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Mary Worth, 12/21/10

Ever since she successfully cured Dr. Mike’s inability to love, Mary’s fancied herself something of an amateur therapist. Today we learn just how far she’s going with her little hobby: she’s apparently developed some extreme form of rational-emotive behavioral therapy where patients use their thoughts to control not only their emotions and attitudes, but their memories as well. “Jill, you were only abandoned by your fiance at the altar because that’s how you choose to remember it! If you simply rethink your memories, then perhaps you’ll realize that he did show up after all, and you’ve been happily married for the past seven years! If you go home and find your house still empty and lonesome, it probably just means that you’re not trying hard enough.”

Gil Thorp, 12/21/10

Notice that Gil actually gives Marty a straight and substantive answer about sports, — in response to Marty’s hesitant attempt to establish emotional intimacy with his long-term frenemy. “Jeez, I’m glad I didn’t tell him that what I wish I had but don’t: recognition from my journalistic peers and my parents of how hard I work on my sportswriting craft. Christ, I feel like an asshole now.”

Apartment 3-G, 12/21/10

Hmm, the girls are already dressed in their best party clothes — Margo in an actually rather fetching little black dress, Tommie in her Star Trek: The Motion Picture-era Starfleet uniform, and Lu Ann in [artist’s duty to think of third party outfit avoided by crafty foreground figure placement] — and Iris has gotten out the punch bowl and traditional balloon wreath, and yet this seems to be the first our trio of protagonists have heard of this party. The possibilities: either we’re in the last scene of an ’80s comedy and all Iris needs to do is mention a party to summon the various accoutrements thereof out of thin air while a Journey soundtrack blares in the background, or she was planning on throwing a swell party and not inviting the 3-G gals, a plan they ruined by stopping by unannounced on their way someplace else.

By the way, it’s nice to see that Iris is planning on repaying Mrs. Bloom’s kind offer of a free place to crash by trashing said free place with endless partying.

Mark Trail, 12/21/10

“Yes, just put your boat near his boat! I am ‘interested’ in being within seeing distance of him! This is because of something I will explain later. It certainly not because I am on a secret government mission, so do not believe that! I am, uh, interested in making sex with him! Yes, that’s it! That’s something humans say, right?”

Ziggy, 12/21/10

Since the mice in Ziggy are generally portrayed as anthropomorphic wisecrackers, the sight of one dead and dangling limply from a cat’s grinning mouth is fairly startling. What could make this worse? Oh, right, the thought of the stench of searing mouse flesh, the hint of which will always linger on the coils of the toaster’s heating elements! Yes, that will do nicely.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/21/10

Oh, look, despite a mysterious phone call from his dead wife warning him not to get on his flight, Les did not in fact die in a fiery plane crash. I know, I’m just as disappointed as you are.

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Panel from Crock, 12/19/10

There are still apparently people who only get the paper on Sundays so that they can go through the coupons, so the Sunday comics have to be treated as if they’ll be the only comics people see all week. Because Christmas is on a Saturday this year, that means that most of today’s strips featured Christmas themes almost a week early. In the spirit of the season, I will say a kind word for a strip I almost never have anything nice to say about: I genuinely found it funny to see Crock’s title character smiling sinisterly out at me from the middle of a festive wreath. Surely such wreaths would be big sellers at the Crock store, if any such thing actually existed.

Mark Trail, 12/19/10

“Yes, just about everyone in the world knows the story of the birth of Christ … except for children, who couldn’t care less about our Lord and Savior and instead worship a bastardized, commercialized version of an ancient Germanic deity, the greedy little pagans.”

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Beetle Bailey, 12/16/10

Good lord, this strip has presented few more nightmarish visions than today’s panel two (and this is a strip that earlier this week featured a disinterested Sarge feeding a bed full of blood-sucking parasites). I guess the point is that the soldiers have been eating so much pork that they’re pretending to turn into pigs (proving that Beetle Bailey is written for and possibly by eight-year-olds), but there’s something about the way they’re all throwing their heads back and closing their eyes making animalistic noises that implies to me an insular group that’s gone off the rails in a deeply creepy way. To avoid “cannibalism,” these self-proclaimed pigs will now spurn the smallish ham and fall upon their cook, tearing him limb from limb and consuming his flesh, oinking all the while.

The Jumble, 12/16/10

The Jumble is definitely one of those strips that I wish I could see as a larger-format image sometimes. Today, for instance, I am fascinated by the three hairs that constitute this horse racing guru’s combover. Rather than flopping greasily over his pate Wilbur Weston style, they hover over his head as if repulsed from his skin by a static charge, presumably barely being held in at the roots.

Mark Trail, 12/16/10

So here’s our villain Ben Smith, and, um, wow. In any visual storytelling medium, we’re supposed to get a read on a character via their appearance, but I have no idea what message the combination of bald, shaggy, mustache, cravat, open-collar dress shirt, and lime green v-neck sweater is supposed to signify. Is it supposed to be “gay” by way of “fussy fashionista”? Under normal circumstances of course one would not associate this outfit with “fashion” in any sense, but then again this is a strip in which Mark just throws an enormous brown jacket over his khaki jumpsuit and calls it “dressing up.”

Spider-Man, 12/16/10

Well, now that I see Spider-Man is planning on punching a dazed, unresisting Mole Man in the face, I guess I should apologize for calling him a coward.