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Psst. Hey buddy. Wanna buy a COTW?

“The whole point of nephewism is that it doesn’t come with the baggage of parenthood. When Skyler is unnecessary and inconvenient to the gag of the moment, he discreetly disappears back into nephewspace until such time as he is summoned forth again to do a gag that requires a child.” –Peanut Gallery

You want more? You want some hilarious runners up? We got ’em right here.

“Fancy yourself a menace, Dennis? Well, now you know: Mrs. Wilson ruined Mr. Wilson’s happiness long before you ever entered the picture. You’re the assistant menace, and don’t forget it.” –Peanut Gallery

“I feel sorry for people who get Dennis the Menace with the throwaway panels removed, because they’ll never get to see what it would look like if Mr. Wilson dressed as an elf and then did a lot of cocaine.” –Schroduck

“I’m getting ‘giving the hitman the go-ahead’ vibes from Les’s ‘yes.’ I guess he needs another wife to die for his next book.” –ArtOfWargames, on Twitter

“I do appreciate the surreal disconnect between the imagery and text. It reads like a serious and staid police procedural yet appears to depict a leprechaun watching a video of a stripper with giraffe horns.” –Lee Sherman

“Frankly, I’m disappointed with Cayla, too. ‘A dead Lisa party? Wowee wow wow! Sign me up! Will there be a cake in the shape of her corpse? Please say yes!’” –Joe Blevins

“Pluggers sneered at the use of ‘like’ as a filler word for decades, but now that Gen X is aging into their demographic it’s acceptable.” –TheDiva

“As an extra bit of language weirdness, Rufus says accordian t’ as a countrified version of according to, yet actually somehow misspells ‘accordion’ (mentally?) while he’s saying it. Of all the places for someone to screw up both old-timey speech and an instrument sometimes used in bluegrass music, Gasoline Alley shouldn’t be it.” –BigTed

“Can I speak to you the word of the lord Zuke? He that grows in multitudes? His vines do creep into men’s souls, so that they open their mouth for the pulpy flesh of the lord. Please, friend. Open your mouth. Take his blessing. Let his vines entwine your soul. Eat of this zucchini bread, for it too is his body. Drink of this zucchini smoothie, for it is as his blood.” –Voshkod

“This is good for Spider-Man, since he’s finally going to get a girlfriend who buys him accessories, houses, cars, etc. This is bad for Barbie, because like every other Spider-Man girlfriend she’s going to be thrown off the George Washington Bridge.” –Ettorre

“No! No! Mom! Stop! Spider-Man is supposed to be upside down, it’s an iconic scene! Did you even watch my YouTube series?!” –Dan

“I like the annoyed look on Rex’s face in that last panel. Clearly he thought that his comment about Sarah being anonymous implied that it would no longer be openly discussed, perhaps for her well-being but also because Rex is tired of talking about his child.” –pugfuggly

“I didn’t expect Shoe to go meta with a comic about comics less funny than news reporting that actually is less funny than news reporting.” –nescio

“They seemed to be very different people. Granted, I only saw Ashlee exactly one single time and didn’t speak to her at all, which isn’t really much of a data pool to draw from, but she burst into the hospital screaming and crying, and that’s something Drew only does infrequently.” –jroggs

“Today’s Shoe especially emphasizes, visually, the always-present but never-spoken fact that Shoe is the only one there unclothed (except for shoes). I guess that’s why they call him Shoe, but in these two panels that doesn’t really come off as the quaint nickname of a hard-hitting newspaper editor. It comes off as psychotic. Forget the bird-man thing for a minute. Sure, they’re birds, but they dress in clothes and work at jobs and watch TV and get haircuts and use glasses to drink and so forth. So they’re basically people, de facto. So imagine that you got a new job as an intern at your small town’s only newspaper, the Treetops Tattler or whatever it’s called. ‘This is the Perfesser,’ your coworkers say to you. You find a heavy-lidded man slumped over a pile of papers, staring at you with dead eyes. A bit much, sure, but he’s a recognizable journalistic type. You wave. Now your co-worker gestures to someone else. ‘This is our editor, Shoe.’ A man scowls at you, smoking a cigar and utterly naked except for Nike sneakers. A beat. You wait for the laughter, because this is a prank, right? They’re pranking the new guy, No one laughs. Someone clears their throat. You guess you’re supposed to say something. ‘N-nice to meet… you?’ you half-whisper. Shoe grunts and turns, giving you a full look at his bare butt as he strides away. Everyone looks at your with heavy-lidded eyes. Why weren’t you nice to the editor? Later he’ll talk to you again, naked, not remembering he’s already met you. He will never wear clothes the entire time you work there, until you decide to leave that nightmare newspaper and go work at the mortuary. At least the vulture wears a suit.” –Chance

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Mary Worth, 8/6/21

One of my favorite things in Mary Worth is when we cut away from the main action of the current plot to other characters, commenting cattily on the main action of the current plot. It’s more fun if the characters in the main plot are dipshits who deserve to be made fun of and, guess what, it’s Mary Worth so they almost always are. Dr. Drew is no Wilbur, but he’s dopey enough that I really enjoy Mary’s “They seemed to be very different people,” which if you’ve read enough Mary Worth like I have you immediately recognize as simultaneously one of the most savage and cutting things anybody has ever said but also not something explicit enough that she’s going to have to walk it back like Jeff will when Drew inevitably tracks Ashlee down and theatrically refuses to even consider a prenup.

Shoe, 8/6/21

This isn’t the first time I’ve said this, but I have boundless respect for the fact that the Shoe artistic team finds new ways every day to depict bird-men who are just crushingly depressed. Look at the Perfesser in that second panel! That’s not just a man (a bird-man, I guess) who’s being berated by his boss; that’s a man who’s been berated by his boss over and over again and it’s brought him into a profoundly dark mindset. I sincerely hope the artist is working from a place of boundless empathy for this character, but doesn’t find him too relatable, if you follow me!

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/5/21

It is truly amazing the way this strip has retconned its Sarah storyline from 2014, in which she made a lucrative book deal with the art museum, in the course of which she did a public event at which another kid was briefly mean to her but mere seconds later she rallied an army of the oppressed to turn the tables on her attackers, and also in an unrelated turn of events befriended a mob boss and acquired a brutal gangland enforcer as her babysitter’s chauffeur. At the time, Sarah seemed to be having a blast, but apparently the syndicate got an angry letter about the impact all this might have on a real child, because now it’s something that Rex and June talk about in hushed tones as the worst thing that ever happened to their daughter, worse than the time she got hit by a car, which erased year of her memory. Anyway, thank goodness we’re recapitulating this now and learning how a child can become a big creative success “the right way”: anonymously, after sending unsolicited fan fiction to their favorite author.

Shoe, 8/5/21

Not sure why, but for the many years I’ve been reading Shoe I’ve always assumed Roz’s was primarily a lunch spot? But the characters seem to be hanging out there more and more after hours, and this is clearly an end-of-the-day gripe session the Perfesser is having. Say, what do you think Skyler, the Perfesser’s nephew and ward, is doing at home while the Perfesser eats dinner after work by himself? What is he, like … ten, eleven? Does he know how to cook, do you think?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/5/21

Snuffy Smith is the only comic in which I will accept a joke about how someone swapped two different kinds of bells as a prank and then everyone has a good hearty chuckle over it. Bells are Hootin’ Holler’s only source of artificial noise of any kind, so of course the inhabitants are going to be able to distinguish the subtle differences between the various types!