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It’s here, everyone: your top comment of the week.

“Objection! The defendant is using his hat like a stupid prop! In fact, it looks like he’s trying to seduce it or something, your honor. If he starts kissing it, I’m quitting. I don’t even care.” –made of wince

And your runners up! Very funny!

“I was going to say that it was odd that neither Dot nor Ditto mentioned it was Sunday before they were already driving to school, but then again, if someone woke me up, screaming at me to get my clothes on in a mad fury, I probably wouldn’t ask too many question either.” –pugfuggly

“This is the way the strip ends/ Not with a bang but with a carbon monoxide leak in the library” –Chris+Rywalt

“That blonde in Crankshaft is or at least looks a decade or two younger than the others. Why is she spending her time napping with a bunch of old farts? Honey, get thee to a Funky strip, where you can complain about the troubles of being in your 40s/50s rather than 60s/70s.” –jenna

“Six people in REM sleep and not one has had their book slide out of their hands on to the floor? I call bullshit. I originally called bullshit on the ridiculously large sign, but the book thing bugged me more.” –Weaselboy

“He actually is a marine biologist, but stealing goodies is less humiliating and more lucrative than applying dozens and dozens of times to get one meagre grant.” –Ettore_Costa, on Twitter

“‘The dog?‘ All the other miscreants get a name (Shady Shrew, Cassandra Cat). Show Dipshit Dog some respect, would you?” –Pozzo

“Hope they’ve got Impossible sausage in the animal future, or Slylock is straight-up ignoring a much more serious crime at the snack hut just up the beach.” –Dan

“Dennis is normally ten times more articulate than the Family Circus kids, but in this situation they would know what to do: blame it on ghosts.” –Anonymous

“So, I guess you could say that Hagar got… a Viking grill funeral [CSI: Miami theme goes here]” –Dunkelcopter

“The non-grounded electrical outlet probably indicates the existence of shell and tube wiring in the Mitchell house. Menace level: High!” –But What Do I Know?

“Rex: [looking at TV] ‘Well, yeah. You’ll want to stay off of it or just not use it so much … ice and what not. Call the office and make an appointment if you don’t feel better…’ Sweeper: ‘What? No I’m asking abo–‘*Click* [stares at phone]” –Kevin On Earth

“I haven’t been following this costumed vigilante hostage scenario story, but I’m not the least bit surprised to see the thrilling climax is, as always, a phone conversation between middle-aged men.” –jroggs

“Dennis, brandishing a sledgehammer: ‘Come on, Joey! If a scraped knee gets you measly cookies, think of the rewards of a shattered tibia! You’ll be laid up in a cast enjoying you brand new PS5! We’d be foolish NOT to break your leg!’” –The Great Joe Bivins

“Well, this is only anecdotal evidence, but being hit by a car seems to have worked for my daughter.” –TheDiva

“Can’t help noticing the Street Sweeper looks nothing like the guy he was introduced as and exactly like Rex himself. Hoping this is a Looper kind of situation where Rex has been sent back in time from a dystopian future where there’s a medical cure for crime to treat the biggest criminal of all, only to discover that it’s… his past self.” –Schroduck

“One of the weirdest things about being a comic strip character is that other characters are always walking up to you and saying setup lines, totally unsolicited and out of nowhere. Today, for instance, Dagwood is just trying to read the menu when Lou approaches him and says, ‘Summer sure changes people’s eating habits.’ Dag is momentarily disoriented — as we would all be in this situation — but he quickly readjusts. By panel two, he’s leaning forward to better hear where Lou is going with this. In panel three, accepting his fate as a human joke machine who can never die, Dag solemnly closes his eyes and recites the punchline, with the calm countenance of a religious martyr who’s about to be executed for his beliefs but has come to peace with this fact.” –Joe Blevins

“I think we’re reading too much into this. This is just Lou’s way of saying it’s too hot to cook.” –Hibbleton

“Joel and the colorist both know the international convention that helps avoid collisions between mule-drawn wagons: Red on the port side, green to starboard.” –Peanut Gallery

