http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/cpubk/comic_god_hates_yaxisinverters_especially_in_red/

So, hope the holidays continue to treat you right, and be careful out there this New Year’s!

Happy Thursday, all. Today we get Mittens’ empathy strip, wherein we learn the tragedy at the heart of his character. Part of the fun of writing these characters is learning what their catastrophes were (and rest assured, all of them have at least one), and what scars those events left behind. Mittens wears his like a prison forehead tattoo, and you just gotta respect that.

In other news, I’ve got to figure out which movie to see this weekend. My choices include…

1) “Armored,” in which Laurence Fishburn slums in a flick that looks half Death Race, half A-Team episode.

2) “Brothers,” which has the most entertainingly confusing trailer ever. It starts as a tear jerker, wades through rom-com territory, turns into a psychological horror movie, and ends as a romantic comedy again. I’m sure it’s just a chick flick, but part of me hopes it pulls a “From Dusk Til Dawn” and turns into vampire snuff porn at the 90 minute mark.

3) “Everybody’s Fine,” in which Robert DeNiro invokes the “As Good As It Gets” Corollary and pleads his case to the Academy voters why he should get an Oscar for something in his lifetime, and it may as well be this boring pile because it’s going to happen one way or another, so we may as well get it over with.

4) “Transylmania,” by some of the people who keep excreting direct-to-video National Lampoon movies.

Or I can try to find a theater in the city that’s playing “Up in the Air,” which I keep hoping will be good (George Clooney! Jason Reitman!) despite having the least interesting trailer I’ve ever seen for a top Oscar contender.

There’s always my last ditch option–fudging my “new movies only” rule a little and seeing last week’s “Ninja Assassin,” which, I understand, is about a ninja who is also an assassin. Personally, I’m leaning that direction. It’s like going to a grocery store and finding a can marked “Meat.” Chances are, you’re going to get what you pay for, and dammit, sometimes I just want a movie with ninja assassins in it.

The title of today’s strip comes from a Neutral Milk Hotel that Andrea and I have a tendancy to scream along to whenever it comes up on shuffle. It just seemed appropriate.

On that note, I think I owe my lovely bride a note of thanks. To this point in the strip, I’ve played up her neuroses through Zara much more than I’ve played up my own through Joe. That will change in fairly short order, but still, she’s never been anything but accommodating, and I appreciate that. It’s never been any secret that Zara is my favorite character in the strip, and I try to give her the best lines when I can, even when she’s playing straight man to Mel.

In other news, Armor Games’ “Crush the Castle Players Pack” is taking up an obscene amount of my spare brain space. I’m a sucker for physics games, and this one has a hook that will not be denied. Try it at your peril.