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Hey kids! Though it’s the wee hours of the morning, I am still here to offer up this week’s top comment:

“You know what’s been great about Mary Worth this week? Mary Worth hasn’t been in it.” –Inspector Dim

And the runners-up … a lot of ’em this week, but they all kept me in stitches:

“In other news, Michael’s crappy novel has arrived, guaranteeing us a very painful couple of weeks. I’m going to need a vat of ice cream sprinkled with Vicodin to get through this.” –Whippersnapper

“How does ’Shaft have a t-shirt tanline? All he’s ever worn in his entire life is that filthy, filthy jacket.” –Tweeks_Coffee

“I think Cassandra and the boys in blue at the police station have a thing for each other, which is why she keeps setting up these obvious scams and they keep pretending to play along. If Slylock keeps interposing himself in their affairs, he’s looking to take a 45-caliber nap one of these days.” –Harold

“Over the decades, I have received many hundreds of books in the mail. I don’t recall ever receiving one packaged with styrofoam shipping peanuts. On the other hand, over the decades I have frequently received hazardous waste samples for analytical testing. They were very often packaged in styrofoam shipping peanuts. Draw your own conclusions.”–Saxman

“‘My book! My writing! I’m just like Hemingway!’ Yeah, without the pistol.” –bats :[ on Mike Patterson

“I notice that Deanna is becoming familiar with publishing terms like ‘advance copy.’ Soon, her education will be augmented with terms like ‘remaindered’ and ‘returned.'” –willethompson

“The Judge Parker water politics storyline is freaking me out. If had guessed which daily comic strip would be ripping off Chinatown, it wouldn’t have been JP. It would have been either Doonesbury, for the penetrating gaze into the human condition, or The Family Circus, for the incest.” –ratnerstar

“Only one story was important enough today to make the front page of the latest edition of NEWS — the story important enough to merit three-inch-high headlines screaming ‘ESCAPEES ELUDE DRAGNET!’ I can hardly wait for Rex and Niki to get to that unmarked road next month! Clearly: they have a date with ADVENTURE! Oh, and pederasty as well, obviously.” –Fred P.

“I’m no geologist, but it seems to me that, lurking somewhere like a will o’ the wisp in the dark swamp which is Cully’s brain, there is some notion, with his ‘A bunch of us did it all the time,’ of the concept of ‘assumption of risk’ by his late victim. If Mr. Victim, in the supposition based on numerous encounters in the recent past that all would go well, offered himself willingly into Mr. Vale’s power, and Mr. Vale, acting under the same supposition, and acting without coercion, and without covert intent to harm, merely followed through in the normal activities and details of the same pastime that Mr. Victim had decided of his own free will to partake of, and had indeed perhaps partaken of in the past on numerous occasions, then, m’lud, I submit to you that my client the unfortunate Mr. Vale is himself the true victim of this ghastly accident — if accident it be! Indeed, with my next witness, I intend to lay out to the court the strange, damnable, almost diabolic threads of this extraordinary tangled web of intrigue which will shortly m’lud reveal a plot so fiendish, so infernal, so heinous that your lordship will reel back in horror and dismay. Call Cardinal Richelieu!” –odinthor

“Well, I say, take heart, little Jeffy; and keep your chin up even though I know it’s difficult since your poor neck is straining under the weight of that megacephalic melonhead of yours.” –Paperback Rifler

“The other nagging question is, is he wearing it ironically? I think the answer is no. I don’t think Drew would recognize irony if it leapt out of the ocean and stabbed him with its proboscis.” –Gold-Digging Nanny

“Wow, Margo isn’t a very nice person, is she?” –Dollface

“Alas, brave Homer! Like Odysseus reuniting with fair Penelope after facing peril and tribulation, perhaps you too will win back your true love with your tale of daring and adventure. You might want to leave out the part where you got knocked out by a fish.” –SmartPeopleOnIce

“The standard line on Family Circus is, of course, that it sucks and sucks hard. There is a great deal of evidence to support this theory … whole decades worth, in fact. However, in just the last couple of weeks, there have been at least three FC panels here that I consider actually pretty funny, all of them featuring Dolly, who is fast becoming my favorite FC character. I’ve recently admired the cool, Zen-like logic with which she has discussed dead flowers (‘these flowers are done being flowers’) and candy which has fallen on the ground (‘it belongs to the ants’). In the cartoon above, we see another side of Dolly’s personality: a wariness of an all-powerful God. Dolly and her siblings have obviously been raised in a Christian home, but she seems to be the only one who has intuited that God is not always Mr. Nice Guy. Here, fearing her prayer might be dreadfully misinterpreted, she begs her Creator not to kill a nice old lady. Based on God’s track record, Dolly’s fears are quite well-founded. Good call, Dolly. You display a wisdom which has utterly eluded your imbecilic siblings.” –Joe Blevins

“Of course the governor has time to spend an entire night partying at the Old Haunted Hennessy Mansion — which I assume is one of those scary houses people set up for Halloween. He’s obviously finished dealing with every one of his state’s problems, judging from his immaculately empty desk.” –BigTed

