The highlight of Cyanide and Happiness’ ‘Drug Experimentation Week’ in throbbing Animated Gif-o-Vision.

“Everyone who’s X-er than me is Y.” Wondermark enjoys a tasty snowclone.

Would it be tacky for me to say that this SMBC panel is a variation on the “72 virgins in Heaven” meme? Or is it tacky enough all by itself?

A rare goody from The Quigmans, not that it’s particularly funny, but the concept of “Playing War-In-Iraq” is far more topical than the usual Quig-fare.

Note: the policy of this blog is to link to comics when a permanent (more than 90 days is permanent enough for The Web) archive is available. If not, a reduced size but hopefully still readable copy of the comic is displayed here along with a link to whatever web resource the comic has. When I wish to make a particular point, individual frames or parts of frames may be displayed. If you don’t think this qualifies as ‘fair use’, I’ll meet you in a dark alley, whimper a lot and beg your forgiveness.

The Lio Diet:

Best of Bizarro:

and because nobody ever has a problem with Anti-crastination…

In an act of incredible guts/chutzpah/cajones/whatever, talented but currently-not-doing-his-own-webcomic Ryan Estrada, has stepped up and made guest strips for – well, just about everybody who ever used guest strips. The depth and breadth of Mr. E’s skillz are clearly on display here, because for most of these he captures the host comicker’s essence without totally ripping off their style and the rest he takes in a new direction that is as good as it is surprising.

And it’s all in promotion of (and a damn good audition for) his new, highly questionable, business venture: Cartoon Commune, in which he is offering to do custom comic books at the below-minimum-wage price of $200 for 12 pages or $300 for 24 pages. Damn! Apparently his services do NOT include drawing what others have written, or else I’d have found my collaborator for “Clowns Around”…

And so we approach the challenge of finding, maybe not all the webcomics Ryan is guesting for, but the few that are NOT using his perpetually-underpriced services. Here goes:

Ryan Estrada Guest Webcomics for September 17, 2007

Astronaut Elementary
Dinosaur Comics (How do you do something different and original with Ryan North’s fossilized format? He does!)
Dr. McNinja (“CUUUUURED”)
Genny (I’m discovering comics I’ve never seen before thanks to Ryan…)
Goats (Valdemort Special Edition)
Hate Song (with blood)
Hero by Night
Joe and Monkey (an earworm)
Joe Loves Crappy Movies (not the same Joe)
Little Gamers (…meet the BIG Gamers)
Multiplex (…in continuity)
Muffin Time
Niego
Nothing Nice to Say (punk elephant sighting!)
Octopus Pie (with special guest ducks)
Overcompensating (doing something I always wished I could. Yum.)
Patches (havin’ fun with the format)
PC Weenies
Questionable Content (haven’t we seen this before?)
Sam and Fuzzy (scroll down for ‘bonus’ strip)
Scary Go Round (a goblin-centric strip)
Scene Language
Starslip Crisis (Memnon meets the Little Art Critics)
Theater Hopper
Ugly Hill
White Ninja (on the ‘fan art’ page…)
Wigu (he’s even guesting for strips that aren’t updating! The man is beyond machine! He is a factory!)
Yirmumah!

MORE! Alien Loves Predator
Beaver and Steve
(and how many times does he use the phrase “Six times!” in dialogue in these guest strips? maybe, SIX TIMES?!?)

No PvP? Well, he’d done something for it before but apparently his Infinite Canvas freaked out Scott Kurtz, so I think I understand.

(HOW DOES HE DO IT? I’ve pretty much exhausted myself just surfing for and linking to his special guest appearances.)

Of course, certain webcomics COULDN’T hand themselves over to Ryan today, because Barkeater Lake, Order of the Stick and You Damn Kid had previously announced today was the day they were returning from hiatus. Tough luck, guys.

Things are slowly beginning to return to their normal non-Ryan-Estrada status in webcomicland… meanwhile, the Great Comics Usurper is posting all of his nearly-fifty guest strips at his own site, one every five hours… by the time he’s finished, his sleep patterns will be totally screwed.

So, let’s talk about something else:

Yes, I think it’s time to begin the formal redefinition of the word “Comcastic” to “malignant, virulent and usually terminal”.

If the multi-universal plotline of Goats with the Infinite Monkeys, Demon Fire, Programmers and Farmhands and especially the “Pub Axis” thingy has kept you thoroughly confused up until now: “Now everything makes sense.”

My admiration and respect for Randy “Sarcastically Positive” Milholland has gone up a couple of levels with his new ’side-strip’ “SP1937″, featuring the mis-adventuring of The Guy Davan Was Named After. He has always had a great feel for his characters, but I could never get over the taste of his mix of spicy cynicism and bitter depressingness. But for the “70 Years Ago” parts, it feels so right… maybe because ‘37 was in the middle of the GREAT Depression…

Am I gonna buy a “Tub of Happiness” as soon as it goes on pre-sale at 8AM Mountain Time Thursday Morning? Well, I’m not gonna get up early for it, but I’ll probably be an Early Adopter no matter what we learned from that iPhone thing.

