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Jeez, a guy can’t go away for 24 hours before getting frantic emails about huge chunks of the comments section acting like jackasses. (Those of you in the non-commenting “silent majority” can ignore this.) I will tell you all right now: quit it. I know it’s hard in the lead-up to an election to avoid political diatribes at all, but please be respectful towards one another rather than launching epithets at your politically divergent fellow commentors. Because you know where else you have to get into this kind of flame war? The entire rest of the Internet.

Anyway, high passions can and will be forgiven; I probably shouldn’t have mentioned any of the major candidates in a post before I left of the weekend anyway, though my point was just horror at the Family Circus trying to make itself relevant. I actually had intended to set up an election day go-at-each-other thread on Tuesday to let people get it out of their system. But let me tell you something that will earn you an immediate banning: posting nasty stuff under the name of another commentator just to make them look bad. Seriously, that is 100 percent not kosher and only my actually trying to enjoy my weekend trip prevents me from wading into the back end of the comment machinery to root out the offenders right now.

Anyway, did anything good come out of this spat? Perhaps. While flicking through in horror, I came upon this gem, posted by faithful reader Mr Snrub: “Does Taft/Roosevelt slashfic exist?” If it doesn’t now, I order you to expend your political energies on this thread creating some. “Ever since Taft had returned from the Phillipines, TR found himself going out of his way to spend more time with him talking about the situation there…” Go!

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Family Circus, 10/31/08

Yes, Dolly is dressed as … exactly who you think she’s dressed as. At least Jeffy isn’t going as Obama, in blackface.

Meanwhile, it took me took some serious staring and contemplation to realize that Billy is supposed to be the popular Iron Man character, with his mask pushed up on top of his head (presumably so we’d know that he was really Billy, and not Robert Downey, Jr., come to score some dope from the Keane Kids). For the longest time I thought that he was wearing a Kangol hat, and he was supposed to be some guy in a Kangol hat who’s been splattered by red paint.

Dennis the Menace, 10/31/08

No amount of contemplation could help me suss out the meaning of Dennis’s outfit, however. Is he supposed to be the guy from V for Vendetta? Or just some dude in a mask who likes to stab people?

Spider-Man, 10/31/08

As I promised yesterday, the Spider-Man strip is simply relentless in its efforts to disappoint fans of Spider-Man, superhero comics, action, and narrative. Big Time, having managed to miss the web-slinger at point blank range despite paralyzing him with his most powerful weapon — sound — now simply bludgeons our hero with a clock.

Mary Worth, 10/31/08

Frank is quickly showing himself to be a very promising Mary Worth guest star. I look forward to him turning every compliment into something negative. “Frank, your daughter’s performance was simply tremendous!” “Yes, tremendously humiliating!” “Frank, this soup is delicious!” “Yes, deliciously repulsive!”

Apartment 3-G, 10/31/08

“Heh heh, some junkie I’ve never met gets popped, and that just makes for more action for Gary! Good thing I wore my sexiest camel-hair jacket!”

UPDATE: I’m going out of town for the weekend, so I probably won’t have a chance to post weekend comments until Monday. Till then, enjoy!

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Archie, 10/30/08

Today’s Archie reveals just how primitive the AJGLU 3000’s graphics subsystem is. Rather than portraying a pizza box as a collection of surfaces and enclosed foodstuffs that can wobble, flop open in mid-air, and splatter pepperoni, sauce, and grease everywhere to hilarious effect, it instead assumes that it is a simple, monolithic object that flies into the living room serenely, describing a perfect parabola before miraculously coming to rest in Jughead’s hands. I’d guess that whole system is based on Atari System 2 hardware, which explains the mysterious paperboy reference.

Hi and Lois, 10/30/08

I was going to go into a diatribe about how it’s silly that Ditto is regarding his lunch with wide-eyed shock in panel one seeing as it’s (a) one that he packed himself and (b) awesome, but then I caught sight of those two … brown … things in panel two. Are we supposed to assume that those are his two candy bars, both of which he carefully unwrapped and then set down on the lunch table to enjoy later? Yes, yes, let’s assume that, please.

Spider-Man, 10/30/08

You have to give the creators of the newspaper Spider-Man credit for always exploring new frontiers of total lameness on the part of their characters. In one corner, we have Big Time, a criminal mastermind so committed to his laughable clock theme that he has some sort of clock-shaped pop-gun that spits out its minute hand as ammunition and is thus presumably useless after two shots; and in the other, we have the Amazing Spider-Man, who boasts of his “spider reflexes,” which will help him dodge a projectile that hasn’t managed to cover about three feet of space in the time its taken him to thought-balloon a sentence and a half — only to have said reflexes completely disabled by a loud noise. Determining the winner in this battle will be like a philosophical conundrum: can an object with no mass be moved by an infinitely weak force?

Pluggers, 10/30/08

Pluggers know it’s cheapest just to get plastered at home, in front of the TV set.