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“What!” you’re exclaiming. “You’re going on vacation again?” Yes, I am. I’ll be back on Monday, 4/20. Until then, Uncle Lumpy is in charge, so be nice!

If you’re mad at me, just imagine I’m Coach Thorp in this hypnotic animated GIF from faithful reader One-eyed Wolfdog:

Or this hypnotic YouTube video from faithful reader Scott. (Great minds think alike!)

And now, to spare Uncle Lumpy the pain of picking out the best of the best, your comment of the abbreviated week!

“Has anyone ever actually seen a person clean while wearing an apron and a head schmatta? I’m 49 years old, have four immigrant grandparents, grew up in a blue collar world where some people I knew earned a living by cleaning, and yet I’ve never seen anyone dress up like that. This must the artist’s way of letting us know that the character is cleaning and not watching TV or masturbating.” –SF_Reader

And the runners-up! Very funny!

“If all goes well, the saga of Ted and Adrian will end with everybody in the Corey family having to apologize for thinking Ted’s a conman, but only just before Ted is horsewhipped in Charterstone’s public square for allowing his identity to be stolen. FYI, if Ted is put in the Charterstone pool and yet floats, the punishment will be far, far worse.” –Frank Parsnip

“I was gonna send something to Josh about Garfield self-plagiarizing, but I didn’t have time to scan every Garfield strip ever published.” –Chupper

“Gil will, of course, regress to being a six year old and talk in an adorable lisp. The scenes where he calls Mimi ‘mom’ should be amusingly uncomfortable.” –Artist formerly known as Ben

“[The Pluggers chicken-lady] appears to be of the same zoological family as the birds in Shoe. They seem to have evolved fleshy lumps where their beaks should be. And hands, of course. It’s all a natural progression, leading ultimately to a Ziggy.” –un malpaso

“So, does Rusty go back to school soon, assuming a public school system exists near Lost Forest? Or is the realm like a reverse-Narnia, always summer but never fun?” –cj

“Sunday’s Mark Trail, in a rare instance of continuity, will feature the rare Orange-Bellied Punchy-Con. ‘Modern technology seems destined to doom this good-natured cash-flinger … but some woodsmen know to set out its favorite treat, Monstrouschild’s Cameras, to encourage this reclusive omnivore to dig a home in a sheltered habitat!’ Then the director of NOAA will inexplicably show up to give Mark an award in the last panel.” –Dragon of Life

“I’m not sure if Rusty’s death-mask grin in the last panel is supposed to indicate one of those ‘Sure, Dad!’ fake smiles (while he’s really calculating how quickly he can reach the border of the Lost Forest and be free) or if it means the muscle-contracting poison in Cherry’s cookies is starting to set in.” –Eldaglass

“Looking at the background of Mark Trail gives me a headache. ‘You shouldn’t be going too far from Lost Forst alone … but feel free to teleport between this room made of rough-hewn logs in panel 1, a featureless beige nothingness in panel 2, and outdoors in panel 3!’ Then again, Mark is himself a sort of featureless beige nothingness.” –Nomstrosity

“Uh-oh: Gil’s going to lose his ‘coachy sense’!” –Gal Friday

“Today’s Pluggers is a goddamn lie; pluggers do not send letters because pluggers are illiterate. At least, that’s the only valid explanation for why they didn’t lynch Gary Brookins years ago.” –Captain Thunder

“That’s sort of the tagline for Momma, isn’t it? ‘Momma: Eventually your soul will scab over.'” –One-eyed Wolfdog

“Sometimes I think that Apartment 3-G is really an advertisement form Ikea. ‘To the left of the unimaginably boring woman, you can see our new Blue Curtains #3898 which complement any generic apartment of up-and-coming middle-classers.’ That’s our Tommie, making uninteresting objects interesting by mere comparison.” –Jeremiah

“That guy in today’s Momma apparently has a spare organ that allows him to poop a chair out of his butt when needed, and retract it when he doesn’t.” –Patrick

“Clearly the ‘organs’ to which the man is referring can only be two things: 1) He is a pipe organ salesman, or 2) He is aware of her need to devour human organs.” –Sarah

