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A Special Valentine with the Family Circus

(1978)

It's Valentine's Day in the acid-trip alternate universe the Family Circus lives in, so of course Dolly makes a Valentine's Day card in school and all the kids sing a Valentine's carol with their creepy bus driver on the ride home. Okay, in my entire goddamn life I have never once heard of a "Valentine's carol", but whoever writes these things is obviously completely fucking insane and if I manage to press his buttons he'll probably hunt me down and cave my skull in, so I'm not saying there aren't Valentine's carols, all right? I'm sure there are and I just haven't been paying attention or something.

Anyway, when all the kids get home of course they get in this huge fight about who has the best Valentine, and when they make fun of the baby's he runs off crying. Next comes the coolest part: they think he ran away from home, so they imagine all these places he could be, like hitching on the freeway or, I swear to fucking God, floating on this raft in the middle of the ocean with all these sharks jumping out of the water trying to get him. (Of course they don't, but fuck, that was pretty awesome.)

The other kids feel all bad and shit, so they decide to make this huge Valentine for the baby by stealing and pretty much destroying everything in the basement. They actually manage to make this gi-normous heart, but then, in the second best part, the dog jumps right through it and wrecks the whole thing! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Fucking losers. Of course since it's the lame-ass Family Circus there's like this happy ending, but as usual there was enough weird-ass shit for the journey to be the reward or whatever. If the comic version in the newspaper was this awesomely fucked-up maybe it wouldn't make me puke every Sunday.