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Your comment of the week coming shortly, but first: enjoy this fine video, sent to me by faithful reader Mr.???. Stan Freberg urges you to read the Sunday comics … if you know what’s good for you. Featuring the Spectacular Spider-Ass!

And now, your comment of the week:

“If you need your wife’s permission to be a poacher, you probably aren’t cut out to be a poacher. Just sayin’.” –smacky

And your runners up! So funny!

Re: Marvin’s apparent lack of genitals: “Sadly, I suspect Marvin procreates by other means, probably by implanting his larvae in the brain or chest of some poor unsuspecting human.” –TheDiva

“I believe Adrian’s boyfriend has mistaken her for some kind of gigantic whiskey decanter and is trying to unscrew her head to get at the sweet, sweet liquor inside her neck.” –Joe Blevins

“Aristotle Papagoras/Sees the trees, but not the forest/ He’s just a drug-prescribin’ monkey/ For every eyebrow-batting junkie.” –Uncle Lumpy

“Who would have thought that the cop from the good family would prove to be a modern day Salome? Too bad we missed the Dance of the Seven Ugly Neckties.” –Nekrotzar

“In a further effort to reach out to its target audience, today’s Momma was specifically drawn to be enjoyed by people with cataracts.” –NoahSnark

“I think it’s funny that several people chose to assume the gender-neutral names were those of guys, even though there’s plausible deniability. Francis’s possible bisexuality doesn’t manage to make the strip funny or interesting, but it’s like we’re desperate to get it there somehow.” –junk science

“I don’t ever do the Jumble. I just go holler the four scrambled words out my front door and pretend I’m a trailer park Mom on Mars.” –Dancing Bear

“Look, if she’s staring at the wall while she’s talking to you, maybe you ought to think twice before prescribing narcotics.” –commodorejohn

“Fascinating. We all know it only takes your average man a few seconds to ‘turn’ his ‘microwave knob,’ while women usually require a bit more time. But this is the first information I’ve seen on the sexual proclivities of shapeless orange blob-things.” –ratnerstar

“The Professor recommends that Ms. Merrill double the dosage of her drugs, so that she will forget seeing his name and face on that ‘Wanted’ poster in Athens, where he is being sought for crimes against the electromagnetic spectrum by wearing that necktie with that jacket.” –seismic-2

“First compliment his physique, then get him drunk … is Brock reading directly from Handbook for the Desperately Closeted Teammate? ‘Duncan, I rented a dirty movie, wanna see? Oh my God, they the rental store must have totally mixed up the tapes! Hey, let me show you my new wrestling moves!'” –teddytoad

“Ooh! First sexting came to Milford, then stalkers and now it’s hipsters! I can’t wait to see see the poorly-drawn confusion on Gil’s face as he learns that Duncan doesn’t actually like Sonic Youth and is just wearing the t-shirt ironically, and also that Sonic Youth is some sort of rock and roll band.” –Rachel K

“Poor Dick Tracy; normally his cases are so easy to solve. Just find the person with some freakish genetic abnormality who has a name that describes that abnormality and make sure they die in some agonizing fashion. Now that he’s surrounded by freaks with corny pun names he might actually have to use real detective skills to crack that case. Well, at least after today we know someone will eventually be eaten by a tiger.” –Rob

“Whatever that shirt says under Duncan’s grotesquely oversized hand, there’s no way it’s ‘Sonic Youth.’ I’d say it’s ‘Comic Mouth,’ a condition that afflicts Duncan’s freakish friend.” –Steve S

“I don’t think ‘yeah I guess I pumped a little iron’ is so much carefully calibrated ambivalence, as it is a more sanitized, newspaper-friendly version of ‘uh … dude, is that a boner?’ Meanwhile, Brock/Robb’s attempt to cover (let’s go drink some heterosexual beer like heterosexuals) is as transparent and awkward as his naked ‘excitement’.” –edp

“You have to give the AJGLU credit when it’s due, and I really like how Reggie is such a complete douche that the fires of Hell are already beginning to consume him during his preamble, before he even gets to his douchey punchline.” –Edgy DC

“The longer I look at this Mary Worth strip the more insanely glorious it becomes! I just hope this time the Nazis manage to actually shoot some of those yodeling Von Trapp urchins.” –sugarpie

“Why is the police chief standing in front of FLOOR PLAN? When he says ‘infiltrated,’ how literal is he being? Are there heroin dealers in the ducts?” –OtherOpus

“The funny thing with Margo and Lu Ann’s exchange in the final panel is that usually it’s the other way around. ‘It gets easier, I promise’ is what Margo whispers to her lovers during their unspeakable sex acts.” –Mr.Death

“Is it correct police procedure for Detective Aryan Butterscotch to pull his weenus out in a restaurant for Adrian, claiming it will make things ‘one step better’? Or is he just reaching to ‘jiggle the handle’ so to speak?” –True Fable

“Just wait until Crankshaft finds out about Marvin’s bee-killing ways, given his known pro-bee sympathies. Maybe Batuik will put together a strip where Crankshaft invites Marvin and his family to an apiary conference to learn more about bees, and sadly they all die from Legionnaires’ disease. Except I won’t be sad at all! Hahahahaha!” –Brock Simpson

