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Sally Forth and Peanuts, 9/2/06

It’s never particularly fair to compare any comic to Peanuts, but I was struck by the convergence of Ted’s team snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with one of the earlier Charlie-Brown’s-baseball-team-are-losers storylines. This strip again goes to show how routinely Peanuts was probably the bleakest thing not just on the comics pages, but in the entire newspaper. Ted at least is directing his rage outward in an emotionally healthy manner. Presumably the tears and self-recrimination will happen later.

Gil Thorp, 9/2/06

More interesting than the dating etiquette of Milford High students is … well, anything, really, but I’m thinking here of Marty Moon’s sad little face in panel two. “Hey guys, I thought maybe the three of us could hang out … guys? Oh, um, that’s OK, I’ll just go back to my car … I have some booze … I’ll be fine…”

If you’re wondering how Von and Mandy managed to save Marty’s bacon … Ben Franklin figured out pretty quickly that the two of them were pulling some elementary scam, was impressed by their moxie, and cut Moon’s $5,000 debt down to $500. No, I don’t understand it either.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 9/3/06

Note that Lugbutt and his bartender are totally capable of speaking in complete sentences, but that he and his doctor communicate entirely in a disconnected series of proper nouns. For me, the ironic reversal would have been much better if he and the sawbones had spent the whole visit talking about booze. “Beer … malt liquor … scotch … vomiting … rum … cirrhosis of the liver … vodka … etc …”

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Big ups to faithful reader The Ray for being the very first to send in his photographic tribute to Aldomania:

Note that The Ray is not only wearing the shirt, he’s also reading Mary Worth. That’s dedication for you! He claims to have worn the shirt to work, “to the delight (and confusion) of my colleagues.” If you’d like to be more like The Ray, pick up your Aldomania ringer t! Or, if you prefer, you can also get the junior baby doll, baseball jersey, or junior raglan.

Of course, it’s not all Aldomania over at the store. Check out Will, lookin’ good in his black Finger-Quotin’ Margo t:

Those t-shirts are of course still available as well. And once you’ve purchased them, you’d better send me some pics of you in ’em! Will and The Ray have joined the pantheon of models in the sidebar — will you be next?

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Archie, 9/1/06

Ahh, the joke-writing computer rears its ugly head again. You can tell because Dad Archie uses the phrase “1-cent coin” in panel one, which has never been uttered by any carbon-based native speaker of American English ever. My guess is that both the first and third panels originally used the word “penny,” but some rule in the mechanical comic creator’s humor-generating algorithm required that key words in the joke not be repeated and instead be replaced by synonyms, so this clunker got pulled out of some second-rate thesaurus and plopped into place.

More proof of this strip’s robotic origins: Jughead appears to have pulled a fully-formed, ready-to-eat hamburger out of the refrigerator. A cybernetic artist would obviously be unfamiliar with the details of how biological life-forms acquire their fuel.

Mary Worth, 9/1/06

Man, look at their faces in panel two. Those two are about to have some angry, angry sex.

I have to confess something. I used to own a shirt that looked remarkably like the one Aldo is wearing. And this wasn’t some long-ago artifact of my non-fashionable youth; I wore it regularly until it developed a hole in it about a year ago. It was long-sleeved, and was just a V-neck rather than a polo shirt with a collar, but the color and the stripe are pretty much exact matches. It creeps me out a little.

Apartment 3-G, 9/1/06

The saddest thing about panel one is that Tommie thinks she’s flirting.