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Hey everyone, it’s Sunday night, and you know what that means … it means the COMMENT OF THE WEEK!

Curtis: “So how is Diane going to tell Stacey’s mom (who obviously doesn’t have it going on) about this? ‘Oh, by the way, my son was masturbating to a tape of your daughters tits’?” –Krohmdohm

And it also means the very funny runners-up, obviously.

“You know, I would think a place with the name ‘Bum Boat’ would show up in Gil Thorp long before it would in Mary Worth. It’s only natural: every Gil Thorp strip seems like the lead-up to the hardcore scenes in gay porn, whereas every Mary Worth strip seems like the lead-up to solving the mystery in Murder She Wrote. I guess that’s where they’re similar: they both try to string the reader along with a promise of something exciting around the corner but constantly deliver inadvertently humorous situations without giving the reader the goods they expect.” –Forthillrox

“Dick Tracy, it begins to dawn on me, is Wagner for the comics page. The vast dilation of time … the protracted sequential repetition … the ambiguous, perplexing perspectives (so very like the disorienting harmonic confusion of, e.g., Tristan) … the omnipresent fire and death … yeah. It all fits. Today, witness the return of the ‘My Gretchen’ leitmotif, subtly transformed to seem smaller, fainter, more querulous, as if borne through the most poignant tragedy. (‘Poignant’ here is used in the sense of ‘having a considerable splatter radius.’)” –Keg of Curd

“I’m pretty sure this is the first time in recorded history that the phrase ‘the Wall Street Journal’ has concluded with an exclamation point.” –dbp

“The only thing Dick Tracy renders more lovingly than the excruciating torment of criminals is chins. Dick Tracy loves chins. Today we have the beautiful trifecta of Dick’s utterly rectangular chin, the Baron’s respectable jowls, and the elongated majesty of … whoever that is.” –Reynard Noir.

“If this strip has somehow put a subliminal image of death into my head, and that goddamn butler shows up when my time comes, I swear I will come back and sue Batiuk and his heirs from beyond the grave.” –Quäsenbo Pan

“I’ll just add that I’ve never seen a worse waiter than the one in Archie. Two glasses, and he looks like he’s about to topple over. Has Betty’s pantslessness given him a giant erection? Is he slipping on the mess on the floor caused by Betty and Archie’s lovemaking? What I love most is his look of grim determination, as if Betty and Archie have been screwing on the same spot every day for the last month, and Mr. Waiter has up until this moment always avoided their love-jasm. Not today, however. ‘Today,’ thinks the waiter, ‘Today I’m just going to walk through it. Screw them and their love juices. I have a goddamn job to do, and today I’m going to do it, and not by some scenic route, either.’ His customer waits with all the anxious expectation of a sports fan, or just a fan of watching people fall violently backwards.” –RaJ

Mary Worth: “Can we please stop seeing three-hair combover dad pawing his daughter? It’s surpassing creepy and moving into … what comes after creepy? Crawly?” –chumley

“For this Spider-Man arc to generate any real suspense, they need to tell us just what TV show they’re trying to fly back home in time to catch. What are the stakes? Are we even talking new episode here?” –BlinkAndItsOver

“I’ve come to the conclusion that there is only one tear in this strip; it just moves around from character to character, sort of like a virus. Except for Margo, of course: she is immune.” –Piper Grey

“Spider-Man impresses me with its ability to be completely uninteresting. At least the Phantom usually has someone holding a gun or a knife or sharp pencil or whatever; this is just one strip away from being Spiderman’ll Do It Every Time: ‘Webbo has all these amazing powers fromma spider but whoooaaa he can’t deal with the crazy airport security when hez gotta make a plane!'” –RoboMax

“So is today’s lesson about thriftiness? Because cans of shaving cream are way more expensive than disposable razors. A true plugger would lather up with soap stolen from the men’s room in the gas station.” –Jym

“Oh, the second panel [of Gil Thorp] warms the heart, seeing the teamwork between our heroes — one able to read numbers, the other words: together they are unstoppable literacy machine!” –SecretMargo

