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Good readers! A request for you: I am thinking of doing a comedy thingie that will involve making fun of awful PowerPoint presentations, not unlike the way I make fun of comic strips. But for this to work, I need PowerPoint presentations! Do you have any that are terrible or hilarious or otherwise mockworthy that I can use? Please send ’em along if so, e-mailing them to bio at jfruh dot com! I promise to anonymize them to spare you and your employer embarrassment.

And now, your comment of the week!

“I was going to call my car ‘White Lightning’, but the more I thought about it, it’s a Subaru Forester, and I’m a grown man, so how about you just get in the car already?” –TC

And your runners up! Very amusing!

“Gravity. It isn’t just for poor people anymore.” –Poteet

“Have you ever heard Mark Trail cry to the blue corn moon? Or asked the sleeping grizzly if he can help? Can you shout with all the subtlety of a man pursued? Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?” –Nate

“Good God, that final panel is chilling. Mary staring serenely at the reader, basically saying that not even the fourth wall will protect us from an untimely meddle. It’s like the octogenarian version of The Ring.” –tb4000

“Now if I could just remember how to aim a bear.” –Honey Badger, Does not give a shit

“My greatest comic wish is that at the climax of this storyline, the A3G artists decide to break their ‘nothing drawn below the waist’ rule in the most spectacular way possible: by giving us the most graphic depiction of childbirth ever seen on the comics page.” –pugfuggly

“What I love about Mark Trail is that unlike following some kind of plot, Elrod just wanders off on a journey that may or may not have anything to do with what was going on the day before and can be entirely unhinged from reality. You can totally imagine explaining any Mark Trail plot as if you were relating a weird dream to your spouse while shaving: ‘Yeah, so anyway I dreamed that Gene Johnson, you know the guy from accounting? Yeah, him. Anyway, he was convicted of murder. Weird, right? But it turns out he didn’t shoot him, his gun was borrowed to shoot the guy, but that doesn’t make any sense, so I went to the place to look for clues and there was this gum wrapper and I took it, and then I went to talk to the guy who I thought shot him and he chased me in his plane and then he and this purple woman who looks like that crazy lady who yelled at you in the dry cleaner that one time were chasing me around this island trying to shoot me, but suddenly there was this cave with this grizzly bear in it … Anyway, I don’t care what Dr. Ressler says, I am so not taking Ambien anymore.'” –geekwhisperer

“I think Dagwood is just trying to speak what he thinks is hipster jive. So, it is best to not interpret what he is saying as being literal. He is talking in what may best described as wink-winkese. As for what he is really asking for … I think Dagwood is back on the smack.” –tallyHO

“It’s official! Google won, we can all stop using Lycos now for our web searches.” –Santa Royale With Cheese

“Mary’s feeling the weight of her years as she feeds on the sadness of Wilbur’s patrons, but not to worry, she’s lopped off a few years with a youthful lower lip piercing of blasted ebon stone! Ah, the mid-life crises of the immortal and unkillable.” –Black Drazon

“Today’s Wizard of Id … it feels like there should be more, doesn’t it? Like there should be a second panel that’s just a close up of the knight’s face so you can see flames reflected in his helmet as he stoically says ‘COMMENCE THE CULLING.’ Maybe that’s just me? I’ve always thought the creative team behind the Wizard of Id gleefully write and then forlornly crumple up a vast number of Black Death comics each year while muttering ‘someday, someday.'” –Tophat

“Even if that guy doesn’t work there, he should at least tell Skeezix that the device he’s gesturing towards is not a DVD player, but his penis.” –Irrischano

I must thanks to all who put some cash into my tip jar! And we must give thanks to our advertisers:

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Funky Winkerbean, 6/29/12

I had never given it much thought, but I can see why Les, a goateed self-styled intellectual, would feel a certain affection for Snowball, the character in Animal Farm meant to represent Leon Trotsky. It’s more of a stretch, but I’d even be willing to see Les and Funky’s sometimes strained friendship as a metaphor for the relationship between Trotsky and Stalin. You know, anything to move us along to the part where Les gets killed in Mexico by a guy with an axe.

Gasoline Alley, 6/29/12

So this week Gasoline Alley abruptly pulled away from its extremely mildly entertaining storyline about a demon-haunted cat to instead focus on Skeezix’s problems with his electronic equipment. “How could this get any more boring?” I said, but then I got to today’s strip and I was all like “Oh.”

Gil Thorp, 6/29/12

“You know, come over here unannounced and then whine to your two-year-old son about his athletic failures. I can’t decide if it’s more creepy or more pathetic. Is there a word that combines the two? Creepthetic?”

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Mary Worth, 6/28/12

Wow, so the letters that people write into Wilbur’s Ask Wendy advice column are … kind of abstract? I mean, usually people send notes to advice columnists with very specific questions, like “How can I convince my son to get a job and move out of the house?” or “What’s a polite way to tell my mother-in-law that how I cook isn’t any of her business?” or (scroll down to the second letter, which is the greatest letter to Dear Abby ever written) “My husband wants too much sex, should I let one of my horny friends sleep with him to take the pressure off me?” But if the letter we’re getting a glimpse of here is representative, Wilbur’s fans just write long, rambling diatribes about their overpowering ennui, full of sweeping, nonspecific complaints about our fallen age, and lacking any particular question or request for advice per se. Are these mopey types attracted to Ask Wendy because Wilbur himself is full of quiet but very deep despair, which radiates out on a frequency only other depressives can detect? Or do we have things the wrong way round — has Wilbur in fact been driven to the slough of despond by the incessant soul-crushing letters Wendy receives? You can see that Mary herself, normally indefatigable and chipper, is already buckling under the weight of sadness in panel one.

Wizard of Id, 6/28/12

In much cheerier news, the Black Death has arrived in Id, striking terror into the hearts of its inhabitants. If historical averages hold, the plague will kill a third to two-thirds of the characters in the strip, but we can always hope for more.