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Welcome back, everybody! Did you enjoy your holiday week off? I did, but as ever I must submit to the siren song of the comics! How did our favorite characters spend the week?

Apartment 3-G, 12/27/10

Well, over at Apartment 3-G, Lu Ann realized with a sinking feeling that she never should have trampily exposed that shoulder if she expected to win the heart of his altar boy. Would she just burst into flames if she entered Paul’s church? Better not risk it!

Apartment 3-G, 12/29/10

Also, just FYI, never, ever speak ill of Margo’s building if you want to live.

Curtis, 12/29/10

Curtis’s annual Kwanztraavaganza is featuring less insane hallucinogenic ancient African magic and more depressing modern American unemployment, which is a bummer. But at least the protagonist has a horrifying jawless lamprey-dog as a pet. That counts for something, right?

Mark Trail, 12/29/10

Over in Mark Trail, our hero seems to be learning about this thing called “flirting.”

Funky Winkerbean, 1/1/11

And in Funky Winkerbean, Les’s two ladies finally realized that he’s in love with a dead woman, and now they will give up their fruitless and baffling pursuit of him. (Ha ha, just kidding, they still want to sex him up for reasons no sane person could ever comprehend.)

Mary Worth and Spider-Man, 1/1/11

2011 brought us not one but two wonderful weddings: one solemnized under the watchful glower of Mary Worth, and one made more festive by an endless river of silent, inhuman monsters. Happy New Year, everybody! The bestial fiends of Subterranea are coming to devour you!

Panel from Dick Tracy, 1/2/11

Back on the surface, Dick Tracy’s Crimestoppers Textbook seems to be really, really reaching for crimes to stop.

Anyway, expect 2011 here at the Comics Curmudgeon to bring you basically the same awesomeness that you’ve been getting for nearly seven years now, unless of course the newspaper comics industry completely collapses, in which case I’ll turn the whole thing into a Mary Worth fetish porn site. Happy New Year to you all! And check those receipts! ERRORS DO OCCUR.

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Mary Worth, 12/9/10

Can there be any more delightful phrase in the English language than Jill saying “I’m not finished yet!” Let us hope that her drunken outburst goes on for days — nay, weeks! She appears to be attempting to pick up that table in panel two, so one assumes that she’s about to start bludgeoning people with it.

My favorite new character in today’s strip is David Niven, who looks up in sudden surprise in panel one despite the fact that this tirade must have been going on for a full minute or two at this point. Perhaps he was so enraptured by the little lemon slice on his water glass that he’s just now noticing the commotion.

Curtis, 12/9/10

She-bully Veranda becomes today’s unlikely hero, as everything she says to Curtis is in fact 100 percent accurate.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/9/10

“My therapist tells me that isn’t so much ‘Lisa’ as ‘my own deeply internalized sense of self-loathing,’ but what does he know? In my heart, I’m sure that Lisa is always with me, telling me that I’m a failure!”

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Curtis, 11/30/10

Though we may mock Curtis for the eternal clockwork-like return of its eight or so plots, in truth there is more than a little comfort that can be derived from this nonthreatening reliability; in this sense, the strip serves as a stand-in for the the newspaper comics section as a whole. So it’s a bit discombobulating when a new character is introduced, and even more so when an old character shows up in different circumstances. All Curtis trufans know that Derrick is always accompanied by his bullying partner “Onion,” and that when Curtis spots them, his thought balloon inevitably reads, “Oh no! Derrick and ‘Onion’!” But today we see that Derrick has put away childish things like friendship and has now entered the grown-up world of romance. And while it’s nice to see that he’s met someone who shares his core interests and horse-like laugh, it’s a little sad imagining “Onion” sitting somewhere with his hood cinched tightly around his face, bitter tears of abandonment running down his comically oversized nose.

Mary Worth, 11/30/10

Oh, God, this week is going to be all I hoped for and more, as a drunken, predatory Jill decides that she’s going to forcibly dance with any man who comes within arm’s reach. All reactions in soap opera strips are of course ludicrously overplayed, but I’m not sure why exactly Jeff’s face in panel two is framed by a nimbus of sheer panic. “Oh my God, Mary’s going to see me touching another woman! She’ll never agree to marry me now!”

Shoe, 11/30/10

I’m not sure what’s worse: the suggestion that the Perfesser’s car might have sexual needs, or the downright lascivious look the mechanic is sporting as he relays this fact. “Bet you never knew that cars had sex, did you? I’ve got some instructional videos on the subject around here … why don’t we watch them, and what happens, happens?”