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Is it COTW time again? You know it!

“I love how gently rumpled Les’s tie is. It seems to say everything about Les, about this strip … and about us all? The human predicament: gently rumpled.” –Greg

And your runners up! Also hilarious!

“Of course, ‘mouse’ is the Smiths’ code word for ‘meth,’ as their racing brains are being kept up all night by the sound of their own teeth-grinding.” –BigTed

“The ‘raise the roof’ poses of everyone at Drew’s party seems rather awkward. I wonder if Liza got them all to attend by pointing a gun at them.” –Mark B

“I’ve followed this unbroken line of arrows that say CONFERENCE ROOM 3 all the way down the hall, but this last arrow ends 18 inches away from anything. So where the hell is Conference Room 3? Oh, could it be this door marked CONFERENCE ROOM 3? Guess I’ll give it a shot.” –ks

“All right, let’s get this party started! Who wants a cup of cake?!” –Ned Ryerson

“Les has so many facets of his personality, to the point where they’re all bad. I mean, there’s Mopey Les, which you could almost feel sorry for, but there’s also Self-Righteous Les, Creepy Les, Creepy Womanizer Les…” –Pseudo3D

“Hair of yellow, dumb as jello; hair of black, terror’s back; hair of red … that’s the boring one, right?” –jayjaybear, on remembering which A3G girl is which

“It’s not that you have to be old to be a plugger, but when you’re casting around for things to bitch about, it helps to have more years to look back on through your distorted lens of nostalgia, grievance-based ideology, and suppressed rage.” –Walker of Dog

“I like to think the whole assembled crew is totally in on Liza’s batshit scheme. ‘Yeah, so Drew tried to break up with me like, a jillion times after our really awesome date, but I am so not having that, so let’s throw him a surprise third birthday party! That’ll show him! Something.’ ‘Okay, Liza, but if we do your thing you have to help me kidnap my ex’s kid. You’re relatively familiar with the layout of Chuck E. Cheese, right?'” –Violet

“So being paid ridiculous sums for writing trash is less fulfilling than running his own little nepotistic empire? I think the moral of this story is that it’s always better to dole out unearned favors than to receive them. Go figure.” –A New Day

“T is for Talk, which is what the assembled suspects will do, eventually, after Officer Torturedog introduces them to Tina the Shark.” –gleeb

“Any time Reeky Rat cheats at Battleship or whatever, Slylock Fox is all up in his grill. But this fucking elephant can just jack the rabbit’s ice cream, and all we’re supposed to care about is ‘T’ words? I call bullshit.” –Doctor Handsome

“It’s a tragedy that vampires always have to wear poorly fitting clothes.” –Mark B

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Marvin, 6/3/11

With this, I dearly hope that Marvin has reached the lowest point it can with the bathroom humor. In fact, I’m not sure this can be defined as “humor” at all. It’s just all “That dog has a name that sounds like ‘pee,’ because he urinates everywhere.” I guess if this were a spoken conversation (or, as is the case here, a telepathic conversation between a baby and a dog) there’d be a vague pun in that you’d think the name is spelled “Peabody” but really it’s “Peebody” because he likes to “pee” on things. But seeing it written out means that you know there’s nothing but piss jokes coming in panel two, so hang onto your hat (because otherwise Peebody the dog will urinate on it).

I suppose “bladder control issues” was some kind of syndicate-imposed euphemism, but it does add an extra bit of awfulness because it implies that Peebody’s peeing is involuntary, and probably causes him great shame.

Apartment 3-G, 6/3/11

Oh, hey, Aunt Iris has departed abruptly and now Mrs. Bloom is back from Florida, whither she decamped a few months ago, apparently for extensive cosmetic surgery. Don’t anger her any further, Tommie, she’ll taser the crap out of you.

You know, Iris has vaguely intimated that her friends and family don’t approve of her “gypsy lifestyle.” Naturally I’ve always assumed that this was because the squares in the A3Giverse are easily shocked by any even vaguely out-of-the-ordinary behavior, but maybe it’s because she always just picks up and leaves town without saying goodbye to anyone, like a jerk.

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Slylock Fox, 6/2/11

This is definitely one of the more aggressively bonkers things we’ve seen in the Island of Dr. Moreau meets Encyclopedia Brown world of Slylock Fox in some time. One of the strip’s lower-level police-dogs has harnessed an elephant with an S&M collar and is using him to drag a shark in a tank up to a motley gaggle of animals. I’m not exactly whether the beasts at the right end of the panel are supposed to be sentient or not, but they look extremely dubious about the presence of this shark, probably assuming that one or more of them is about to become its food. I’m guessing that before the editors forced a last-minute change to this “letter T” business, the original question was “What the fuck is going on here, exactly? Anyone?”

Funky Winkerbean, 6/2/11

The second of Les’s paramours has declared love for him in as many weeks, and in both cases Les responded as any man would: with emotionless silence. Cayla, of course, is the more together of his two hapless not-girlfriends, so all she did was dump him and stalk off in a huff. Since Susan tried to kill herself the last time Les rejected her love (back when she was his student, in high school), the next two days should be extra-cheery, as Les watches the carnage in detached befuddlement. “Unring a bell” is generally used in legal contexts, when jurors learn information that should not have come out in a trial, so hopefully this presages a killing spree to come.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/2/11

It appears that the Vikings have plundered the coasts of Britain and the Frankish Kingdom so throughly as to have snuffed out the brief Carolingian Renaissance, and their depredations have now brought them to the Mediterranean, where they’ve been savagely destroying the last remains of classical civilization. The legacy of Roman literacy must have already been wiped out by the time Hagar’s war-band got to Italy, presumably by terrifying fires that mindlessly consumed the libraries and monasteries, so he had to settle for just enslaving one of the locals.

Apartment 3-G, 6/2/11

This Tommie plot has meandered along aimlessly for way too long, but I’ll be willing to forgive a lot if it ends with Margo gradually teaching Tommie about hard drugs.