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I admit to having been slack over the past few days, forcing you to hit Refresh on your browser over and over again, hoping to see a new post here and being mocked by an ad for Comics Curmudgeon tchotchkes. (An offer almost nobody has taken up, incidentally. Come on, don’t you know that everyone will worship you like a new god if you wear a “More zippers, mule!” t-shirt?) To make it up to you, I offer you not one, not two, but three fresh comics for today.

B.C., 2/1/05

I don’t think Jesus likes that punchline very much, Johnny. Also, I don’t really get the grandpa angle of the joke, nor the being-hip angle. If you’re going to set up this joke — and, I need to emphasize, I really don’t think you should — then you could probably find a better way to go about doing it.

Luann, 2/1/05

To my mind, this is the funniest Luann in weeks. It’s also evidence that a strip doesn’t need to have a punchline per se to be funny. Things I like about it: Brad casually saying “Whatev.” (complete with period) while raising one eyebrow, in panel one; T.J. solemnly offering a box of Oreos to Brad’s grave; the poem on Brad’s imaginary tombstone (you probably can’t read it in this graphic, but it reads “Brad DeGroot/ Ran out of luck/ Fell in love/ Forgot to duck); and the fact that T.J. hasn’t felt the need to dress up for his visit to the graveyard.

T.J. appears to have an earing, something I never noticed before. You’ll also notice that he’s entirely mum on the subject of dealing with sexual pressure.

Mark Trail, 2/1/05

Never mind the thrashing around, Mark; maybe you should STOP SHOUTING! I swear, if I were a shark, I’d eat him just to shut him up.

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My fiancée is in the sex ed biz, and this week she returned from a visit to a health center north of the Mason-Dixon line with this intriguing artifact.

OK, so I understand that there are very few male characters in Luann who aren’t either related to Luann or involved in some sort of tiresome romantic situation with her. And obviously her make-out session with Aaron marks all this as outside the continuity of the strip. But still, she’s talking about dealing with sexual pressure with … TJ? TJ the schemer? TJ the scammer? TJ, whose every appearance in the strip heralds the inevitable entanglement of Brad in some awful web of deceit? The TJ I know would be turning this situation to his advantage and be attempting to shepherd Luann into the back seat of his car by the end of the pamphlet.

On the other hand, the TJ I know is also white. At first, I thought that perhaps I had never seen him in a Sunday strip before; but you know, it’s pretty obvious that Delta is black even in the dailies. Maybe it’s one of those parallel universe things: evil Spock has a beard, good Spock is clean shaven; evil TJ is white, good TJ is black.

My only comment on the content of this handout is that I think a “Waiting Is Sexy” t-shirt may send out some mixed messages. Waiting is many things, many of them positive, but “sexy” is not one of them, particularly if you’re a teenager. I can barely handle the three minutes of waiting involved in microwaving a frozen pizza pocket, and I’m 30. Also, I find it interesting that Greg Evans borrowed a trope from Mark Trail and featured some animal-closeup panels while humans converse offstage. Presumably this is because the only thing duller than drawing two people walking and talking is drawing two people walking and talking about not having sex.

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Luann, 1/7/05

Delivering … products? Is that like delivering “stuff”? Are there any comics out there any more that are immune from drug dealing plots?

On the other hand, if over the next few weeks Luann turns into a New Jack City-style gangsta epic that follows Dirk around as he simultaneously tries to keep Toni in the dark, plot his revenge against Brad, and move as much “product” as the market will handle, it might do what I have long thought impossible: make me care about this infuriatingly static love triangle.

Speaking of drug dealing, for those who are curious: it was cocaine on Kelly’s shoes yesterday, not meth. Lesson: don’t have your fish mounted by guys named “Barracuda.”