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Gil Thorp, 9/1/08

Hey everyone! The incredibly long long boring long non-exciting long story of Elmer appears to have finally ended, with Elmer getting to stay in America because he has a new job doing bilingual outreach for the Kalamazoo Kings, even though it was repeatedly established that Elmer is entirely monolingual. But whatever! Don’t question it, or they’ll drag him back and try to explain away his happy ending some more.

Anyway, it’s September, which means it’s football season, which means that we get to see Matt Rogers and Jeff Ponczak head off to Central City to get a “football physical”, for some reason. Matt and Jeff (which sounds just like Mutt and Jeff — one’s short and one’s tall, get it) are a couple of nattily dressed buds who are no doubt destined to be this strip’s most lovable pair of totally platonic dude friends since Bill Ritter and Stormy Hicks. I’m sure there will be delightful antics, with more hilarious malapropisms from the Widow Ponczak, the batty Bratislavan!

Apartment 3-G and Blondie, 9/1/08

Since the harrowing real-life effects of drug abuse — the violence, the terrible mood swings, the neglect for hygiene and the resulting oozing open sores — are considered too intense to depict on the comics page, there’s only one way left to depict Alan as the desperate addict we all know he is: by establishing via a narration box and dialog that he was asleep in the middle of the afternoon! Damn you, demon dope! (Of course, we can’t actually show him sleeping, as that would be simply too shocking.)

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that I think Dagwood has been a junkie for quite a while now.

Gasoline Alley, 9/1/08

I was going to make fun of Gasoline Alley for taking a day off, but then I realized that the chain link fence depicted here has had more work put into it than a week’s worth of this strip’s usual hillbilly antics.

Pluggers, 9/1/08

You know, if you’ve gotta repeat a joke every four months or so, pluggers ain’t gonna hold it against you or nothin’.

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Panels from For Better Or For Worse, 8/31/08

So I was mostly defeated by the FBOFW Wall o’ Text that greeted me on Sunday, but I feel I have to say something, so…

Thank God Deanna gave up on that pharmacist gig to finally get into an acceptable profession for an ovaries-bearing Canadian: sewing, and the sale of sewing accoutrements. Now at last a more qualified man can take her old job advising women on how to “accidentally” not take the pills he prescribes!

The “just for laughs” angle baffles me a little bit. Perhaps now that the Pattersons and their hangers on aren’t being monitored and controlled minutely by their Creator, they won’t be forced to end every interpersonal transaction with a terrible pun; but Deanna, in some form of Stockholm Syndrome, is no longer able to survive without the constant corny jokes.

But April, at least, got out. And got to get it on with a cowboy, whom she’ll presumably drop like a hot potato when she finds out that Gerald is getting divorced.

Anyway, Ces Marciuliano’s Medium Large today pretty much has the definitive statement on the subject.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/31/08

“For $10,000 to the clinic, she can write anything she wants!” Oh, Rex, you’re such a whore for humiliation. And for money.

I’m kind of in love with Rex’s little office-basketball move in panel four. “Check it out, everyone! I may not be a big yachting expert, but I’ve still got the athletic talents of my youth! I’m totally not going to cry like a little baby next week while clinging to the side of the boat and projectile vomiting!”

Slylock Fox, 8/31/08

In today’s puzzle, Slylock has gone back to his “Teach other creatures how to be meddling detectives” gig that we’ve seen before. You’d think that this would just produce competition for his own work as a freelance nosey detective, but maybe he gets the big bucks for these classes — especially in this case, in which he isn’t lecturing to kids but appears to be running some sort of adult education program. But the one who looks really anxious about obsolescence is Max, who is regarding that duck with the notepad suspiciously. “Wait — is a sidekick supposed to write things down? Oh, God, I’m going to be replaced! Please, don’t, Sly! I have no job skills!”

Panel from Marvin, 8/31/08

I kind of love this panel out of context. The joke is about terribly fiery grilling accidents, a trope that (and here’s a sentence I don’t think anyone has ever written before) is done better in Crankshaft; but in this panel on its own, with the parents regarding each other with heavy-lidded hostility and Marvin’s eyes wide with terror, it pretty much reads like a threat.

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Dennis the Menace, 8/30/08

At last, I have determined what it takes to get me to laugh at Dennis the Menace: public urination.

Marmaduke, 8/30/08

Now that a new artist has taken over Marmaduke, the “I am about to devour this child” expression on his face is even more terrifying and vivid.

Pluggers, 8/30/08

Pluggers are fish-fucking perverts.

Shoe, 8/30/08

Roz’s meatloaf is mostly made of feet.

UPDATE: Cannot deal with the foobnale tonight … Sunday strips tomorrow morning.