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Spider-Man, 5/5/11

I was about to give this dreary Spider-Man vampire plot credit for its first genuine bit of horror, as Martine and Morbius’s eyes are suddenly and without explanation transformed into awful, toothy mouths, but then I realized that their pupils have just turned into bats — very, very crudely drawn bats — and it’s supposed to be, like, symbolic or whatever.

Apartment 3-G, 5/5/11

Ha, and now that Trey’s softened up the old man, Margo comes in to apply some brutality. “I hope the money’s coming from Herriman and Fowler! Just make that check out to ‘Trey and Margo’s sex vacation fund,’ or my associate here will be forced to do terrible, terrible things to you, and not the fun kind.”

Funky Winkerbean, 5/5/11

Have you been thinking, “Damn it, I wish Les would stop toying with these two women who for unexplainable reasons are attracted to him and just pick one to share his lovemaking stylings with”? Well, I’ll bet you’re sorry now.

Mark Trail, 5/5/11

As Mark squirmed into his cocoon, he thought of the many long-haired and bearded men whom he had defeated via fisticuffs over the years. But little did he know that he would soon be facing his greatest nemesis ever: Jesus Christ.

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Mark Trail, 5/3/11

Ha ha, remember last week when you were all like “Dudes with mustaches, they must be bad,” but then later you thought, “Oh, I’m not giving this strip enough credit.” Well, you totally were giving it the exact right amount of credit, my friend! I can’t believe this trio — one with a mustache, one with hair that reaches his collar, and one who wears a motorcycle helmet, presumably to hide even worse crimes against grooming — dare to refer to themselves as “clean-cut kids,” mostly because they all appear to be about 35.

B.C., 5/3/11

Hey there, legacy cartoonist or cartoonists now helming B.C. on behalf of John L. Hart FLP, the whole point of the “Wiley’s Dictionary” jokes (aka the “Book on a Rock” jokes) is to slap some clip art around a painfully unfunny joke and/or pun and then head out to the golf course. There’s no need to, say, show whatever random character you have reading the dictionary straighten up in disgust and contempt at the joke’s corniness in the second panel. That sort of thing just smacks of effort.

Phantom, 5/3/11

When Diana decided to call up Savarna, who made a play for the Phantom when everyone thought Diana was dead, I assumed that she just wanted to taunt her. But don’t worry about Savarna! She’s working out her sexual frustrations very nicely, thank you, just shootin’ massive artillery pieces at stuff, by remote control.

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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.