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Spider-Man, 7/15/07

I know it gets old hearing me go on about how Spider-Man is an incredible feeb, but … Jesus Christ, Spider-Man is such an incredible feeb. Today’s he’s decided that he’s just had about enough of this terrible secret identity curse, and so he’s going to pack up his things and go retire the Spider-Man identity entirely. Here’s a hint, Spidey: Spider-Man is the interesting one — by comparison, anyway. You know who should be going into retirement? Mr. Peter “Waaaah my wife makes more than me” “Waaah I don’t have health insurance even though I have super powers and don’t need it” “Waaah I can’t reach the remote” Parker, that’s who. Does this happen to all superheroes eventually? Were Rex Morgan and Mary Worth originally crime-fighting mutants who retired their superhero personae but somehow held on to their spots in the comics pages? Because Peter Parker sans Spidey could out-dull either of them.

I do like the leftmost panel in the bottom row, though, which dramatically illustrates the insane mob of camera-wielding maniacs that would surely drive even the most powerful superhero into seclusion. “Look, there’s a guy on the roof — he might be Spider-Man! Photograph, photographers, photograph!”

However, in the long run, even the usually reliable NEXT! box disappoints. Is that Papyrus font? Sheesh.

Judge Parker, 7/15/07

You can tell Mr. Caesar is a bad guy, because he wears a full three-piece suit when he goes to inspect his sinister industrial operation, which probably exists solely to transform crude oil directly into global-warming-causing CO₂ without even refining it into useful gasoline first, because he’s just that evil, you see. So also clearly this “Rusty” will have something really awful in store for Sam and Sophie. I’m guessing that when he makes his arrival tomorrow (tomorrow in Judge Parker time; actual date: June 3, 2008), he’s going to look a little something like this:

“GEEEAAHHH!” Sam will say. “YOU CAN HAVE OUR SHARES IN THE WINERY — JUST STOP POINTING THAT FACE AT ME!”

Sophie, meanwhile, is so worked up about environmental disaster that her left eyeball is rolling into the back of her head. It’s kind of freaking me out.

Crankshaft, 7/15/07

“Wait a minute … damned souls, trapped in trees and begging to be urinated on? Packed swimming pools full of boiling water, with the scent of cooking human flesh wafting over the whole neighborhood? That’s not ‘the past’ … those are my fantasies about the torture of my enemies in hell! Sorry, I’m old, I get things mixed up sometimes.”

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Apartment 3-G, 7/14/07

“I found the legendary Marg-Po idol in a monastery high in the mountains of Qinghai province, just like the old man at the museum said. The monks said that its mystical power was the only thing that could defeat Margo. It seems crazy, but I think it’s our only chance.”

Mary Worth, 7/14/07

Welcome to phone sex, Mary Worth-style. That means it’ll take a year and a half, will take place at impossible angles on hideously colored sheets, and everyone will lose interest about a quarter of the way into it.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/14/07

Man, I could just watch hungover Hugh stand absolutely still and blink very gingerly all day. It’s kind of hypnotic. The next three weeks of this strip could just be Hugh blinking as the storyline is advanced by word bubbles coming from off-panel. They could call it The Angriest Hungover Brit in the World.

Shoe, 7/14/07

Possibly the most depressing Shoe ever. I think they’re finally figuring out that if they’re going to have Roz responding to punchlines with huge-eyed horror, they need to make those punchlines truly horrifying.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 7/14/07

Wow, Hekkie held one set of attitudes as a child, but decades later as an adult holds a different set of attitudes entirely on a number of subjects!

That … that is something they’ll do every time, actually.

Boring technical update: Apologies to everyone whose comments were eaten by the new spam filter over the past few days. I know it’s really frustrating, but believe me when I say it’s also been really frustrating for me to try to figure out how and why it’s happening and how to fix it. I switched back the other filter program; hopefully it won’t cause the site to grind to a halt again or start eating comments like it was doing last week. (For those of you who are computer nerds: I had switched from Spam Karma 2 to Akismet and now back to SK2. If you have any words of advice, I will appreciate them.)

On thing that will definitely increase your chances of getting caught in any kind of spam filter is adding a bunch of links to your post. So, I’d advise you not to do that.

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Man, give Comics Curmudgeon readers access to one wacky Gil Thorp cartoon and about 36 hours, and you get an entire elaborate — and utterly hilarious — backstory for the “Rock and Roll Carole King.” Go back and read the comments on this post. I dare you not to giggle. I dare you.

Meanwhile, faithful reader Trotzenbonnie sent me some pics of her taking her Margo!Boxcar!Saturn! shirt out for a walk in he Big Easy. Here she is sucking down a mojito at Pat O’Brien’s…

…and here she’s showering herself with powdered sugar at Cafe Du Monde.

“My M!B!S! t-shirt was admired by several passers-by who all thought my name must be Margo,” she said. “I liked that.”

Also! I’ve linked to plenty of blogs that focus relentlessly on a single comic strip; in all that time, there’s been a gaping hole in that genre that at last has been filled. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Nobody Loves Rusty, for your all-Mark-Trail-all-the-time needs.

And finally, apparently every Webcomics artist is a secret FBOFW reader.

UPDATE: Will GailMania ever end? Probably! But to cash in on it before that happens, coming Monday there’ll be GAIL MARTIN CONCERT T-SHIRTS available from my CafePress store! The design is by faithful reader Dingo:

He says he’ll update it with more cities over the weekend, so post your suggestions in the comments.