“Niki just got back from 1985, judging by that boombox.” –Tweeks_Coffee

And hey, did someone say “Curmudgeon fan meetup?” A note from faithful reader The Specatcular Spider-Brick:

Here are some pictures of the Madison ‘Mudgeon Meetup 2007 (a.k.a. MMMMMVII). We gathered for dinner Friday at Ella’s Deli, an eclectic spot with some odd decor that reminded us of the comics. We saw a Popeye straddling a rather Freudian rocket and soaring across the ceiling on a wire; a table filled with model trains à la John Patterson; and a Mark Trail lookalike with an evil twin mustache trying to hook an angry muskie (though the way he was bending over, it may well have been Rex Morgan in hip waders).

Here’s the whole gang assembled, and toasting the memory of Funky Winkerbean’s Lisa Moore. From left: The Spectacular Spider-Brick, Crooked Soricidae, Jamus the Bartender, Gadge Cubic Mole Preener, and Dingo.

And here’s another. Again, quoth The SSB: “Here, Dingo, at right, displays a treasure Jamus found in a used bookstore — a compilation of TDIET made back when it was still timely! Or did the panels from those days refer to situations in the Roaring ’20s? I think at least one had something to do with waiting for the stagecoach. Meanwhile, Gadge Cubic wonders when the TDIET he sent in will be printed.”

More pics are available at Gadge Cubic, Mole Preener’s Flickr site.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/7/07

More often than not, when I mention to people that I’m a fan of Rex Morgan, M.D., and similar strips, it completely boggles their mind. “But how can you force yourself to read that boring crap day after day?” is generally the sort of thing they ask me. Days like today are the payoffs that keep me going. Sure, the final panel, with Rex going into such paroxysms of shock and horror that his face is about to collapse in on itself, would be hilarious even without context, but you really need to backstory to appreciate all the other psychodrama going on here — everyone’s sneering at Rex’s mothball-scented bid to match his father’s rugged outdoorsmanship, and Niki blowing the whole thing to bits with his city-kid need for creature comforts.

In a conventional narrative, Rex and Niki’s initial antagonism on the trip would eventually soften into mutual compromise — Rex would wow Niki with his fly-casting skills, and Niki would teach Rex hip youth-culture lingo like “radical” and “extreme”; and maybe Niki would help Rex understand why the good doctr needs his dead father’s approval so badly, and that a situation where one is waist-deep in water and short on food isn’t necessarily a Katrina survivor’s idea of fun. But this is Rex Morgan, M.D., a strip whose hero never even tries to grow as a person or engage in a single moment of self-reflection. Niki will be made to hate fishing every bit as much as young Rex did, only to try to force it on his own son years later for reasons he can only dimly grasp. Thank God Sarah Morgan was born a girl, and is thus forever safe from Rex’s relentless Pygmalionesque schemes.

Mary Worth, 10/7/07

And sometimes the hoary old soaps can deliver perfect moments of emo pathos. I have to admit that, while the grinding gears of Mary Worth plot changes are generally audible from miles away, I’m not sure whether this is meant to be a capstone on l’affaire Drew or a setup for more heartstring-pulling to come. Either way, though, I’m going to enjoy imagining these roses sitting on Dawn’s dresser, withering more and more each day, but staying in their vase until they’re reduced to a skeletal mess, and Dawn seeming to draw more and more strength from their death until she’s more powerful than Drew could possibly imagine.

One Big Happy, 10/7/07

Ha ha, this is some of the most dick-tastic dad action in the funnies since — well, since Rex Morgan. One could argue that the point of a school-assigned spelling lists is to teach children how to spell, not how to memorize arbitrary lists of words just long enough to pass a test, and that we should be impressed that Joe has actually managed to get his little pea brain around the concept of homonyms. But then we wouldn’t have gotten to see Joe squirm about in his usual learning-avoiding contortions. Dad’s shown himself to be more of a math guy, anyway.