“‘If Dick Tracy will do it, so will I.’ That is probably the most dangerous statement ever made. The street will be lined with scalded bodies tonight.” –evie oh oh

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Shoe, 10/21/07

As the funnies have repeatedly taught us, there’s nothing better for tickling your funny bone as you read the paper over a leisurely Sunday breakfast like a lonely, depressed bird trying to deal with his empty life by drinking alone. Usually it’s the Perfesser whose ruined, emotionally dead existence gets put on display for our amusement, but today’s it’s Shoe, because, hey, why the hell not. He wants to drink whiskey until his vision is impaired! His psychic wounds are so deep that no amount of substance use can put an end to the pain! Normally this is the stuff of depressing black-and-white European cinema, but there’s a cute pun here and a reference to a classic movie star that 75 percent of the strip’s readers have never heard of — plus, as mentioned, the poor depressed alcoholic and his enabler are birds — so in this case it’s a God-damned laugh riot.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/21/07

I have to admit that I found this strip both sweet in and of itself and a decent way to frame the Great Funky Winkerbean Leap Forward. However, I do wonder exactly what dialog preceded “…and so that’s what happens to people when they die.” If this were the Family Circus, there probably would have been some treacly description of God taking you up to a beautiful shiny white paradise where you get to look down from above on a cloud, but in this strip I’m guessing Les provided a detailed description of the typical sequence of organ failure, followed by a chemistry-heavy discourse on the decay of organic matter. Similarly, in a cutesier strip, little Summer’s heartwarming gesture in the first panel of the second row would indicate that Lisa will live forever in her heart, but it’s more likely that Les brought her to Central Park so she could dig up some of her ashes and eat them.

Judge Parker, 10/21/07

Yeah, Red, wait! Stick around! I can’t imagine why you’d want to leave. Is it just because one of your hosts got drunk and tried to shank you with a steak knife because you pointed out that he got himself into his own mess? Nice little egging on there from Sam — “Wish you hadn’t sad that, counselor! Don’t make Mullety Flatop angry — you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry!” Why, if you storm out now, you won’t get to see Trudi break that wine bottle on the edge of the table and go after her knife-wielding brother. Should be a hoot!

Oh, and note to Keith: Don’t all shysters have law degrees by definition? Also, I know it’s your house and all, but you really shouldn’t try to stab people with the flatware.

Dennis the Menace, 10/21/07

Ha ha, look at Dennis’s pissy face in the last panel! I know what he’s going to be when grows up: sullen and unemployed!

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Mary Worth and Apartment 3-G, 10/20/07

OH SNAP DR. DREW GOT SERVED AGAIN BY HIS OTHER GIRLFRIEND! See, this is the advantage of dating an older woman: instead of violently lashing out when she’s wronged, she just slips some stilleto-sharp barb right between your emotional ribs. Drew, Vera’s tough because she’s had to endure things you can’t even imagine. Did you know she used to be rich and now she’s not? And then she had to get a job? Clearly she’s not to be trifled with.

On an unrelated note, I’m a little unsettled by Vera’s throw pillows being the exact same awful orange color as he sofa. They’re supposed to complement the piece of furniture, not blend in as if they’re hiding from predators.

The contrast between Vera’s steely, several-weeks-post-breakup resolve and Margo’s floundering hostility is instructive. Obviously our still conspicuously non-engaged gal Magee is not holding things together as well as she’d like us to believe, and Ruby’s little smile shows she knows who has the upper hand in this confrontation. Still, now that Margo has arbitrarily decided that Ruby is her enemy, she can’t back down, so this should be a gloriously amusing conflict. Perhaps she’ll lasso a heartbroken Gina into some sort of Axis of Insensitive Brunette Evil.

Gil Thorp, 10/20/07

Faithful reader Virginia deserves credit for noting the resemblance between this obviously bad news dude (torn-off sleeves? torn-off sleeves?) and Mary Worth’s legendary Tommy the Tweaker. Whether or not he’s an incompetent meth dealer, I’m going to guess that ponytail guy is going to lead poor, vulnerable, prone-to-violence Cully down the wrong path (I mean, torn-off sleeves? Seriously?). In the end, we’ll learn a valuable lesson, which will either be that youthful offenders need to be integrated back into society as quickly as possible to avoid recidivism, or that there is no hope whatsoever for youthful offenders and they need to be put into a dark hole from which they’ll never be able to get out.

I appreciate Cully’s perfectly triangular sandwich in panel one. Does he get his lunch from OCD Deli?

Dick Tracy, 10/20/07

I don’t want to cast aspersions on the intelligence level of the average American, but I’m willing to bet that more people in this country know the name of Britney Spears’ ex-husband than the name of the current governor of the state they live in; therefore, any town in which Dick Tracy and the governor are “celebrities” has got to be either the best educated municipality in America or the most boring (probably both, actually). Still, the managers of this bizarre charity event are right to think that getting the trigger-happy Detective Tracy involved will attract media attention. The banner headline in the local paper the next morning will no doubt read something like “DETECTIVE MISTAKES GOVERNOR FOR GHOST, SHOOTS HIM 148 TIMES”.