, patriots?

Wizard of Id, 7/4/14

The Wizard of Id crew exists in some faux-medieval land far the bounty of American Freedom, yet its inhabitants are aware that the American experiment ought to mean an end to strife, and the discovery that we can join together with our former enemies to celebrate democracy.

Crock, 7/4/14

In Crock, we see the jealousy that our national greatness arouses in others, as these cruel and cynical Frenchmen mockingly pantomime our Independence Day celebrations while imposing their colonial will in the North African desert.

Dennis the Menace, 7/4/14

Dennis imagines his future manic dictatorship, in which the special nature of this day’s celebration is lost in a ceaseless barrage of explosions, each gaudier and louder than the last, driving all rational thought from everyone’s mind until they can no longer think straight enough to resist his menacing tyranny.

Family Circus, 7/4/14

The Keane Kids represent contemporary Americans’ total ignorance of our nation’s Founding: they don’t know or don’t care that the nitrate-salt tubes and sugar-filled buns they eagerly cram down their greedy maws would have filled our first generation of political leaders with mingled terror and disgust.

Beetle Bailey, 7/4/14

Finally, Beetle Bailey reminds you to ring, not bong. Don’t do drugs, kids!

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Ugggh, everybody, much as sorting through all these plots has been a genuine joy of (re)discovery, it’s also meant some hard choices, and in going back over the 2007-08 blog year, I had an extremely hard time even cutting things back to a winner and three runners up. I could not ignore, for instance, the time that Mary Worth’s boyfriend Jeff’s son Drew “Dr. McHottie” Corey tried to simultaneously romance Wilbur’s daughter Dawn and Mary meddlee Vera, with predictably violent results:

Later, he was forced to admit that Mary and Jeff represented what true love was all about, which, barf.

Over in Gil Thorp, Coach Kaz went on an exciting summer adventure as an undercover detective in the entourage of Gail Martin, the “rock and roll Carole King” and performer of the smash hit “Tarzana Nights.” Kaz punched some dude in the brain and figured out who the rat in Gail’s entourage was (it turned out to be her drummer, aka Burnout Ben Franklin).

And let’s not forget the time that Abbey was secretly fed pot brownies, by her kindly elderly pot-growing next-door neighbors, and then she got super high and she and Sam tried to have sex but she passed out first and this image was involved and it was the worst kind of surreal nightmare.

But when it came to hard-hitting stories about drugs and how they are bad, the winner was definitely Apartment 3-G, which spent much of the year on the saga of Lu Ann’s ne’er-do-well boyfriend Alan, who was addicted to … drugs, of some kind, it was “rock” or “dope” or something, and he got it from “Jones,” his vest-wearing beatnik dealer and eventually tried becoming a dealer himself, but the important thing is that this plot gifted us with some of the dorkiest drug talk ever committed to print. For instance: how does dope make you feel? Does it make you feel super?

How much would you say drugs cost you? Just a part of your paycheck, or most of it, maybe?

When you’re super into dope, are there things other than getting high that you care about?

And, finally, when you’re really worked up about drugs, what is it that can make you calm down?

Alan was eventually gunned down by this crazed bald drug fiend, so, you know, drugs are bad and you should not do them, no matter how sexy Judge Parker makes them seem, the end.

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Family Circus, 7/3/14

Man, you guys, those are some glum-looking Keane Kids right there. Just alone in that featureless room with the cat. How do we get out? is the one question that animates their minds. Not just out of the room — though they want to get out of the room, of course — but out of their heads, out of their family, out of their lives. They’ve seen the antics of cats and dogs on the computer screen, obviously, and they wonder: what about the giggling humans in the background? Do they make money, somehow? Do they live exciting, dynamic lives, lives not spent in some room with a white rug and cream walls and no art? Could Kittycat be their ticket to that life? Too bad Kittycat doesn’t share their ambition, their desperation. Kittycat likes the featureless room. Kittycat just wants to take a bath, then maybe a nap.

Spider-Man, 7/3/14

“Thanks for getting my car back, Doctor Octopus! It’s, uh, all pretty smashed up and undriveable now, but I appreciate the thought. At least that guy didn’t successfully heist it!”

Luann, 7/3/14

Hey you guys, I know I’ve been super remiss in keeping you up to date on Luann’s queasy-making erotic stylings! Anyway, today in Luann’s queasy-making erotic stylings: Gunther’s mom wants Gunther to make good on his spontaneous and instantly regretted boast that he was going to move with Rosa to Peru so she can have the house to herself, for sex. It says a lot about Luann that Quill/Gunther’s mom is the least revolting pairing the strip has offered us in years.