“I’m a bit surprised by Dr. Papagoras. Sex for drugs seems rather pedestrian. I figured his usual M.O. to be to get his patients hooked on his own special cocktail of lithium, diamorphine, and mescaline and then, using a combination of operant conditioning, hypnosis, and readings from Nietzsche, disable his ‘patients” moral center and impulse control, turning them into amoral, drug-fueled killing machines. Tommie and Lu Ann, of course, were early subjects of his, and he only succeeding in completely incapacitating their frontal lobes, but Margo — Margo is his masterpiece.” –Comrade Denny

“The key to Spider-Man is surely that the narration box doesn’t say how many seconds. It’s probably at least 3600. Enough time to ‘get her to safety,’ if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Oh wait. This is Peter Parker we’re talking about isn’t it? Make it 300 seconds. That’s probably enough time to get himself to safety anyway.” –fnord3125

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Family Circus, 9/7/09

While my self-respect demands that I ignore Billy’s patented brand of ME ME ME LOOK AT ME idiocy, I am a little curious about just what sort of adult-time activity he’s interrupting. It appears that Mommy and some of her grown-up friends are hanging around the house decked out in what appear to be low-key hipster housewife togs from 1978-ish. The two non-Keanes look somewhat discomfited by Billy’s appearance, and really, why wouldn’t they be; still, I’d like to believe that there’s something vaguely disreputable going on here, possibly involving objects hidden away in those clunky purses, or clandestine ingredients added to the big mugs of International Coffee so casually balanced on the furniture.

Also, I’m curious as to what these ladies are doing over here at Billy’s bedtime. Shouldn’t they be at home reading fairy-tale stories to their own sleepy broods? (The idea that the Keane parents would be associating with non-breeders is obviously unthinkable.) Perhaps it’s actually 3 p.m., which has been established as Billy’s bedtime due to some combination of strict parenting ideas and his extreme obnoxiousness.

Marvin, 9/7/09

I feel like I’m getting kind of repetitive when it comes to Marvin, and I promise to stop the moment it stops serving up nightmare visions that turn my stomach. This strip at least demonstrates a sort of interesting visual effect, which is that all the cues that we associate with cute, adorable babies — grossly oversized heads, short, stubby limbs, a proportionally wider torso — become awful and terrifying when the baby in question is blown up to adult size. The vision of the monstrous Marvin-troll, the same height as his mother but at least three times the mass, with a grossly oversized head and eyes the size of baseballs, is so shocking that it allows us to ignore the even more unsettling fact that he’s berating his mother for dressing all slutty.

Spider-Man, 9/7/09

Since Spider-Man has no super-speed abilities, I question how much safer anyplace he could take MJ to within “seconds” might be. “Sorry, Logan. Had to take the lady to safety by putting her on top of that five-foot-tall pile of boxes inside the same building or place where we’re standing now. Is it a warehouse? I forget. Anyway, you can see her right over there. Let’s wave to her from down here, where it’s ever so much more dangerous!”

Jumble, 9/7/09

I originally read the rather compressed dialogue in today’s Jumble cartoon as “Now they can enjoy their food without sweating.” Because the toxic pesticides these pilots have sprayed all over the picnic tables will cause all of the parkgoers’ pores to close up, a few minutes before their nervous systems just shut down altogether.

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Marvin, 9/6/09

You know, I’m pretty much a prematurely jaded cynic, but sometimes the comics can still surprise me. Marvin in particular always manages to surprise me with the new depths of horror it reaches every week. Let’s review today’s trauma:

• This strip introduces entirely new characters, two bees drawn with the enormous noses that defile the faces of most of the human males populating this feature.
• The bees believe that their purpose in life is to sting people for no good reason by the end of the summer; if these are ordinary honeybees, this is of course a suicide mission.
• The bees are intensely focused on stinging a human on the buttocks, which they refer to as a “rear assault.”
• The bees attempt to sting Marvin on the buttocks, but are prevented by his “padded armor,” which, this being Marvin, presumably includes a layer of feces.
• The bees are crushed to death by Marvin’s ass.

And then, the ultimate insult: the Stars and Stripes, dragged unwilling into the opening panels as some kind of attempt to justify this atrocity. Why does Marvin hate America?

Apartment 3-G, 9/6/09

As is its wont, Sunday’s Apartment 3-G provides us with relatively little new information, but I do think that it throws a couple of important facts into stark relief:

• The Professor is prescribing powerful sleeping pills to Ms. Merrill after she mentions that another doctor gave her some years ago, and is thus violating professional ethics and several laws, because he wants to bone her.
• Margo is almost insanely insensitive. “Yes, I haven’t been to the gallery that Eric owns since he died. So many bad memories there! Not like you, who only associate this place with good thoughts about your dead boyfriend.”

Pluggers, 9/6/09

OH SNAP SINISTER ALLIGATOR/VULTURE MAN-BEASTS! You don’t lay off someone with a nationally syndicated comic unless you want to suffer nationally syndicated comics wrath five months later! I am charmed enough by the righteous burn that I will pass over the laughable notion that any plugger would work in a cubicle job. HEY AFGHAN LADY I BET YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BE SUCH A SNOB ABOUT FREE SAMPLES FOR DINNER ANYMORE, ARE YOU?

Funky Winkerbean, 9/6/09

“Which makes sense, when you consider that it’s not really funny, at all.”