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Gil Thorp, 5/27/09

One of the (many, I swear!) things I like about Gil Thorp is its tendency to keep once-starring players around as background characters for as long as their fictional high school careers last. So, during basketball and baseball season of 2008, Andrew “The A-Train” Gregory (whose name was meant to taunt one of the strip’s younger readers) was an obnoxious, egomaniacal superjerk who dominated the plotlines with his self-aggrandizing antics. Now, though, he looks positively cuddly when compared to prank-happy megadouche Shep Trumbo. Presumably all of the strip’s readers will forgive Andrew’s past irritations if he makes good on his promise to choke the life out of Shep with that disturbingly realistic toy snake.

Marvin, 5/27/09

What is Marvin’s greatest affront to human dignity? This is a complex question that can probably only be fully answered by a duly constituted war crimes tribunal, but here’s my take. One of the things that make babies so enchanting is their innocence, their complete unfamiliarity with the world; everything is fascinating and delightful to them, even something as mundane as a household toaster, because it’s so new. But Marvin completely lacks this quality; instead, he’s a paradoxically cynical baby, viewing the world with heavy-lidded ironic distance. He’s a monstrous adult-infant hybrid: the worst aspects of grown-ups (emotional numbness, sarcasm) and babies (squalling, pants-shitting). He should be left on a hillside to be eaten by coyotes.

Herb and Jamaal, 5/27/09

This cartoon does a pretty good job of illustrating how difficult it must be to manufacture clothing in Herb and Jamaal-world, where individuals that are notionally of the same species can exhibit radically different physical characteristics. For instance, a baseball cap that fits snugly on the tip of Jamaal’s oblong skull can only balance precariously atop Herb’s spherical cranium.

Mary Worth, 5/27/09

Say, do you know what sort of people would be easy to snare in some sort of con? People who place their absolute trust in someone based on one ten-minute meeting and a relationship with his family that ended decades ago, that’s who!

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Panels from Apartment 3-G and Crankshaft, 5/21/09

Just as I am, in a larger sense, kind of in love with Margo, I’m also more specifically in love with her facial expression in this panel. She’s doing the head-bobble that A3G characters are contractually obligated to do when presented with surprising information, though you’ll notice that she’s upped the degree of difficulty by attempting an asymmetrical semi-bobble. But despite the bobble, her face still shows her mingled boredom and contempt. It’s as if she’s acknowledging the fact that she’s just now learning her parents have been making nice with each other behind her back, but she still wants to make it clear that this doesn’t change her opinion that love is dull and gross and so are they.

Meanwhile, the facial expressions in today’s Crankshaft would lead you to believe that you’re seeing the end game in a hate-filled, Lockhorns-style marriage of mutual emotional violence, in which one partner has finally managed to cross the line and say something completely unforgivable. You aren’t, though! They’re characters in Crankshaft, is all, so they just look like that all the time.

Marvin, 5/21/09

You know what’s a million times worse than Gil Thorp plots about YouTube? Marvin plots about YouTube.

You know what’s a million times worse than Marvin plots about YouTube? Marvin plots about YouTube that involve YouTube videos of Marvin running around with his penis flapping about.

Mary Worth, 5/21/09

“Certainly nobody whose father I knew years ago could possibly ever be a bad man! Here, take my daughter, and a list of her credit card and bank account numbers!”

Marmaduke, 5/21/09

“Also, someone in the house has a face that’s melting off the front of her skull!”

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Marvin, 5/15/09

One of Marvin’s favorite time-padding techniques/crimes against humanity involves taking a joke that, at first, seems to be not particularly funny, and then repeating it every day for a week until you literally want to tear your own eyes out of your head just so you can be sure that you’ll never see Marvin again. The current running joke (which at least features less recycled art than Belly Laffs did) is that Marvin is in some kind of dream sequence in which all of his family members appear as stick figures, and utter stilted sentences that contain the word “stick” as the punchline-like conclusion. This was bad enough — in fact, my description doesn’t even do how bad enough it was justice — except that the stick figures Marvin encountered became less and less stick figure-esque over the course of the week until we got to Friday’s strip, in which his grandfather, though more poorly drawn than usual, exhibits exactly zero stick figure-like characteristics. At least he still says the word “stick,” though! ‘Cause that’s the payoff. See how they put it in italics there? Ha ha! Stick!

Crankshaft, 5/15/09

So Pam was terribly anxious that her daughter might be streaking at her graduation, until she remembered that she was in the buff at her own graduation, back in the day, which has caused a sudden onset of smugness, presumably at her own daring and/or hotness. Her husband is profoundly aroused by the thought, if by “profoundly aroused” we mean “gripped by panic and bordering on a major cardiac event,” and since this is the Funky Winkerbean universe, that is exactly what we mean by “profoundly aroused.”

Mark Trail, 5/15/09

Yesterday, Andy categorically refused to do anything NOW on Mark’s cue, so it appears that today Mark has simply hurled the enormous St. Bernard at his enemy. The real question, though, is what exactly went on between Andy and the non-bald baddie between the two panels that left both evil-doers looking so shaken and depressed.

Judge Parker, 5/15/09

“We’re also delighted that you’re holding your head at that angle so our readers can get a good look at your fabulous mullet! Market research has shown that mullets are one of the most popular things to appear in this strip, right behind tits.”