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Mary Worth, 5/10/11

Look at that face! Have you ever seen a man more grimly determined to let a woman down easy before? He’s massaging the back of his neck with his tie, the better to keep a cool head for the coming letting-down-easy process. Keep in mind that, in Drew’s last attempt to break up with someone, he decided that the best technique would be to just stop returning her calls, a move that led to physical assaults on his person and his dignity and, ultimately, his exile to Vietnam, so he realizes the importance of acting prudently now. Plus Liza seems like she might get stabby when crossed!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/10/11

Oh, that Clovis! He and his wife might fuss and feud, but we all know that eventually at her wishes he’ll be baptized and will accept a version of Christianity based on the Nicene Creed, thus determining the religion that will dominate Western Europe for the next thousand years.

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/7/11

You know, despite all the jokes I make about it, I’ve always assumed that the ghost of dead Lisa who lovingly watches Les and Cayla do it was, you know, a metaphor for Les’s inability to let go of the memory of his wife and commit whole-heartedly to his new relationship. But today’s strip reveals that spectral Lisa is all too real, and, moreover, that her glowing blue form is visible reflected in Les’s eyes while Cayla and he have sex. The fact that this didn’t result in her running screaming into the night, but instead just caused her to become even more grimly determined to screw the ghost away, pretty much means that she and Les deserve each other, forever.

Barney Google and Snuff Smith, 5/7/11

A lot of luddites will try to tell you that simple country folk have more meaningful interpersonal interactions because they don’t spend all day uploading adorable cat photos and emo song lyrics to their Tumblrs or whatever. But if today’s Snuffy Smith is correct, what they do instead is taunt each other by nailing signs to trees, which fails to impress me.

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Funky Winkerbean, 4/17/11

This latest plot development may be more weighted down with grim Funkyverse backstory than any we’ve yet encountered. For those who don’t keep up, or who continually purge Funky details from their mind so that they can continue to feel pleasure: the blond dude is Darrin, who was the baby Les’s sainted dead wife gave birth to as a teenager and gave up for adoption. His blonde wife is Jessica, whose father was a newscaster and the star of John Darling, a strip that Tom Batuik created with Marvin auteur Tom Armstrong; the strip was cancelled and was wrapped up in hilarious fashion when a crazed gunman murdered Darling. Later, back at the Funky mothership, Les solved the murder and made it the subject of his first book, which was a complete financial flop. Fun!

Jessica and Darrin somehow managed to escape the awful gravitational pull of gloom that is Westview, but are now returning voluntarily because Jessica wants to make a film about the death of her father, which will presumably do about as well as Les’s book. Anyway, the best part is that they have to live with the Moores (because everyone in town is far too depressed and/or cancer-ridden to build new houses) and Darrin will have to get a job at Montoni’s (because it’s literally the only functional business within a fifty-mile radius that doesn’t require an MD with an oncology specialization as a prerequisite of employment).

Curtis, 4/17/11

I fine it hard to believe that Gunk has, in all his years of paling around with Curtis on the comics pages, never been taken to an American movie. But I’m even more baffled that horror connoisseur Curtis can’t see the potential in the movie plot Gunk outlines. A respected scientist is transformed as a result of his obsession into a grotesque, enormous mollusk — a monstrous nightmare-thing that, in an appalling twist, his insatiable colleagues consume alive? The visceral horror combines with allegorical themes to make Flyspeck Island a shoo-in as winner of next year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. (Wait, do they not speak English on Flyspeck Island?)

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/17/11

Perspiring visibly, the cop was so fixated the sordid sexual encounter he had planned for the evening that he couldn’t focus on his job! Sordid R-rated film starring Harvey Keitel or Nicolas Cage … or wacky comic that appears in family newspaper around the country?