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Here it is! Your comment of the week!

“You know land lines are becoming archaic when even comic strip artists forget how you’re supposed to hold a handset when talking. Are Blondie and Dagwood trying to FaceTime each other?” –Tabby Lavalamp

And your funny runners up!

“What these stupid kids don’t know about autumn leaves could fill a book. Which really doesn’t matter, because apparently none of them has ever read one.” –BigTed

“We begin with our observers paying lip service to the notions that their subject is behind the times and requires reform. This is quickly met with reluctance and denial and insistence that its content is still good, even though many related enterprises have failed. Sentimentality and sluggish inertia then causes them to push that the art is still charming and the once-positive responses still hold. Leaving no allowance for anything new, be it fresh ideas, improvement, or openness to current feedback, they smugly decide to leave things just as they are and do nothing to solve their obviously apparent problems, determined to instead wallow in fruitless nostalgia. Hmm … are we really talking about a corkboard here?” –jroggs

“I sincerely hope that today’s Mary Worth is the beginning of a new storyline where every character has nightmares about Wilbur. Even the animals. Even Wilbur himself.” –Craig!

“No, Hi and Lois aren’t looking directly at us, the readers. They’re looking directly at you, Josh. This is their response to all the times you’ve called comic strips out for still having dogs living outside and whatnot. ‘It’s a time capsule. You should leave it as it is.’ They’ve become aware of you and don’t want you to interfere. Not that this should scare you — what should scare you is the fact that Wilbur’s also become aware of you, and the way you keep putting him down is turning him on.” –likeagrapefruit

“Cheers to Zits for having the courage to tell parents it’s okay for them to have a frank talk with their kids via text about what said kids should do when they’re horny! Jeers to Zits for forgetting that the only people still reading newspaper comics are retirees whose children are in their 40s, and who have never been given their grandchildren’s cell phone numbers, possibly to avoid this exact scenario.” –Briane Pagel

“Look, the joke in Crock wouldn’t work if the shovel was colored golden from panel one. On the other hand, it doesn’t work anyway. Hm.” –matt w

“I had to rack my brains to work out who ‘The Cueball’ and ‘The Stoner’ were, but you know what? The idea that Elon Musk would teach his shitty AIs to call Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson mean names is the most plausible thing in this story so far. If anything, these names aren’t cruel enough — the real Elon Musk literally tweeted that Bill Gates looks pregnant and made him lose an erection. Ian Mollusk’s robot should be saying things so libelous that the strip gets banned by English courts.” –Schroduck

“Dagwood’s insatiable appetite makes a lot more sense when you realize he’s trying to fill the void left by his professional and personal life.” –TheDiva

“Man, I don’t know if my heart can take any more of this wild, roller-coaster ‘handshake might hurt my finger a bit’ action right on top of the already pulse-pounding ‘friends reunite and everything turns out great’ drama in Rex Morgan. Let’s dial it down a little, people! It can’t be constant thrills, all the time!” –Chance

“Coach Martinez might lack Coach Thorp’s leadership skills or natural understanding of his players, but he compensates for this by inflating his neck like a tree frog.” –Ettorre

“Mary Worth is almost there in accidentally recreating the myth of Freyja.

✓ Husband absent.
✓ Frequent weeping.
✓ Can shape-shift into a falcon (see the 5/7/1972 strip, true believers!)
✓ Slept with four dwarves for a fancy necklace (see upcoming honeymoon storyline)
X Has a sled pulled by two cats (so close! Keep trying, Mary Worth.)” –Voshkod

“Pierre is staring straight ahead in wide-eyed terror. ‘Damn, she’s still talking about this crap! I can’t handle the pressure of trying to figure out the correct moment to weigh in with woof!’” –Weaselboy

“It looks like Mud’s album is called ‘Mud in Your Eye?’ Honestly, that’s great. No irony, that rules. I hope he has a whole discography of mud pun titles, like ‘Clear as Mud’ or ‘Happy as a Pig in Mud’ or his post-cancellation album, ‘Drag My Name Through the Mud.’” –Dan

“Yes, this will render them helpless … three at a time! Surely they will all wait patiently in line for food that their compatriots will, to a man, audibly opine is terrible, and none of them will simply walk around this undefended little hut to, like, the front door! Also, are we implying that Grossie lives in the hut? That the hut is her home? Where she’s cooking the meals? For an entire army? I just hope those guys on the tower understand that the enemy isn’t taking their diarrhea home with them, is all I’m saying.” –els

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Crock, 10/25/24

Of all the characters in the comics, few are subject to as much indignity as Crock’s Grossie. I mean, forgetting the fact that she’s named “Grosse” and married to a guy named “Maggot,” we must also keep in mind that she’s a colonial subject, and while she’s usually depicted as fairly fiesty and independent, she is also, like her nation, under the heel of the French and must obey their whims. Not sure what’s worse for her here: that she had to participate in the operation of this sham restaurant that’s been set up as part of an elaborate bit about what a bad cook she is, or that she’s probably going to be killed by her own countrymen when they storm the fort, just because she’s in the way.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/25/24

Hey, remember when Wanda first showed up in this strip, as a waitress who was flirting with Mud Mountain Murphy, but then Mud turned out to be kind of an asshole who pretended to shit his pants on stage, so she hooked up with Truck instead, because he was her only other option? Well, now that Mud’s been brainwashed by a con artist, who accidentally made him a better person in the process, Wanda seems eager to get Mud back into her and Truck’s lives. What I’m saying is, I look forward to discovering if Rex Morgan, M.D., can make polyamory boring.

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Mary Worth, 10/24/24

If I know Mary Worth, and I’d like to think at this point that I do, I’m reasonably sure that Estelle and Dr. Ed will, in fact, end up back together. However, I appreciate the fact that she’s maintaining a somewhat realistic attitude about the matter. Like, yeah, maybe you have some regrets, but the guy whose engagement ring you hurled into his chest at full force in front of a bunch people at his vet clinic — the vet clinic where he was overworked and you started volunteering to help out at, from which you stormed out that day and presumably have not been back since — that guy might not be in the headspace to pick up where you left off. And that’s fair! Can’t hurt to ask, but it’s fair if he says no! At least a vision direct from God will keep her from marrying Wilbur, even if it means dying alone!

Hagar the Horrible, 10/24/24

Because I’m the specific kind of dork that I am, my immediate thought reading this strip was, “Wait, are these Vikings supposed to be a bride-price culture or a dowry culture? You can’t have it both ways!” Well, after doing a little research, it turns out the dichotomy I half remember a friend of mine explaining to me when she was taking Anthropology 101 during our freshman year of college was a little reductive, because you can have it both ways and the Vikings did: their marriage rituals were preceded by an elaborate and reciprocal series of gift exchanges between the bride’s and groom’s families. Now, that sounds like a big waste of time to me because you end up with the same amount of money at the end of it that you started with, but I guess it helped establish and tighten kinship bonds or something. Whatever, I’m not going to tell them how to live their lives! Wouldn’t do much good anyway, seeing as they’re all dead.