The Morning Line: The Best in Threats

Let's get right to it, Cartoon Nation. It was a particularly interesting week as threats abounded on the "funny" pages -- from nuclear warheads to job cuts to male teen drivers. So in that spirit of laughing our way through anxieties that could rate their own color-coded alerts, we turn to this week's Riffy Awards.

First off is the winner for funniest single-panel GAG O' THE WEEK: Thursday's "Non Sequitur." Part of the reason it packed a punch is the half-second it took my Pentium-1 brain to realize that this couple, in discussing cat food vs. dog food, was actually mulling their own menu options in these hardscrabble times.

As Neil Diamond might sing: " 'Iams,' I cried / To no one there." (UPS) Enlarge Comic

In the lingo of Vince Vaughn's "Swingers": So money, Wiley. So money.

FAVE LINE O' DIALOGUE: The eternally engaging thing about "Get Fuzzy's" Bucky Katt is that, smack dab in the middle of a harebrained monologue littered with half-truths and slander, he'll suddenly let fly an opinion that isn't as untethered as it might seem. On Monday, B-Katt is doing the full "Manchurian Candidate" bit to the Manx and Satchel when he says: "Now listen: After you become president of the U.S., you will dissolve Congress -- no one will
object to that."

The fool on the Hill? (UFS) Enlarge Comic

As one industry friend refers to such priceless lines, that's a "coffee-snorter."

Thanks to you, Darb, we are indeed "havin' a laugh."

FAVE ARTWORK: The stellar team of Borgman/Scott does so many little things just right in Thursday's "Zits":

Straight from the course's mouth. (KFS) Enlarge Comic

Mama Duncan's morning-calm smile, the rising sun, the "weight" of the skillet, the spongy slickness of the catapulting eggs and, perhaps best of all, the loose lines of the piled-up pans. When I grow up, I want to draw as ostensibly effortlessly as the good and great Jim Borgman.

THE MIFFY: And this week's lone, lowly Miffy goes to today's "Beetle Bailey" because of one trait that leaves me peevish: head-scratching ambiguity.

Commander, on chief. (KFS) Enlarge Comic

I, for one, can't say whether Sarge is a true apologist for the missteps of the Bush administration, or whether it's just a much fainter coat of sarcasm that I'm used to seeing from "Beetle." O wiser minds than mine: Help me intuit the one true political meaning, because this has become a verbal "Magic Eye" In which I can readily read it both ways.

Those are this blog's Riffy picks -- what are yours?