“I am bothered by the positioning of this fence. For one thing, it simply stops, rather then connecting to anything, which seems to defeat the entire purpose of a fence. More importantly, though, is that this fence seems to be at the edge of a cliff, presumably to keep people from falling off, yet Elviney is on the other side. Has she inched her way along the very edge of the cliff face, tenaciously holding onto the fence to keep from plunging into the chasm, just so that she could deliver the set-up for today’s joke? I admire your dedication to your craft, Elviney, but I hope that once you heard the punchline for which you risked your life, you began to question your choice of a career.” –seismic-2

“The only reason the other poker players haven’t put a bullet in Snuffy yet is that he’s really bad at cheating. It’s hard to pull a gun when you see a card up his sleeve but somehow you’re still up fifty bucks.” –Tabby Lavalamp

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Pluggers, 6/10/22

I have been writing this blog for far too many years, and a trend that I have noticed over that entire period is that syndicated newspaper comics have always felt like they need to be doing something to keep up with “the modern world” in some way. It keeps not working, but also there have continued to be syndicated newspaper comics for that entire period as well, so maybe they don’t, in fact, have to do anything at all, but their attempts are inevitably pretty funny. For instance, way back in 2006, For Better Or For Worse (only real ones will remember the Foobs) started posting animated versions of the strips on its website, except these were the same strips that went to physical newspapers where animation wouldn’t work so the only animation was that the characters would blink, and fairly slowly, so you could miss it and then see it out of the corner of your eye and be like “What the fuck was that, am I going crazy, are these people moving????” It wasn’t great! It wasn’t great for a number of reasons, not least of which is that the idea was planted that maybe some other cartoonist would try this stunt, and that they might try it at any time: that some image you assumed was static would suddenly start moving. This would be unsettling at any time, of course, but with some strips it would be much, much more traumatizing than others.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/10/22

In order to experience the round of inflation that rest of us are all going through, Hootin’ Holler would have to be connected to global supply chains and the worldwide central banking systems, which we all know is absolutely not the case. I assume this is just a coincidence and what actually happened is that a plane crashed on the edge of town that had a cargo hold full of $100 bills, or possibly Chuck E. Cheese ski-ball tickets.

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Blondie, 6/9/22

We all talk a lot about how Dagwood wears a full-on tuxedo every day to work, which none of his coworkers do — Mr. Dithers doesn’t even wear a suit jacket! — and that this is truly bizarre behavior, would make him a social pariah, is probably the result of some kind of personality disorder or maybe he lost a bet, etc. However, one thing I feel like we’ve never discussed is that he must be unpleasantly hot, like all the time. Yet he defiantly eschews any attempts to mitigate this, even to the extent of taking off his jacket, which I assume means that he’s also just drenched in sweat, constantly, over the course of his workday. A fun thing to imagine as he’s getting yelled at for goofing off, that he must smell pretty bad too!

Gasoline Alley, 6/9/22

I haven’t been keeping you up to date on Gasoline Alley because … well, I mean, why would I. I wouldn’t enjoy typing it out any more than you would be able to muster up enthusiasm for reading it. I will merely give you the bare bones — that back at the end of March Rufus and Joel were told that the the “Hollywood folks” were looking for them, and now, two and half months later, having intended to travel to Hollywood, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, they have mistakenly arrived in the city of Hollywood, Florida, instead. Even this is probably more Gasoline Alley plot information that you ever wanted or needed, but it’s important to set up today’s good news, which is that Joel and Rufus appear to be dying, so we probably won’t have to deal with any more Gasoline Alley plots ever again.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/9/22

“Yes, when I received the call from the man known as ‘the Street Sweeper’ asking if I could ‘cure crime,’ I did know that he had kidnapped the deceased at gunpoint and was refusing to hand him over to the police. But am I responsible for the carnage that happened seconds after I bluntly told him I couldn’t? Not according to my lawyer.” –Rex Morgan, in what most commentators will agree was one of the most disastrous interviews given on local TV news in a decade