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‘Tis the first Friday of March, and like all First Friday’s it’s that magical day known as Internet Read Aloud Eve! Please attend my delightful comedy show in Los Angeles, California, if you enjoy funny people making hilarious jokes about … the Internet.

Here is the Facebook event, please check in and then subsequently attend!

Also, it is just Friday in general, so that means it’s comment of the week time!

“What the hell is all that stuff Darin and Jessica are taking with them? Gas masks? Hazmat suits? Immunological bubble? A completely supply of drinkable water and canned goods to avoid exposure to Westview’s poisons? It won’t work of course; they’ll be dead within hours.” –Nekrotzar

Your runners up are also a delight!

“It’s nice that we have Sunday comics, where writers and artists can really go beyond the usual limitations of the form and really explore more creative space. If this were a weekday, we’d probably only get a panel or two of the aftermath of the vomiting of a ham sandwich, but today we can find out so much more: the journey that the masticated ham and cheese took, the fact that it was both ‘weird’ and ‘gross’, the wider impact that the vomiting had on individual students, as well as the student body as a whole. I’ve never thrown up a ham sandwich myself, or have even been witness to it, but somehow, now I feel that really I have.” –pugfuggly

“Ha, remember when people used to read the Sunday funnies while enjoying a nice breakfast? I bet everyone’s glad they don’t do that anymore.” –BigTed

“Beetle Bailey is surprisingly accurate today. ‘Any person subject to [military jurisdiction] who behaves with disrespect toward his superior commissioned officer shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.’ –Article 89 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Can be punished with up to a year in jail and a dishonorable discharge. I like this new direction of Beetle Bailey’s Adventures with the Judge Advocate General.” –Voshkod

“Thanks for the tip, Sly. After all, public schools are massively overfunded, so it’s no issue for me to throw all these pencils away and order a fresh batch. Speaking of getting rid of things, why are you here in my school and how soon are you leaving?” –jroggs

“Marty doesn’t understand ‘product placement’ means referring to a brand in his call of the game, not simply referring to the generic product they sell. ‘Los Morenos burritos’ is product placement, ‘burritos‘ is not. I didn’t expect this story to segue into a frank discussion about the long-term cognitive damage caused by excessive alcohol consumption, but that’s clearly where Gil Thorp is going with this.” –Truckosaurus

“Pluggers have to wait for their tubes to warm up in more ways than one, my lad.” –McManx

“‘Mark, did you say seriously?‘ asks the sheriff, as he squirts Mark in the face with water from the flower on his lapel.” –seismic-2

“When you have a mouth but you still can’t scream” –Anne Elisabeth Dillon, on Facebook

“Wilhelm almost died in the ER because as he lay there on the trauma table screaming all the doctors just kept telling him what a comic genius he was. Luckily, he eventually passed out from the pain and they went straight to work.” –Rob

“Otto is displaying human levels of self-deception and rationalization. I’m pretty sure he sticks around for the food.” –But What Do I Know?

“Some might say that if you start to feel run down all the time, you should be checked out by a doctor. Fortunately, Pluggers is here to set you straight!” –A Concerned Reader

“It says something about the triteness of Shoe that, instead of being amazed at reading a newspaper cartoon about group sex — a cartoon that wouldn’t necessarily be about fucking if its characters were any other kind of animal in existence — I keep focusing on the impracticality of bolting a desk chair independently of the desk to the wood floor, two feet from a chalk board but near nothing else.” –handsome Harry Backstayge, idol of a million other women

“Pluggers are hard working and industrious, except for the vast majority of time when they’re not.” –TheDiva

“The main reason not to have the conversation where M’Sieur Pepper can hear is because the chef knows how angry he gets when you don’t acknowledge his Ph. D.” –Andrew

“Yeah, the kids these days don’t really drink coffee anymore, they just like to get a nice tall cup and sniff it.” –Anonymous

“Nip this in the bud right now, Kelly. Years from now, when you’re married to Niki, you don’t want to spend valuable time mashing up food into a fine paste so that your husband’s idiot friend won’t choke to death during dinner.” –Joe Blevins

