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Shoe, 5/19/11

Nobody ever reads off a list of everything on a menu aloud, and Roz’s pencil is working diligently, so I assume that the Perfesser is actually ordering this extremely long list of food items, which in turn means that Shoe is referring to some kind of U.N. meeting on global obesity problems. Several of the dishes the Perfesser is trying to order are also based on bird-flesh, which means that it may be a U.N. meeting on a resurgence of cannibalism.

Gil Thorp, 5/19/11

I’m sad to report that the less interesting of Gil Thorp’s two current plotlines is the one that doesn’t involve school budget negotiations. Still, Coach Kaz is extorting money out of a longhair with the implicit threat of violence, so maybe things are looking up a bit. My bet is that Buzz Marco is less intimidated by Kaz’s beefy arms than he is by the horrifying tentacle-fingers that Kaz has so delicately draped across his collarbone.

Mary Worth, 5/19/11

Today’s Mary Worth narration box is for readers who don’t understand the orthographical convention by which bold italics convey emphasis. I dearly hope that Drew is literally shouting the final clauses of his sentences at Liza, in the increasingly desperate hope that she’ll acknowledge that he broke up with her.

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Archie, 4/29/11

So, the Archie newspaper strip got a new artist this week! Despite having written a blog about comic strips for like the past six years, I actually don’t have a very good vocabulary to describe what I like and dislike about art, so I’ll just say that the new style looks more … cramped? All the features have seemed smaller, less detailed, seen from farther away — until today, that is, when we’re treated to the horrifying closeup of Professor Flutesnoot in panel two, with the bags under his eyes and the terrifyingly realistic shading on the huge fleshy proboscis jutting out at us from the middle of his face. From now on, I want the viewpoint of the strip to stay as far away from the characters as possible to spare us such horrors.

Also, isn’t Professor Flutesnoot a chemistry teacher? I distinctly remember people fiddling with test tubes in his class. Damn it, do I have to keep track of continuity for the Archie universe? Because I don’t think I’m ready for that.

Mark Trail, 4/29/11

Of course, Professor Flutesnoot isn’t one tenth as terrifying as Nightmare Sherriff there in panel three of Mark Trail. What’s the most disturbing thing about him, do you think? The fact that the distance from his eyes to his upper lip seems disproportionately long when compared to the distance from his upper lip to his chin? His “hair,” which looks like someone else’s scalp that he’s wearing as a hat? His soulless orange eyes? The unexplained figure standing behind him, whose anxious expression seems to be saying “Watch out! I can’t control him when he’s like this! Oh … oh God!”

Gil Thorp, 4/29/11

At last, someone has the guts to cut down Milford’s bloated budget! I can see two directions where this story might be going. Hobart McMustache could demand cuts to the athletic department, particularly to sports that are boring and/or involve girls; on the other hand, he might hold the Thorps up as examples of good fiscal stewards of public money, since they tend to get assistant coaching duties for no charge from the janitorial staff or from cantankerous old weirdos who just show up at practice one day.

Mary Worth, 4/29/11

Oh look, Liza got a taste of Drew’s love and now has instantly become a psycho stalker, what a surprising development. Frankly, I’m much more intrigued by Drew’s hideous phone, which appears to be a cheap Vietnamese knock-off of a Dell PocketPC from 2004 or so. Still, you have to be impressed that it auto-hyphenated “tonight” to keep the lines of text formatted properly, unless we’re meant to understand that Liza did that to interject a charming faux-Victorianism into the midst of her awful txt-speak.

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Gil Thorp, 4/20/11

“Ease up” has pretty much been my all-time favorite two-word combination in Gil Thorp ever since it served as a prelude to Coach Kaz bending time and space with his hairy, hairy fists. I’m frankly hoping that this board meeting ends in fisticuffs, as that’s about the only interesting follow-up there can be to phrases like “deficit task force,” “budget subcommitee [sic],” and “Hobart.”

Mary Worth, 4/20/11

Ha ha, Mary can’t even remember Dawn’s name. “You remember, he was fornicating with that nice Vera, and what’s-her-name, the underage girl who can’t get enough of the computer whosits. Whatever. Who do you think he’ll seduce and betray next?”

Family Circus, 4/20/11

That’s a nice big basket, Billy! In the spirit of the season, seeing as you’re the firstborn son and all, we’re going to use it as a boat, and put you inside it and float you down the River Nile. Maybe you’ll be adopted by a beautiful Egyptian princess! Only by “River Nile” we mean “the sewage culvert” and by “beautiful princess” we mean “one of those hobos who live in the tent city down by the sewage culvert.”