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Hey all! I’m taking next week off from the comics-mocking, but have no fear: your favorite Uncle Lumpy will be filling in with his usual hilariously avuncular stylings. So be nice to him! I shall RETURN on the 20th. But until then: you comment of the week!

“It’s a nice first try, but Ziggy hasn’t quite gotten the hang of blatant product placement yet. Here’s a quick tip: try not to make the readers imagine Ziggy having sex with the sponsor’s mascot.” –Brad

And your hilarious runners up!

“Hey, kids … did we have a nice day? Oh, sorry, and how are you, insignificant child-care provider? Did you tend to my child’s every beck and call?” –Dood

“There’s a drawer full of them … she wants to sell them! A whole drawer of horse pictures. It’s a giant flipbook, first the happy horse, but then the clouds roll in and the lightning strikes and it’s just page after page of spikes and horsemeat and rendering plants. It’s like a little horsey Guernica in that drawer. I dream about it at night, I can hear the frightened whinny of her horses. Please take her out of school and get her a DeviantArt account. Please?” –Voshkod

“We would like to remind you on this National Tea on a Propane Camp Stove Day to take time out to enjoy a nice pot of tea made on a propane camp stove. Thank you.” –Spokesman for Propane

“Inclement weather spoils another game of ‘Civil War wounded.'” –Doctor Handsome

“I’d like to imagine that the girl in front of Billy has awesome fashion sense instead of just being recycled art from who knows what era when someone thought The Kids Today were dressing like that. ‘Today,’ she said this morning. ‘I’ll push not just this podunk town’s boundaries, but America’s.’ Then she put on her Dr Bunsen Honeydew glasses, lavender polo, and red beret, smiling at the persona in the mirror. Is she French? A beatnik? Very, very old and shrinking? ‘No,’ she thought. ‘She’s an enigma.'” –Alex Blaze

“Slylock carried a magnifying glass once. However, seeing the world expanded, broken into digestible components so that no detail however seemingly meaningless was ever missed didn’t quite suit his style of hard-hitting arbitrary justice handed down from a brutal authority figure, so he elected to carry an ornate hand mirror instead and see the only font of truth necessary to convict ‘evildoers’: his own face, damning the perpetrators.” –bunivasal

“Yesterday I thought for a moment that Spider-Man, actual newspaper Spider-Man, had outplanned and outwitted and defeated a real Super-Villain. Okay, so it wasn’t exactly Doctor Doom or General Zod or something, just a fat man with lots of money who only qualifies as a Super-Villain through a loophole in the Lex Luthor Clause (and if he hypno-gas was fake, he might be disqualified entirely — I have to check the case law, but I think dicta in Gorilla Grod v. Flash is relevant here).” –Master Softheart

Apartment 3-G: “‘Fat missive from Greg’ is my new favorite euphemism.” –KreatureFeature

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Family Circus, 5/10/13

It’s generally a good bet that any given Family Circus cartoon features lightly repurposed art and/or jokes from times gone by. That’s why I’m fascinated by the TV floating in Daddy’s groggy dream-bubble, the dream-bubble about to be so cruelly burst by Jeffy’s hoe. (Side note: who on Earth thought it was a good idea to give Jeffy a blade at the end of the long stick? If it can break up clods of dirt it can cut through flesh!) What clip-art library did it emerge from? The television is all black and 2-D depthless, like a modern flatscreens, but seems to have a DVD player or cable box perched impossible atop it. Maybe in his half-awake state he’s conflating all the TV technology he’s encountered in his lifetime, much as the strip itself does. We could do a better job of placing the timeframe of this reverie if we could just see how long the basketball players’ shorts are.

Mark Trail, 5/10/13

In different kind of comic strip, when two people stumble through a lonely forest away from their crashed plane and find an abandoned cabin, inspiring a “bad feeling” in an experienced woodsman, it would herald some truly terrifying adventures to come! In Mark Trail, it just means that Mark and Wes are going to do some canoeing, whee.

Mary Worth, 5/10/13

Aw, isn’t that cute, Beth is holding onto Tom’s left hand! In other Tom hand news, in panel one we can see that on his right hand he’s wearing a glove made out of human skin.

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Slylock Fox, 5/9/13

Now, you might think that little Johnny falling asleep in mid-arithmetic is the sign of some serious medical condition, but just check out that menu hanging on the wall next to him. Lobster? Quail? Paté? The child’s slovenly clothes aside, this is clearly some sort of school for the ultra-wealthy, so probably this little one-percenter has just dozed off after a particularly rich lunch, served to him on butter-drenched platters brought to his mahogany table by a steady stream of manservants. The school nurses must be experts in treating gout and other diseases usually associated with bewigged 18th-century British gentry.

Spider-Man, 5/9/13

Haha, all the drama and excitement you’ve been enjoying over the past few weeks, as a mind-controlled Daredevil battled Spidey and brought him to the Kingpin, have been a fraud! Everyone was faking and nobody was ever in any danger. The main takeaway here is that Kingpin’s “Faster! Work faster!” management strategy is a failure, since it just causes your underlings to produce sham, non-functional products and then plot with your enemies to destroy you.