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Hi everyone! Your eyes do not deceive you: this is a truncated comments of the week post, because I’m doing a truncated week of blogging! Your favorite Uncle Lumpy is coming by tomorrow to do some guest blogging, while I take a relaxing vacation at an undisclosed location. Be nice to him, and each other! I’ll be back in the blogging saddle on Monday, September 14th, and as usual, Uncle Lumpy loves you all too much to try to choose a favorite commenter, so this week’s winner will stay up at the top of the site for a bit:

“‘Are you Corina Karenna?’ ‘Why? Are you authority?’ Oh man this bad girl with a heart of gold is gonna need so much of the discipline and integrity you only get from organized sports.” –Dan

This week’s runners up will also stand the test of time!

“‘That’s impossible!’ thinks Slylock, who has been mind-controlled into believing that the Acme Mind-Controlling Crown Company, a well-established corporation two towns over, can’t logically exist. (Their actual slogan is ‘We’re Space Aliens From From a Galaxy 5 Million Miles Away, So Your Friend or Neighbor Couldn’t Possibly Be Using Our Products on You!’) Slylock has also been made to believe he’s a hyperintelligent fox with extensive law-enforcement training, when he’s really only a moderately intelligent fox who attended a lesser state university.” –BigTed

“Shoe’s joke is so incredibly stupid that it annoys me and then I’m annoyed that I’m letting Shoe annoy me. Why a woodpecker? Why, dammit? Who’s eating those chickens? Can’t we have Shoe removed from the papers by a court order or something? So many questions.” –Chance

“I don’t know, but yours is going to be sent to Elon Musk’s orbiting nursing home satellites as soon as we can get the technology nailed down.” –Christine Lehman, on Facebook

“‘Corina Karenna‘ is what you call your protagonist when the Tolstoy estate refuses to endorse your Anna Karenina porn parody.” –Schroduck

“When I started my first corporate job, it was well-known that any email from our VP had actually been typed up by his secretary, per his dictation. I used to think this was just a power thing, but I later learned that he never typed anything at all. That’s because he couldn’t type, and had in fact had never used a computer and never planned to. This was 20 years ago, and it while it was slightly odd then, it would be unheard of now, where the current, 55-year old VP conducts business on his phone 24/7, and you can’t get him off it long enough to pay attention in a meeting. The point I’m trying to make is, the 3rd panel of Dustin should be: ‘Dude, shut the fuck up.’” –Carsick Yankee

“‘Reckless‘ behavior can be surprisingly tame for people who sit around all day pretending to be restrained by imaginary straight jackets.” –nescio

“Cayla doesn’t want Les running off, she needs to produce a body and a death certificate to collect on that insurance policy. Her first attempt didn’t quite pan out, but we’re all still rooting for you, Cayla. Don’t give up.” –K.M.

“The trope ‘A number of women greater than one struggle for Les’s affection’ is the Funkyverse’s worst trope. Please bring back depression/comic books/comic book-related depression.” –Ettorre

“Let’s do something reckless tonight — let’s reference Scrabble without putting the little circle-R symbol after its name. Come and get us, Hasbro!” –Pozzo

“My favourite part of this strip is the smile on the snake’s face, almost as if this whole gag was his idea. If this was a Chick tract, in the next panel that snake would definitely be telling Denis to skip church and listen to heavy metal.” –pugfuggly

“‘I gotta say, Will Thayer looks like he lived in the weight room all summer.’ ‘Yeah, he’s pretty disheveled all right. Do you really think he’s homeless?’ ‘Uh, that’s not what I meant. I … you know what? On second thought, let’s just enjoy this beautiful day in silence.’” –Joe Blevins

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Dennis the Menace, 9/2/20

Dennis using some gross small animal to drive away Margaret, who has only ever wanted to love him, is the typical level of menace we expect from this strip. However, the fact that he’s dressed in an extremely fancy magician’s outfit to do it, complete with bow tie and pocket square? It’s dorky enough to seem less menacing on the surface, but speaks of a commitment to the project that is in fact quite menacing indeed.

Gil Thorp, 9/2/20

And speaking of bodies, despite the fact that we’re living in the futuristic year 2020, we’re still trapped in our sad meat prisons, forced to lift slabs of metal endlessly over a period of months just to gain a slight advantage on the football field where we slam our flesh-husks against one another, risking permanent damage in the process. Imagine the day when we’re able to upload our minds into a virtual world, freeing ourselves to exist as beings of pure thought! Imagine how transcendant our competitions will be then! Mudlark football is a mere placeholder until that blessed day, a pale shadow of what is surely to come.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/1/20

Here’s a fun “lockdown story” for you: for pretty much the whole time my wife and I have been married, she’s been prone to minor colds — nothing serious, but maybe a few days every other month or so — in a way that I’m not, which has resulted in a certain amount of good natured teasing about which one of us has a superior immune system. But a few weeks ago, she realized that she hasn’t had a cold since March, which is when her job had her start working at home, like I do all the time. In other words, it’s not that my immune system is any tougher than hers; it’s that I, like Harwood père, have been quarantining for the last twenty years, pretty much. Anyway, I’m glad that this strip has wrapped up the story of the flamboyant con artist so we can really focus on the guy who’s exactly as boring as me, a guy who blogs about newspaper comic strips for a living.

Crankshaft, 9/1/20

It took me years of reading this strip to realize that Keesterman, the guy whose mailbox Crankshaft annihilates on a daily basis due to some combination of incompetence and spite, is also one of Crankshaft’s only two non-work friends. Anyway, you might at first glance think that Keesterman (who it’s also just occurred to me has a name that means “Ass Man,” which is neither here nor there) is honoring his late friend Crankshaft, who passed away peacefully last night, in a uniquely appropriate way. But of course, that’s not true; Crankshaft will never die, due to the aforementioned spite, and Keesterman is just being extremely passive aggressive.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/1/20

Speaking of hateful Funkyverse characters who will never die, I feel like it’s been years since we’ve seen any sustained Les-Cayla interaction, so I’m excited to see them snipe at each other about the heady melange of danger and sexual attraction to a young actress playing Les’s dead first wife he’s been experiencing in Los Angeles, city of dreams!

Marvin, 9/1/20

I guess “reckless” is supposed to imply something … sexy, maybe? … but look, I’ve read enough columns in celebrity tabloids by “body language experts” to know that these two — sitting next to each other on the couch, facing forward, arms crossed — now only stimulate each other via taunts and cruel misdirection.