Spider-Man, 10/7/07

This strip is notable solely for panel five, which contains a passable likeness of Leonardo DiCaprio that apparently absorbed all of the artist’s celebrity-drawing abilities, as nobody else at this “Hollywood costume party” is even remotely recognizable as someone famous. But while I’m here, I might as well point out that this is yet another example of the most irritating weapon in Spider-Man’s narrative arsenal: the dilemma that solves itself in a day or two with no intervention from the protagonist whatsoever (see here for a particularly egregious example from a couple of years ago). In this light, it’s probably impossible to believe that the typically dramatic NEXT! box will live up to its promise. “You can’t go home again — or can you? Oh, wait, actually, I was right the first time. It turns out that you can. Never mind!”

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Crankshaft, 10/6/07

Wow, most comics characters at least make some sort of pretense of respecting religion and some vague concept of a Supreme Being, but Ed Crankshaft has officially added to his Most Cantankerous Comics Character Ever cred by sneering at the notion that any sort of just deity might respond to our pleas. Since he lives in a universe shared with Funky Winkerbean, in which characters are visited by afflictions both arbitrary (cancer, alcoholism) and ironic (hearing loss, limb loss) at a much higher than average rate, he’s obviously decided that begging his Creator for some droplet of mercy will only intensify the punishment to come. Still, the fact that he’s doling out his atheistic opinions to his fellow oldster, reading a book about prayer in a doctor’s waiting room and desperately trying to hold on to some thread of possibility for continued survival, reinforces the ’Shaft’s hardcore crank status.

Hi and Lois, 10/6/07

Of course, Crankshaft’s religious impulses may have been cynically flattened by cartoons like this. Remember, kids, if your congregation is large and wealthy enough to build an enormous, Medieval Times-inspired faux-castle for its church, its members must be one step closer to salvation! It just stands to reason!

Apartment 3-G, 10/6/07

Oh man, oh man, I am so looking forward to Lu Ann’s Adventures In Unrealistically Specific Memory Loss! Does she even remember that she’s an artist? Doesn’t she wonder why she’s an elementary school art teacher if not? Wait a minute — did she somehow manage to hold on to her art teacher job despite the fact the she presumably didn’t come to work in the weeks and weeks she spent barricaded in her carbon monoxide-filled art studio? Does she even remember what a “job” is? Is that why in the first panel she looks so baffled when Alan claims to have one?

Speaking of carbon monoxide poisoning — did anyone ever have words with the kindly studio landlord about the incredibly unsafe status of his building? I’m not up on New York landlord-tenant law, but surely the right to not be suffocated is at least implied in most commercial leases, yes?

Dick Tracy, 10/6/07

Good lord, I was really hoping that we wouldn’t have to look at the hideous visage of Dick’s commie nemesis anymore. But then I saw his weird, weird ass. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

Dennis the Menace, 10/6/07

Dennis reducing his only friend to a urine-soaked lump of fear is pretty much par for the course for this strip, but I’m kind of intrigued by Henry’s little smile at the psychological hold his son has over his playmate. Presumably the Mitchells will spend this camping trip gaslighting Joey until he’s only fit for a locked mental ward. The only question: is there some financial gain spurring their cruelty on, or is it mere sadistic sport?

Mark Trail, 10/6/07

I haven’t been discussing Mark Trail much because it’s been so painfully moronic, but here’s the gist: Shirley the duck and her chicks, who have been saved first from bulldozers and then from (no, really) rain by Homer the construction foreman, Mark Trail, and some other chumps I refuse to go into the archive to identify, are now about to be eaten by this rather awesomely rendered fish. What lesson will we learn in the end?

• Sometimes nature itself can be crueler than the most rapacious developer.
• There’s no point in trying to protect the weak or care about anything; might as well give up and start drinking!
• Ducks are delicious, and baby ducks are especially delicious.
• Not even fish are safe from Mark’s patented Right Hook O’ Justice!

Discuss.