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Hey everybody, it’s the wee hours of Tuesday morning, so it’s COTW time! But first, as is becoming more and more common, it’s adorable merch picture time. Both of today’s pics come from the future Mrs. Spectacular Spider-Brick, who here is modeling the one of the fine t-shirts bearing the CLAM DOWN logo designed by her beau:

And her kitty loves the logo almost as much in its mousepad form!

Also! There are two comics blogs that I have been meaning to link to for about ever:

• Mary Worth, Style Mavin takes on the extremely important task of analyzing the fashion in our favorite meddling-biddy-themed soap strip. Not only does blogmistress Tina offer her opinions on the clothes worn by Mary, Toby, and the rest, but she actually creates real-life versions, as you can see here and here.
• Comics In My Pants proves rather conclusively that every comic strip can be improved by changing the punchline to some variation on the phrase “in my pants”.

And now, here’s this week’s not-in-my-pants top comment!

“Alan’s deep into drug addiction now. Shirt open at the collar, no undershirt seen, and it looks like his cuffs are unbuttoned. Next thing you know, he’ll stop wearing a belt, and maybe let his pants cuffs down an inch. This raw depravity gives me the vapors.” –Muffaroo M. Muffaroo

And the runners-up! So funny!

“Today’s FBOFW would look good on a Hallmark card that had been set on fire and flung into a sewer.” –Angry Kem

“To get pregnant, [Elizabeth] would have had to had contact with Anthony’s junk, which, henceforth, we shall refer to as ‘Little Anthony and the Imperials.'” –Old School Allie Cat

“I can’t wait for the inevitable three-year story arc when Toby and Chinbeard get to Scotland and she’s run over by an oncoming glacier. ‘That ice! It seems to be getting closer. Should I move?'” –Mr. Coffee Nerves

“Toby often uses her credit card to cut up lines of coke, but usually spends cash on her main purchases. Namely, coke.” –Rusty

“I love the confusion on Toby’s face when the bank asks her ‘Did you move to Canada?’ Clearly she doesn’t know. Perhaps she did. How can one tell? Where is Canada? Toby’s mind is on overdrive.” –Gabacho

“There’s something about that ellipsis and subsequent horrified triple exclamation mark in Margo’s speech bubble that suggests very strongly that if she, personally, happened to get any Lu Ann on her hands she would scrub them with a strong disinfectant.” –One-eyed Wolfdog

“When our A3G narrator says the sunshine ‘restores Margo’s spirits,’ what he/she/it means is that, of course, liquor stores are usually only open during daylight hours.” –Nate

“Today’s installment of Luann maintains such a precise balance of ‘huh?’ and ‘eww!’ that it’s almost a thing of beauty, except for being dreadful beyond human expression.” –Violet

“Was Dennis menacing? If he whipped it out on the diving board and started doing an ‘out of control firehose’ on the people below, I have to give him a bit of credit — perhaps even a standing ovation for something finally ‘menacing’ after all these years of milquetoasty bits of annoyance. However, I’m betting that he probably simply stood up on the high board, shaking with fear and a miserable look on his face, with a stream of urine running down his leg as some bigger kids lined up on the ladder behind him kept taunting him to jump.” –Frank Parsnip

“I also like that pluggers buy magazines to look at the pictures, thereby subtly, hilariously subverting one of the oldest jokes about illiteracy. Books can’t be found within fifteen miles of this conversation.” –ChargeMan

“I think the duck looks a little irritated with Slylock. Maybe he suspects the way the thief gets across the water is because the thief is a duck. ‘It’s like he doesn’t even see that I’m here,’ he’s thinking. ‘Howabout the next thief steals chickens from a henhouse — how would he like that?'” –Shmork

“Take the wheel, Jeff, I need to gesticulate.” –Red Greenback

“A3G has such nice, polite, well-groomed dope fiends. I can only assume their drug of choice is Flintstones chewables.” –Joe Blevins

Also worthy of honorable mention (though far too long to reproduce here in its entirety) is faithful reader Gold-Digging Nanny’s meticulous reconstruction of the last few months of Apartment 3-G storylines, with damning analysis of how they have almost universally failed to live up to their potential.

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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.