THE OCT. 29 ISSUE’S comics ran from outstanding to sheer garbage. On the premium end, Shawn Belschwender’s “So You Want to Be a Rock Critic” Menckened rock critics so well that it made up for our loss of his Refrigerator Johnny. I can only hope that your rock/pop music critic Mark Jenkins, himself a fourth-rate Greil Marcus (the pseudo-literate schmuck whose idiocy Belschwender accurately exposes in “Rock Critic”), reads Belschwender’s comic. Jenkins’ murky, dense faux-scholarly reviews clamor for readers to cry out, “God, he’s so hard to understand, he must know something that I don’t.” But those of us who actually listen to and know something about rock/pop music know, that’s WRONG!! Jenkins is just an intellectual wanna-be.

And then there’s Doug Allen’s Steven. What the f**k is that? Droll dialogue…wait a minute, it must be brilliantly subtle in its minimalism. Or maybe Allen’s just deconstructing typical comics.

No, more likely Allen just couldn’t think of anything. If you’re going to have a comic that does little to nothing, bring back The Angriest Dog in the World. At least its subtleties were clever and amusing.

Friendship Heights