“They’ve already got stimulus money creating jobs in Judge Parker? Mark this day — it is the only time we’ll ever see anything in Judge Parker work faster than in real life.” –rhymes with puck

“Poor Ruby, seeking a cup of Margo’s urine but she isn’t home. Maybe a bottle of Tommie’s tears will do the trick.” –Dingo

“If I had a potato gun and access to a third-story window, I would shoot baseballs at Gil Thorp, too.” –survivor

“Billy’s winsomely ignorant remark was met with a slurred but fairly enthusiastic ‘you got that right, kid’ from the drunken derelict relieving himself in a nearby corner of the bus station in which his parents had abandoned him. The saddest part though, really, is that he’s not even reading Spider-Man.” –Violet

“Tommorow’s Spider-Man should have Spidey reading the comics and commenting: ‘Well it’s a good thing Billy’s parents weren’t afraid of cantaloupes!’ Although it’s probably just a pipe dream, as not only does Spidey lack the wit but I’m pretty sure he’s also illiterate.” –It’s time to pay the price

“The reason Peter Parker’s biological parents did not raise him is that there was something they wanted to watch on TV at the time.” –Nekrotzar

See you in a week or so! Don’t trash the place!

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Family Circus, 4/10/09

Don’t believe her, Jeffy! She claims that the mystical orb she holds is the key to spiritual enlightenment, but its roiling inky blackness tells a very different story.

Luann, 4/10/09

I don’t know if I’d call a guy who can however briefly be in two places at once “pathetic.” “Unsettling,” maybe.

Ziggy, 4/10/09

I was pretty shocked to see that Ziggy has a vanity plate that reads ZIGGY, because I always assumed that he lived his life under the constant, crushing burden of the shame of being Ziggy. If he doesn’t, he should.

Spider-Man, 4/10/09

The Spider-Man comic strip in a nutshell: Our terrifying supervillain, concerned about his son and determined to wreak revenge on the city, takes some time out to hang out in somebody’s cubicle and eat a sandwich.

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Apartment 3-G, 4/9/09

This, combined with this, makes me think that we should add “outfits that people wear while cleaning” to “drug paraphernalia” and “men who don’t look like the two or three dudes that every dude in Apartment 3-G looks like” on the list of things for which the Apartment 3-G team could use some reference photos. My alarm bells are pinging, of course, as to why Ruby might be in desperate and immediate need of some industrial-grade solvent. “Hey, look at that lady over there in that vacant lot! It sure looks like she’s burying someone in a shallow grave and then using some sort of potent cleanser to accelerate the corpse’s decay, doesn’t it? But that can’t be right — nobody dressed like a Colonial Williamsburg re-enactor could possibly be involved in anything shady!”

Family Circus, 4/9/09

I’m all for Billy rotting his mind with comic books, as he’ll clearly never amount to anything anyway, but can’t we expect him to pay attention to the details? As far as I know, Peter Parker doesn’t even have a mother; he was merely created spontaneously when Aunt May and Uncle Ben came down with nephewism, a common affliction in fictional characters. But maybe I’m being too hard on Billy; his larger point — that it would be amusing to see one of Peter’s loved ones beat him to death with a shoe or a rolled-up newspaper — is one that I can heartily endorse.

Mary Worth, 4/9/09

Oh, look, I guess I was wrong: it seems that Ted really is a scammer, and now we’re going to get to watch the Spanish Prisoner con in action, for certain limited definitions of “action.” Meanwhile, I’d just like to offer this bit of advice to noir-aspirant villains everywhere: though it is important to keep your victim in your sexual thrall in order to prevent her from thinking too much about the details of your fraudulent scheme, creepily drawing her onto your lap in public and gently caressing her cheek, all the while telling her how much she reminds you of your sister, is not the best way to go about doing that.

Shoe, 4/9/09

There is exactly one character in Shoe at whose antics I laugh in a non-ironic fashion, and that is Buzz, the elderly dyspeptic bird. Today, he’s spent hours wandering around aimlessly, angry and confused, because he’s old and losing his mind! Ha ha! Oh, I’m going to hell.