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GUYS YOU GUYS I THINK SPRING IS FINALLY HERE MAYBE? And so let’s enjoy this springy comment of the week!

“Bluegill’s UPS uniform symbolically launches itself from his body as he ascends to become part of the rich elite.” –revenge4Aldo

And the runners up — very funny!

“I feel a bit sorry for Billy, carefully arranging his equipment around him, the ball at his feet, and only then glancing out the window directly ahead to check the weather. ‘No time to raise my head slightly! I gotta hang that glove on the end of my bat just so!'” –Adam

“Sounds like Billy has finally realized how cruelly misshapen his cranium is.” –Doctor Handsome

“These aren’t our jumbles! Because the jumbles aren’t made here at the paper, but somewhere else and sent here by a syndicate! We just pretend to make them because it makes us feel big!” –Horace Boom

“The one way this wouldn’t be a completely silly and time-wasting would be if these two actually worked for the Kingpin and the milk contained some kind of liquid form of the mind-control gas. Of course, Spidey wouldn’t actually drink it then because his spider sense would HAHAHAHA, no. I swear to you that I literally could not keep even a straight face in real life as I typed that.” –Ratiocinator

“‘So, you want me to drink this day-old rancid milk in order to provide the parenting skills you so desperately lack?’ [pause] ‘Why not?'” –Little Guy

“While Spider-Man promotes healthy drinks like milk and Apartment 3-G reinforces the importance of having a good lunch, Dick Tracy shows us how uncool cigarettes are. See kids? Start smoking and soon you’ll find yourself in a bowler cap and a ridiculous green suit solving newspaper riddles for a living.” –pugfuggly

“Dennis is simply getting ready for his role in the new world economy — collecting junk and dismantling it for the small amounts of valuable scrap metals to be harvested. It’s an excellent career path, with early retirement available through the disabling and/or fatal heavy-metal poisoning generally contracted by the age of 26.” –Derelict

“Whose … whose hand is that, Rusty?’ ‘It was yours, Bluegill. I’ve claimed it. Now it’s mine.’ Slowly Bluegill looked down at his left arm. Nothing protruded from his sleeve. His screams echoed across the lake as Mark and Rusty drove off into the deepening night.” –Voshkod

“That’s not a laptop. Marty Moon has taped a mirror in the lid of a Whitman’s Sampler so he can shame himself as he binges on nougat and cremes between innings.” –Ed Dravecky

“I don’t think there’s a joke in Heathcliff at all. I think it has just embraced out-and-out insanity, and future installments will feature nothing but illustrations of bizarre, nonsensical scenes (Heathcliff drives a motorcycle inside an office building, Grandpa builds a model of the Grand Canyon out of discarded tires) with absolutely no explanation given, and the caption will be the punchline from some unrelated joke that was never set up. I for one welcome this change.” –Mikey

“I’m vaguely disgusted by the fact that Marvin tucks his shirts into his diapers.” –DrGnu

“I’ve got Spider-Man’s straw, Kingpin! I’m also handling it with my bare hands and holding it right in front of my mouth while I speak to you! It’s gonna be the most perfect, untainted DNA sample you’ve ever seen, boss!” –Chareth Cutestory

“A corduroy couch topped with a pillow darker than the blackest night, purple cameo curtains and a small picture frame containing a stock image of a panda? Looks like Marvin’s parents subscribe to the ever popular ‘who fucking cares’ philosophy when it comes to life.” –Tophat

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Pluggers, 4/5/13

OK, here is the deal with my relationship with Pluggers, basically: Pluggers presents folksy, down-home bits of wisdom from rural and exurban types that have as an unspoken contrast the way that I and my fellow liberal urbanites conduct ourselves (e.g., we have acquaintances from multiple ethnic backgrounds, we have a passing familiarity with popular culture, we own and use paper towels, etc.); I take this contrast as implying that pluggers think they’re better humans (or human-animal hybrids, whatever) than me and everyone else who doesn’t know how to fix a car and likes living somewhere where you can get Indian food delivered, and I resent it and blow whatever implications are there completely out of proportion.

Every once in a while, though, I encounter a Pluggers that isn’t so much “infuriating” as “baffling,” and today’s Pluggers is one such instance. I hesitate to call this a universal experience, but it certainly has no class or cultural significance that I can detect, unless pluggers assume that we fancy city folk only wear space-age velcro sneakers. I do actually enjoy the drawing of the vaguely poindextery cat (always the go-to man-animal for Pluggers cartoons that aren’t quite plugger-y, as near as I can tell) clearly being sent into paroxysms of obsessive-compulsive anxiety as he feels one of his shoes hugging his foot slightly more tightly than the other, and wondering if he should retie the other one now and if so which set of books under which arm he should set down first to do so.

Spider-Man, 4/5/13

Aw, it turns out that the Great Spidey Milk-Drinking Caper wasn’t just a typical Newspaper Spider-Man time-wasting tangent, but is actually related to the main plot! I mean, the idea that you could “mix” Peter Parker’s DNA with a mind-control gas to make it Spider-Man-specific is laughable, but I guess it’ll do. The Kingpin probably just has the science-y aspects all mixed up in his head, anyway. He’s not a micromanager! He just wants results!

Hi and Lois, 4/5/13

For the life of me I cannot figure out why Ditto looks so God-damned smug in the second panel. Surely he’s not that impressed with his own terrible pun. Is he proud that he carries the youthful six-pack of an eight-year-old, unaware or unconcerned about the flab he’ll start to develop when he hits puberty?

Herb and Jamaal, 4/5/13

As Jesus said, “Judge not, that ye be not judged, unless we’re talking about someone who won’t cough up money for the collection plate. Go ahead and put that guy on your shit list.”

Marvin, 4/5/13

Marvin is a gross, mean, hateful baby, so I take comfort in the fact that he’s already haunted by the grim spectre of death.

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Gil Thorp, 4/4/13

So the Gil Thorp baseball season plot so far has been “Foley is annoying and also wants to be a lawyer like his dad,” which, booorrr-ing. But it’s always good to see Marty Moon back in the wooden packing crate that he huddles inside to call Milford games with his trademark thermos full of hooch. Did he have a laptop in there with him before? Does he have a laptop in there with him now? Is that “laptop” just one of those fake cardboard laptops they have to take up space on desks in furniture stores?

Judge Parker, 4/4/13

Haha, now we see why April didn’t want to invite Randy’s parents to their wedding: because the ceremony will take place behind the barbed wire surrounding the compound of her father’s apocalyptic death cult, deep in the Yucatan rain forest. And it won’t be so much a “wedding ceremony” as an “invocation to the Lords of the Dead, inviting them to drink the steaming blood of the mewling human sacrifice once known as ‘Randy.'”

Heathcliff, 4/4/13

Meanwhile, Heathcliff is single-handedly battling one of the tentacled Dread Elder Gods on behalf of those of us residing on this plane of existence, and, in unrelated news, some guy just wants pepperoni on his pizza.

Apartment 3-G, 4/4/13

“Yeah, it helps familiarize the public with businesses and nonprofits they might be interested in … ‘publicizes’ them, you might say. If only we knew someone who was up on that sort of thing!”

Wizard of Id, 4/4/13

Ha ha, yes, “The Hobbit,” that sure was a pop cultural phenomenon that saw a spike in interest several months ago! Anyway, not gonna lie to you guys, it took me a while to figure out that the Wiz was pointing at this dude’s feet.