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Funky Winkerbean and For Better Or For Worse, 10/3/07

OK, so how would you rather go out?

• In your favorite chair, looking out at the beautiful day, with your beloved wife nearby?
• Being lead through some vast, empty void by some dude with a deeply cheesy tails/Phantom of the Opera get-up?

This may not quite a fair comparison — after all, with Grandpa Jim, we’re lingering on this side of the veil. Perhaps after reaping Lisa, Masky McDeath is going to stop by Millborough to pick up Jim’s soul as well. Lisa’s attempts to make conversation as they travel to the next plane of existence will be met only with inappropriate curse words and bellows of “BOXCAR!”

Apartment 3-G, 10/3/07

Wow, it’s Tommie time again! I can’t believe we’re spending time with America’s dullest redhead when we could be watching Margo screw and/or eviscerate Eric or Lu Ann … do … whatever it is … holy cats, I’m more up on Tommie’s storyline than Lu Ann’s! That’s real bad news for Ms. Powers right there.

Anyhoo, hep cat Gary seems to have taken the object of his affection to the hottest, swingingest, tie-and-jacket-requiredest, whitest big band club in all of Manhattan! Or, more succinctly, he’s seems to have taken her to 1955.

Blondie, 10/3/07

I have to admit that I really enjoyed this Blondie. Leaving aside the question of where exactly Dagwood and Herb are walking in this sprawling, car-oriented exurban landscape (in their work clothes, no less), you have to at least assume that they’re going to the same place. So Herb must have suddenly and angrily taken an alternate route between panels two and three, possibly dashing across the neighbors’ lawns, his shoes and pants cuffs quickly muddying. It’s all worth it to teach that damn Bumstead a lesson via pneumonia. Even his freaky hair antennae are drooping.

Hagar the Horrible, 10/3/07

“Or, since he’s a Viking chief, he sometimes kills them, enslaves their wives and children, seizes all of their valuable, and then burns their villages to the ground! Say, brother, you probably have some nice stuff in that monastery of yours, don’t you?”

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A fair number of you are probably going to the Small Press Expo in Bethesda next weekend. Perhaps more of you will be going once you find out that you’ll be able to see me there! Unlike MoCCA earlier this year, I won’t just be wandering around aimlessly; at 12:30 pm on Saturday, October 13, I’ll be moderating a panel called “Nemo’s Wake: Comic Stripping Today.” The panelists will be Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead), Nicholas Gurewitch (The Perry Bible Fellowship), Keith Knight (The K Chronicles), and Ted Rall (Search and Destroy), and I’ll be trying to get them to discuss (according to the panel description) “the strengths and struggles of drawing personal work in the comic strip form today, in venues ranging from the web to alternative newsweeklies to the traditional daily comics page,” though I may mostly focus on getting them to talk smack about Beetle Bailey. Don’t miss it! And even if you don’t feel like going to this panel, I will in fact be wandering around aimlessly for most of the rest of that day, so be on the lookout if you want to chat me up!

On a related note, is anyone going to be driving either to or from SPX from or to the Baltimore area on Saturday, October 13? Would you be willing to give me a ride? If so, e-mail me! I’m more than happy to take the train down, so this panel doesn’t depend on your generosity, but wouldn’t it be nice to help me save a bit of time and a few bucks in return for an hour or so in close quarters with my sparkling generosity and wit? No serial killers, please.

On a totally unrelated note … hey, young people of today! Are you on the Facebook? Would you like to associate your love for my fine site with whatever sort of social networking hullabaloo you young people do on the Facebook? Well, now there’s a Comics Curmudgeon Facebook group! I didn’t create it, but I did join it, and (assuming you have a Facebook account) so should you! And then the magic will happen.

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Archie, 10/2/07

Huh, the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000 seems to have put the wrong dialogue into today’s cartoon. Here, let me fix that:

Panel one, Miss Gundy: You feel that our school has singularly failed to inculcate any sort of moral sense into our student body? That we are training an army of sociopaths?

Panel one, Mr. Weatherbee: Indeed! What is it that has hollowed out their spirits from the inside, leaving them only fit to be alternately victims and tormentors in life’s theater of cruelty?

Panel two: [A sickening crunch as Archie’s kneecap fractures, leaving him with a limp that will linger the rest of his life.]

Panel three, Mr. Weatherbee: Perhaps we shouldn’t have painted every wall in the school a blindingly bright white. We sought to inculcate spiritual purity, but instead we created the illusion of a yawning void that reflects the emptiness of the students’ souls!

Gasoline Alley, 10/2/07

When last we left this feature, Slim’s insane meteor plot had landed him in an actual mental hospital. Soon afterwards, his clinician choose to follow an unorthodox treatment regime — sending him and Clovia to the beach — and Skeezix, who is the father of one (possibly both? who knows?) of them, had to take over at the garage and deal with their surly employee, who went out on a call and then vanished. In this strip’s newly found rhythm of veering from dull to insane as the plot develops, Skeezix has tracked the missing mechanic to this creepy old house, which is probably inhabited by a family of inbred murderers wearing human skin suits, or a passageway to the plane of damned souls, or something similarly bizarre. The harrowing adventures in this hell-house will of course cut back and forth to and from the dialect-heavy hillbilly antics of Rufus and Joel, who Skeezix left in charge of the garage.

Spider-Man, 10/2/07

Oh, Spider-Man! Is there any hero in the pantheon of American comics tougher and more noble than you? Spidey and his wife have decided to flee Los Angeles for the safer climes of Manhattan; they’ve been driven out of the city of angels by the twin scourges of the Shocker (a “super” villain whose “super” powers mainly consist of a crippling inferiority complex and vibrating gloves he built in his basement metal shop) and an army of amateur paparazzi. But now he faces his greatest challenge yet: heavy traffic on the 405! Obviously it’s worth Peter Parker betraying his secret identity if that’s what it takes to get to the airport on time; after all, air travel between LA and New York is incredibly sporadic, and if Peter and Mary Jane don’t make their flight, clinging to the landing gear like it’s the last helicopter out of Saigon if need be, they could be trapped in Los Angeles indefinitely.

Gil Thorp, 10/2/07

Uh-oh, Howard looks like he’s about to prove that wearing Buddy Holly glasses and being named “Howard” doesn’t automatically make you smart. It’s well known that the Internet primarily exists as a vehicle for anonymous personal abuse. Googling the name of a crappy high school quarterback who plays in a town unnaturally obsessed with high school sports will mainly serve to demonstrate how many ways there are to misspell “YOU FUCKING SUCK.”