This week marks the unofficial end of summer. We celebrated it with a bag of frozen shrimp, and even though it’s not going to get freezing cold until December, I couldn’t think of another metaphor to link frozen shrimp and the upcoming fall season.

About the shrimp. As we get older, we find new and unique (not to mention embarrassing) ways to get hurt. Many moons ago, we did a comic about a guy breaking his finger trying to fish something out of the pocket of his skinny jeans. Now I didn’t do anything close to that humiliating, but… I went for a walk on the beach with my family and I asked to carry our grandchild in a contraption called a snuggli, in which you carry the baby in front, much like a kangaroo carries her baby in a pouch. You know beaches. They’re tilted so one leg comes up shorter than the other, but I figured you make up for it on the way back. Wrong. That evening my left ankle swelled and stiffened and I had to apply ice packs. I told John about this and how I used that ice pack on my foot all year, and now what should I do because I had two separate aches and only once ice pack. He came up with frozen shrimp. I, however, was all about bags of frozen peas because I heard people use them for injuries, but, as we’ve chronicled many times in the past, John hates peas, and besides, they do not comprise a main course, so shrimp it was. And can you really blame Al for using the frozen shrimp on his ankle? It’s not like he was touching the shrimp. They’re in a damn bag! And as he helpfully pointed out, he had already started the thawing process for dinner. A win-win situation if there ever was one.

As for our Labor Day poster, well Al’s daughter was in labor about to deliver her twins and voila, we had a Labor Day poster. We hope you have a much less painful Labor Day than she did and we’ll see you right here— same Bat Time same Bat Channel next week with our first two comics of the fall.

Andy and John