Thanks to everyone who became a Comics Curmudgeon Supporter to get an banner-ad-free site, put some scratch in my tip jar, or backed me on Patreon!. And we need to give a big shout-out to our advertisers:

• Bob the Fish: A site full of humorous and insightful videos on British television, mostly the forgotten bits around the edges. Most prominently the fortnightly commercial breakdown “The Hard Sell”, wherein our proprietor take a product or service at random and then point and laugh at the ways it’s been sold to us (or just go through an old commercial break cracking knob gags). Plus: documentaries about ITV and the dawn of satellite television! Also: There’s a Patreon!
• The Nameless Series: A trilogy of books about people falling in love while being chased by ghosts, attacked by monsters, and haunted by their own pasts. Read the story of how two crazy kids meet, feed blood to a ghost, fend off a slavering nightmare monster, and fall in love. And that’s only their first date
• Fiends of the Hub: Boston is under siege. Hungry, vicious, and wild, these vampires want only to feed. Can they be stopped before they destroy it all?
• Weapon Brown: Aftershock: Jason Yungbluth’s blockbusting Weapon Brown graphic novel busted so many blocks that it sold out! Help get it back into print by supporting the Weapon Brown: Aftershock Kickstarter! Weapon Brown is an epic, Mad Max-style tale of the apocalypse that has a twist guaranteed to appeal to fans of The Comics Curmudgeon: every character is based on a famous hero of the comics page! Charlie Brown, Popeye, Calvin and Hobbes, Orphan Annie and dozens more of the most famous faces in comic strip history all receive black eyes in this hard-hittin’ parody that never pulls its punches! And what’s more, if this drive succeeds it will pave the way for a new Weapon Brown comic book, Aftershock, a 48-page epilogue to the massive graphic novel that will tell three new tales of Chuck, the round headed son-of-a-bitch, and his faithful mutt Snoop! Learn more!

If you’d like to advertise on the Comics Curmudgeon, and get your very own shoutout in this space, head on over to my BuySellAds page!

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/2/18

You know, occasionally I like to remember that before Kelly was a bland nice girl who wore boring normie clothes accessorized with pieces from the Hillary Clinton Hairband Collection circa 1993, she was a scantily clad bad-ass goth delinquent who sassed her mom and dated a 25-year-old with a mohawk named “Spider.” She’s reformed now, of course, but every once in a while we see her old nature peeking out, like today when she acknowledges that Justin is her boyfriend’s best friend, but, like, why does he have to hang around with us all the time? Especially given that scene he made at lunch — reminding us that we’re all biological human bodies and someday, maybe someday soon, we’re going to sicken and die! I don’t care how much you like him, I don’t wanna think about that! No thanks, buddy!

Dick Tracy, 3/2/18

[Fifteen hours later] “OK, I’m giving him twelve more hours, and that’s it.”

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Shoe, 3/1/18

I can imagine a couple possible genesises (geneses?) for this strip that are vaguely interesting as backstory. For example, this could be an instance of a huffy “look what these DEGENERATE LIBERALS are teaching OUR INNOCENT CHILDREN in GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS.” On the other hand, the fact that Shoe is full of bird-people might mean that the “polly”-“parrot” joke is meant to be understood in that context, and this is a shoutout to Shoe’s hardcore base of bird-o-sexual perverts who will be pleasuring themselves tonight to a vision of getting double-teamed by two brightly colored birds who can mimic human speech, including erotic talk.

Sadly, though, my actual assumption is that this strip has the exact same origin story as every other Shoe strip with the loose structure of “a teacher asks Skyler a question that he responds to ‘humorously’”: it’s an excuse to shoehorn in a joke or a bit of wordplay someone thought up, or maybe heard from somewhere else, and that’s it. Skyler’s expression of profound self-loathing in panel three is a chilling reminder of how everyone involved in the production of this strip feels about it, and themselves.

Mary Worth, 3/1/18

Mary Worth is of course a master of the fine points of etiquette, so I guess roast chicken is the official meal for letting your boyfriend know his friend tried to rape you!

Pluggers, 3/1/18

Pluggers’ bodies are breaking down so gradually that, when they do eventually die, it’s gonna take a while for anyone to notice.