And I’d like to come out in Official Disagreement with Toothpaste-For-Drew on this issue. Up your nose with a rubber hose.

The LESS said about how PvP Kurtz celebrated “Talk Like a Pirate Day” the better… Dang blasted lilly-livered land-lubber oughta swab the deck and walk the plank – twice.

I want to assume that “The Legion of the Darned Cats” is Diesel Stevens’ reference to the ORIGINAL “That Darn Cat” movie and NOT the crappy remake. If I find out otherwise, he’ll be in as much trouble as Toothpaste-For-Drew and PvP Kurtz. (No, I don’t know what’s gotten into me today)

No.. wait… I’ll tell you what’s bugging me. I’ve found ever since I started following “Sluggy Freelance”, every once in a while the jpeg of the comic gets munged… and it’s hard enough to follow the story when everything is readable. So when the last thing we saw in yesterday’s comic was the alien-demon-thingy Aylee having just taken human form and seemingly getting blown to smithereens… the last thing I wanted to see today was something like this…

DAMN YOU SLUGGY FREEPETE!!!

Expect more content in the immediate future, plus a severely cool-like re-design as I attempt to get the most out of Tyler Martin’s Comic Press Theme without having a comic of my own, and, of course, many technical difficulties as I update to the latest per-vesion of the WordPress blogging softcore software…. It will get ugly before it gets purty…. And I know that’s how you like it.

Just for the record, this is NOT the “Worst Answer to the “What Do You Want Out of Your Investments” Question” that I have heard today. Really. You don’t want to know how much worse it can get.

And back in the World of Newspaper Comics You Didn’t Know Were Still Being Published (or Wished You Didn’t):
“They’ll Do It Every Time”, a comic that’s been recycling variations on the same four jokes since 1929 has succeeded in making ME feel old…

…if only because (a) I was born before 1958 and (b) I have never seen a woman of my generation (born in the ’50s) with a hairdo like that of the mother with the spinning head.

When as definitive an authority on old joke formulas as “Frank and Ernest” do it, I’d say it’s time to make it official:

“I crossed an X with a Y” is OUT.
“I inserted X DNA into a Y” is IN.

As readers of this site know damn well, I love a good pun and have been willing to sleep with many bad puns. So, I was especially outraged by the Senate Vote on the MoveOn.org Ad and wrote about it at some length at WendellWit.com. Now, a great shirtless webcomicker has made an even bigger commitment to The Freedom to Pun. Jeffrey “Overcompensating/Wigu” Rowland is offering free t-shirts to people who contribute to MoveOn. My advice to all 7 of my regular readers. “Give ‘Til It Shirts!” (geez, I LOVE puns).

Today’s Edition of “More True Than Funny” comes to us courtesy of
the Internet Authorities at Wondermark,

and the Long-Time Married Folks at Real Life Comics,

and Sheldon and The Old Guy With a Duck on His Head.

Yeah, they’re all kinda funny, but much more true.

Congratulations to Huw “Lem” Davies on his 1000th “Bunny” webcomic. But then, when he started I knew they were gonna multiply like that. (Just be thankful he didn’t do a comic titled “Zucchini”.)

I usually roll my eyes wen somebody uses the “it’s funny ’cause it’s true” line, because sometimes The Big Lie is a Big Laugh and sometimes the truth us kinda, you know, inconvenient (TM A.Gore). Anyway, if a stopped clock can be correct twice a day (and a clock running backwards twice as often!), then Achewood is capable of occasional flashes of Absolute Truth. And this is one of them.

(Someday I should tell the story of when I met the guy who Bob Woodward said supplied John Belushi most of his drugs and got nothing but a Polaroid picture…)

Okay, I have plenty of issues with the look of the new comic Ungrateful Dead (cut-n-paste figures, stiff poses, giant heads with spooky eyes), but I was pointed to it by Home On the Strange, a comic I got into much more for the writing than the artwork (but it’s gotten better), so I gave Ungrateful a chance. Started from the beginning. Liked the “all the horrors of flashbacks and none of the fun of the acid” line in the first comic. Suspended my disbelief on the ‘ghosts of dead rock legends’ premise. Forgave it when I didn’t recognize John Lennon’s ghost as quickly as Jimi Hendrix’s ghost. Then it won me over with this joke: 90% on the irreverence scale, 75% on the silly scale, and blended perfectly. And then, this one pinned both meters. A couple of the Freddie Mercury’s ghost jokes fell flat but this one saved it for me. (Although, once again, high levels of Suspension of Disbelief were required to deal with a rock star’s ghost being ‘comatose’). Now that the strip is dealing with the members of the band (not known-entity dead celebs but rock-and-roll ‘types’), here is where Wayne & Craig have their work cut out for them. Stay tuned.