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So I slacked off the whole weekend, going off “having fun” and “enjoying myself” instead of posting comics for your amusement. O the shame! And during such a wacky weekend for the serials, too. Here’s a quick recap, one panel at a time:

Tommie and Lu Ann showed off their synchronized head bobbling.

“Brick” House showed off his vocabulary.

Mimi let her cloaking device briefly disengage and showed off the steel hair and terrifying, alien visage that keeps her EON minions in line.

Dr. Jeff showed off his mastery of platitudes.

And Spider-Man showed off … well, I’m not really comfortable talking about what Spider-Man showed off.

Meanwhile, in da hood…

Curtis, 10/17/05

Holy cow, Curtis is getting interesting! First it gets rid of one side of the comics’ least interesting love triangle, then it takes on gun-fueled school violence! No doubt by the time you read this you’ll know who’s holding that gun, but right now I’m on tenterhooks. Is it Chutney? Gunk? Barry? Or just another kid who listened to a little too much “Fortyounce” or “Bullet-Wound,” which is going to result in a Valuable Lesson About Media Violence?

Oh, and speaking of boring love triangles and violence:

Luann, 10/17/05

Yeah, just visiting a pal … in the back seat of his moving car! Seriously, did Dirk just materialize behind Brad completely unbidden and announced? Am I missing something here? Is the Dirk storyline going to be resolved in the only way that will make it all worthwhile: with the revelation that “Dirk” is a figment of Brad’s imagination, a representation of his untrammeled, unrepressed id combined with his repressed homoerotic fantasies? A guy can dream, can’t he?

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Judge Parker, 10/13/05

So Judge Parker has moved on from stultifying jungle adventures to stultifying domestic drama. See, “Randy,” our current blue-haired protagonist, just spent all of last week being berated by “Horace,” an amusingly freakish Wilford Brimley look-a-like:

To make an agonizingly long story short, Horace thinks Randy should be a judge, but the only thing holding him back (other than his obvious total disinterest in the idea) is that he isn’t married. Yes, in order to get the high-profile, high-pressure job he doesn’t want, Randy needs to finally tie the knot with “Mimi,” the fianceé that he doesn’t really seem inclined to marry. So you can understand why he looks like he wants to shoot himself in panel two. There’s some other details that I can’t really keep straight right now about Randy’s blonde secretary, who has what appears to be a little mustache and may be a CIA agent in training or something and no doubt really loves him. I’m sure we’ll get it all straightened out in relentless, repetitive detail over the next few months, and may even learn why Randy decided to propose some sort of sham marriage to Mimi rather than immediately reporting Horace to the EEOC.

But what I want to know about — what’s shamefully actually got me interested in Judge Parker — is this “Eon” thing. CIA-Secretary-True-Love girl mentioned it in passing too. What is Eon? Is it like EST? Is it like Scientology? Please let it be like Scientology! Please let the minister performing their Eon wedding be a thinly disguised John Travolta, or perhaps Beck! This being Judge Parker, it’s going to take forever for it to actually come out, and then it will be boring and we won’t care, but for the moment I’m clinging to my dreams.

Update: Yes, Beck is a Scientologist.

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Beetle Bailey, 10/12/05

Yeah! You’ll love it! You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be scared, you’ll be … um … angry. So very, very angry. Angry at the filmmakers? Angry at all the chortling, weeping, and shrieking that went on in the theater? Angry at the creators of this strip, who can apparently only draw four emotions? It’s hard to say.