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EVERYBODY! I helped contribute to a project coordinated by the amazing Ryan Estrada that I think you will be interested in! A bunch of comics heavyweights and I wrote dialogue that fit into awesome comics illustrated by Korean artist Nam Dong Yoon. Do any of us speak Korean? No! Were we provided with a translation of the original dialogue? No! Is the result hilarious and insane? YES!

It’s being offered as a part of The Whole Story, a pay-as-you-wish comics experiment. You’ll get Fusion Future, the collection I contributed to, at the $10 level, but there’s lots of other awesome stuff available, so check it out!

Also, since it is the beginning of the month, it is my day to remind you that, if you enjoy using and/or following jokesters on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Google+, why, you can follow me on any of those services, merely by clicking the appropriate links previously in this sentence! I post mostly the same things to all of these sites (links to updates to this blog, links to things I write elsewhere, announcements about projects, links to things I think are funny, dumb jokes) so probably just pick the one you like best. Or pick none at all! The choice is yours.

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Hi and Lois, 7/2/12

You know, it’s not like I want to think about the sex lives of middle-aged comic strip characters (wait, no, I just remembered that Luann exists, amend that to “all comic strip characters of any age”). But when Hi leans back in his easy chair with his hands behind his head so as to vaguely thrust his crotch Loisward, throwing her some bedroom eyes and suggesting they go “wherever the road takes us,” I pretty much have to, OK? Lois, meanwhile, after having had four kids and seeing how they turned out, has finally figured out the value of planning when it comes to families.

Gil Thorp, 7/2/12

In other comics couples whose boinking styles I am now involuntarily thinking about news, here’s today’s Gil Thorp! I actually believe that this strip is part of Gil Thorp’s passive-aggressive battle with its own readership, aimed at those of us who are sad that the crazy, unstructured summer storylines when anything could happen have now been replaced by just another season of boring sports action. “Oh, hey, whiny readers, do you want to see a zany summer storyline about Coach Thorp and Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp’s sex life, full of B&D sex scenes so poorly written and illustrated that they make Fifty Shades of Grey look like Anais Nin?” “Nooooo, don’t do that, just show us some golf, please, for the love of God.”

Judge Parker, 7/2/12

Yep, Sam really hankers for the simple life! Just give him a vast estate and a RV bigger than most Americans’ houses and a bottomless pit of money and he’s a happy guy.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/1/12

Here is a True Story from Josh’s Real Life Events: Many years ago, when I in the midst of my failed attempt to acquire a PhD in ancient history, I discovered that getting a humanities grad degree doesn’t pay particularly well, so I used to do office temp work between semesters. So in this one temp gig, I was doing doing filing at a professional association for optometrists with a guy who was getting an MFA in poetry (AND THAT SENTENCE IS A SELF-CONTAINED CAUTIONARY TALE FOR ANYONE THINKING ABOUT GRAD SCHOOL, BY THE WAY). As people do when bored with mindless work, we started shooting the pop-culture breeze, and somehow it came up that I had alway found it amusing that Steve Miller appeared, based on the evidence of the lyrics in his smash hit song “Take The Money And Run,” to believe that “Texas,” “taxes,” “facts is,” and “justice” all rhymed with one another. And the poet-temp, whether to pull my leg or be contrary or because of genuine poetic conviction, made the case that there is a such thing as a “soft rhyme,” which has a long and honorable history in poetry, and thus Miller’s rhyme scheme was perfectly acceptable in that context.

I was already planning on bringing this anecdote up as a lens through which to discuss Mary Beth’s rhyming of “holler,” “dollar,” and “feller.” In my own speech, the first two rhyme with each other but neither with the third, and I wondered if this were an example of soft rhyme or if we were getting a glimpse of the phonology of Hootin’ Holler’s unique, isolated dialect. But then I took one last look at the throwaway panels and finally noticed that Mary Beth begins the strip by reading Emily Dickinson — the very poet my co-temp used as an example of someone who employed soft rhymes frequently. Thus I’m assuming that our young poetess, while still clinging to traditional structural forms like the limerick, is beginning to explore more advanced techniques. This is, in other words, the most cultured Barney Google and Snuffy Smith ever written, not that there’s really much competition for that title.

Blondie, 7/1/12

Speaking of academia, if you’re writing a thesis about the connection between masculinity and earning power in pop-cultural depictions of contemporary society, you could find worse examples than the next-to-last panel here, in which Dagwood, finally realizing that he’s been duped again, crouches a bit and gently protects his crotch with his briefcase.

Mary Worth, 7/1/12

I was going to write the long riff about how Mary’s response is just as vague and bloviating and self-important as the letter that prompted it, but then I got to the final panel, where we learn that Dawn can’t go anywhere without being reminded of her ex-boyfriend’s cock, and literally all other thoughts were sandblasted out of my mind.