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Folks, it’s that time on a Friday … time for your comment of the week:

“You know what? It’s refreshing that Crankshaft spends its time working out obscure gardening grudges that I’m not interested in, instead of doing obscure golfing grudges that I’m not interested like in every other strip. There, I said it!” –matt+w

And it’s also time for your runners up:

“Of course Weirdly zapped Darla with his laser — how else is he supposed to shrink her down so he has a second rubber duck to play with in the tub? He lives in a town where law enforcement can just barge into your bathroom at any time. It seems perfectly reasonable that he would need to soothe himself with treasured childhood memories. (Oh, he was actually trying to cook and eat her? Never mind.)” –BigTed

“Tomorrow, Thirsty tends to his hangover with his ‘legal’ opioids.” –Hibbleton

“My favorite detail in the Hi and Lois strip is Irma, whose only characterization is ‘hates her husband,’ happily carrying more explosives out to Thirsty. Everyone knows that one couple who don’t seem to have anything in common, and nobody suspects the real answer is ‘arson.’ Hi jokes, but he better hope that Irma and Thirsty don’t rediscover their passion for fire — and each other — by burning down his house.” –literarylottie

“Ladies, you can’t fight here in the People’s Clinic! What would our glorious Chairman Mao think?” –Joe Blevins

“I like the kid in the back, who’s just staring at the spectators while his dad urges him to hop into the race. Rave on, old man. This is not my scene.” –Peanut Gallery

“What amused me is how Billy’s expression doesn’t seem outraged so much as hurt and betrayed. ‘No fair, Jeffy! No fair!’ he cries. ‘We were supposed to make it big, Jeffy, together!’” –Ahno neemus.

“Dad, a child creating a comic because the original artist is too lazy to do his job? This is something those losers in the Family Circus do! I’ve become lamer, but not that lame!” –Ettorre

“Eddie, for one thing you gotta stop wearing the slanket to raids. There’s 900 of them and 5 of us, this whole thing depends on speed and psychological impact. The red muumuu just encourages resistance.” –Jerp+Jump

“If you carry treats with you for any nearby dogs, you can poop in any sandbox you want.” –Tabby Lavalamp

“If Steve Jobs wasn’t dead, seeing Dagwood use one of his products would probably kill him.” –Where’s Rocky?

“The rise of MMORPGs has made the image on an unpleasant lardbutt sitting at a computer surrounded by piles of his own fecal matter as American as apple pie and baseball. What simply isn’t believable in any context is the idea of a human being actually enjoying a webinar.” –jroggs

“Compulsive shopping is a lot more expensive than Zoloft, or even weed, so maybe somebody needs to slip Crankshaft some edibles and a few vintage Pink Floyd albums. Rename the strip to Kushshaft and take it in a new and interesting direction. Kushshaft sets up a grow tent in his garage and obsesses over terpenes. Kushshaft goes to a Phish concert and has a greenout during a 30 minute rendition of Fluffhead. Kushshaft visits the nursing home and proves that men can have multiple orgasms. You know, that kind of thing.” –toxic

“Yes, Zane is the very picture of enthusiasm there. Would somebody please wake him up? He’s missing out on some excellent hand gesturing.” –made of wince

“There’s a syllable in Javanese that’s rendered in English as ‘ba’ (ꦧ). Maybe the kid is just telling some hysterical joke about the construction of Great Post Road between Anyer and Panarukan? ‘Ba!’ ‘That’s right, as if the French could build a road to Anyer! They’d get eaten by pythons! Tell it again!’” –Voshkod

“And so to get the best of both worlds, we’re going to sew the two of you together into a kind of Franken-board-member. Let the ignorant peasants say that we’re creating abominations against God’s will. History is our only final judge.” –Artist formerly known as Ben

“‘All the world’s a stage. Literally.’ said the character in a featureless void that only exists to put him and his wife on display for gags. ‘Don’t ask me where my coffee or her shopping bags came from. Or you, for that matter.’” –nescio

“I like the pose and attire of the Schlock’s confidant — kind of an aging jazz dancer feel. Bob Fosse don’t give a shit about Loretta’s wardrobe peccadillos.” –Dennis Jimenez

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Shoe, 7/9/21

A few weeks ago, faithful reader Tabby Lavalamp raised questions in a COTW runner up about why the notoriously heard-hearted Shoe would accompany the Perfesser on a tender-hearted errand. It stuck with me and was definitely the first thing I thought about today, as Shoe has not only accompanied his employee to the latter’s uncle’s grave (signs of multigenerational newphewism?), but has brought a bouquet of flowers along as well. Anyway, the reason Shoe actually goes along on these trips is that there needs to be another bird-person present so that the exchange of dialogue that creates these joke-like utterances can happen, but today’s strip did make me wonder if he’s actually there as part of his journalistic mission. There isn’t a lot of news in Treetops and anything sensational could make a good story that would get people sharing links to treetopstattler.bird on Facebook, and he’s always had a gut feeling that there was more to this uncle business. So the guy died in some unexpected and perhaps shocking way due to a terrible mistake he made, huh? Sounds interesting. Putting that gruesome tale into the newspaper might be a cruel thing to do one of the paper’s longest-suffering employees, but don’t let the flowers fool you: Shoe’s no softie.

The Lockhorns, 7/9/21

Meanwhile, it looks like the Lockhorns’s Featured Brands program is off to a great start! Congrats to Ann Taylor for partnering with this universally beloved feature, which is bound to portray their brand in a positive light!

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Gil Thorp, 7/8/21

Oh, hey, the “spring” storyline in Gil Thorp is still going on [checks notes] several days after the 4th of July, but today’s strip would like you to know that you aren’t going crazy: it’s being deliberately dragged out by the library board, because they’ve discovered how great it is when people pay attention to them and they’re going to ride that high as long as they can. Anyway, it’s pretty clear from the neoliberal detente Zane and Abel achieved at their debate that the library board is going to announce that there’s no rule in the bylaws that would prevent them from appointing two new members. If there’s further conflict between the two, expect the rest of the board to live-stream the meetings in hope of recreating this magic springtime when everyone cared about library governance (it definitely won’t work).

Daddy Daze, 7/8/21

The whole gimmick of Daddy Daze is that the Daddy Daze baby speaks in an unintelligible series of “ba”s, which the Daddy Daze daddy purports to understand as a fully-fledged linguistic system that encodes complex ideas and concepts. I’m a fan of Occam’s Razor, the idea that simpler explanations are usually to be preferred to more complex ones, which may give you an idea of where I come down on the question of “is the Daddy Daze baby actually able to formulate complete sentences in a language of his own design despite his young age that his father understands, or is the Daddy Daze daddy merely in an advanced stage of psychosis?” Strips like today make the question substantially easier to answer, in my opinion.