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Ah, back in Baltimore again! Gotta go wash off that (extremely) fabulous Rehoboth Beach sand, but you are owed, and you will receive, this weeks top comments. #1 goes to this hilarious tribute to Gasoline Alley’s incipient white panic:

“Oh, black people! Lord have mercy! You just give ’em a basketball and they’ll shoot it at a hoop — it doesn’t matter what season it is! Good gracious! I do believe I have the vapors!” –Windier E. Megatons

And the super-hilarious runners up!

“Not even the flowers are safe from Mary’s meddling, and what’s worse is that they can’t run away.” –Cap’nCheetah

“Finally! It’s not really Spider-Man until someone angrily turns off their TV.” –Trilobite

“I’m not so sure that’s a bee in the final panel. Bees tend to look like insects, rather than hideous fusions of a hummingbird, a wasp, and Ziggy. That one little arm it’s extending towards the window is particularly creepy, as if the poor thing is buzzing ‘Help me! Help me Mary, you killed Aldo, now please, put me out of my quasi-insectile, Kafkaesque misery!'” –Wirrrn

“[Lynn Johnston]’s abandoned all subtlety in her message-mongering, and has resorted to literally having a character harangue people from atop a table.” –Gadge Cubic, Mole Preener

“I thought Charterstone was off-limits to children. Where did those kids in the background of panel two come from? Did condo management decide that there wasn’t enough pee in the pool?” –Darkefang

“Yikes, Mary’s looking a little mannish there in panel one. It’s like they stuck Mary Worth’s head on Mary Worth’s body.” –Anonymous

[Luann]: “Oh, the hilarious innuendo and misunderstandings that will follow! It’ll be like Noises Off meets an episode of Frasier, only much much gayer.” –Lettuce

“For a young doctor, Drew Cory has all of the charisma of an Exodus minister at a rave.” –Dingo

“Did I miss something? The last line in the last panel should read ‘It all makes sense. Wait, no. It doesn’t. I lied and you’re a moron.'” –Foolster41

“Watching Vera attempt to be mysterious and seductive is a bit like watching a four-year-old try to explain how a car works: it’s mostly a stream of nonsense and gibberish, and while it’s amusing, it really isn’t going to lead anywhere.” –Trilobite

“Did they keep the condom that broke? That’s gotta be in there somewhere.” –alamo

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Quick thing #1: It’s a good thing I didn’t follow my basest instincts and do some kind of Pluggers-themed routine for ROFL, because apparently that’s old news in the New York comedy world. Laugh at the pluggers now, effete New York intellectuals! But you’ll be sorry when you need their simple down-home wisdom! Or their crappy dressers!

Quick thing #2: Life imitates Mark Trail … in China!

On Monday, an aircraft collided with a flock of nine pigeons but managed to land safely, the newspaper said. It said the birds were carrier pigeons raised by a farmer living nearby.

The airport has strung nets and tried to scare away pigeons with loudspeakers that broadcast sounds of owls and other predators but has had little success, the China Daily said.

Looks like those Chinese fellas need the help of a Right Hook o’ Justice™.

Kids, I am fleeing the steamy heat of Baltimore for a weekend at the Delaware shore. This post is a COTW-unmonitored zone once again (one of these days I’m going to get a comment-monitoring intern for my absences). Comments of the week Sunday night, and new comics Monday!

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Archie, 6/29/07

When I was a little kid, one of my favorite comic series was Richie Rich. I loved how ridiculously and cartoonishly wealthy he was; there was one particularly memorable sequence in which Richie and his family wandered through a wing of their freakishly huge mansion that they had forgotten existed, and found among other things a bathtub full of jewels. Archie’s Lodge family’s plutocratic status never quite reaches that level of caricature, but sometimes it comes close. The enormous gap in wealth between Veronica’s family and everybody else in Riverdale does lead one to wonder about the community’s economic structure: perhaps it’s all a company town owned by Mr. Lodge. The absence of a community of fellow-billionaires at least explains why Veronica goes to Riverdale High with the plebes: there aren’t enough rich kids to sustain an elite private school, and education at home with a governess has sadly fallen out of style.

At any rate, you’d think that the Lodges could at least afford a secluded private beach that wasn’t within binocular-viewing distance of the grubby seashore where the masses hang out. From the looks of it, they can’t be more than a hundred yards or so from the public beach; maybe there’s just a velvet rope separating the two or something. The weird target thing in the background might explain the proximity, though: perhaps the Lodges like to pick off plebian beach-goers with a high-powered rifle for sport. Since Riverdale law enforcement consists entirely of Lodge hired goons, they can hunt this cunning human prey with impunity.

The little girl at bottom right, who is at most knee high and yet appears to be about eight, is freaking me out. MAKE HER STOP STARING AT ME!

Gil Thorp, 6/29/07

The immature among you will no doubt latch onto the phrase “I pumped you full” and have your jollies at the thought of ol’ Clambake sodomizing the student-athletes of Milford. Maybe you’ll even use it in your own classless double-entendres (“Yeah, I’d like to pump her full of misplaced confidence, if you know what I mean!”). For my money, though, the funniest thing in this strip is the narration box in panel three. If I had my druthers, every single Gil Thorp strip would include a panel that contained the phrase “Also down on himself: [Insert name of indistinguishable Milford resident here].” Soon the strip will be so consumed with self-loathing that it’ll make Funky Winkerbean seem like an Ecstacy-fuelled rave.

Family Circus, 6/29/07

Since PJ is the fourth child, if we were being realistic his baby book would actually contain his crumpled-up birth certificate stuck between two random pages and nothing else. The kids seem to have the right idea, as they clearly think of him as one of the pets.