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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.

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Hi and Lois, 7/13/07

The eldest Flagston child apparently hasn’t noticed that the background to the strip, which in Hi and Lois is usually rendered with a certain amount of detail, as if someone feels obligated to at least pretend to care, is completely absent today; Chip and his dad (and his dad’s disgustingly ancient chair and side table) are floating at random in a nightmarish vacuum of gleaming white nothingness. This indicates that their already fictional universe is becoming less and less detailed, leaving them with only a few concrete items and concepts to latch onto, one of which is apparently Chip’s job. So, the poor boy won’t just be flipping burgers for the rest of his life; in this existentialist blankness, he’ll be flipping burgers for the rest of eternity.

Beetle Bailey, 7/13/07

Not that I have a long history of drinking binges or anything, but in my experience they result in giddiness, a heightened and unjustified sense of competence and/or attractiveness (one’s own and others’), lapses in judgement, and loss of motor control and digestive stability. They do not, however, generate pleasant hallucinations. Still, it’s kind of heartrending and pathetic to see what General Halftrack’s perfect world is like. Apparently it involves sexy half-naked angels, birds, a gnome tending a pot of gold, and some kind of golf club rainbow (and I hope I don’t offend anyone here, but if your transcendent fantasies involve equipment that you can buy at Dick’s Sporting Goods, I pity the narrowness of your imagination).

Incidentally, does anyone want to explain what the deal is with Beetle Bailey and gnomes? In a way that won’t scar me for life?

Crankshaft, 7/13/07

I come before you today not to criticize Crankshaft’s hateful misanthropy, nor to comment on his awful punning, nor even to remark on the fucking smirks to which his entire family is prone. I seek only to express concern at their awful pallor. Seriously, they look like death warmed over. Was this particular shade of off-flesh intended for Funky Winkerbean and accidentally misrouted? Or is Crankshaft going to one-up zombie strips written by the sons and nephews of the original creators and become a strip that’s literally about zombies?

Sally Forth, 7/13/07

This actually made me laugh aloud this morning. Ted says it hurt, but look at his eyes. You can tell that he stopped feeling pain — or feeling anything at all, really — about three weeks ago.

Hey! Remember how a little band called the Quarrymen eventually changed their name to the Beatles? Well, New Delhi Monkey Gang (that would be Hil and Faye) are looking for a similar shift in fortunes to go with a new moniker. Head over to Ces’s blog to help him pick a new name. I’m pushing heavily for “Teenage Girl President.” I’m also pushing for Faye to get a new guitar that isn’t so hideously green.

Pluggers, 7/13/07

Pluggers are awful damn cheerful, considering how close they are to all that manure.