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Mary Worth, 6/19/11

“When?” we’ve all been calling out, for weeks now, as poor Drew has the living daylights stalked out of him by Liza. “When will the meddling start? When?” Well, this is where it starts: “Drew … let me see what I can do.” Think of the all the horror passing through Mary’s vast and cool and unsympathetic unsympathetic intellect during that ellipsis. Being cruel to Liza is not an option for Drew, but he’s not afraid to farm the cruelty out. He may be off to Vietnam at the end of this thing anyway, just to avoid the carnage.

Panels from Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/19/11

Every Rex Morgan storyline begins with awesome supporting characters before eventually petering out into dullness, and this one is no exception. I’m already falling in love pretty hard with this bickering mother-daughter pair with bad emotional boundaries. Check out those icily arched eyebrows and model-quality cheekbones! I certainly hope that one of the promised loser boyfriends show up at an inappropriate time to the consternation of everyone, especially Rex.

Panel from Beetle Bailey, 6/19/11

Meanwhile, Sarge has been possessed by demons.

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Mark Trail, 6/11/11

We interrupt this 100 percent laughable police work (“Moccasins, eh? You know who wears moccasins? Weird mountain men! I seen it on the TV!”) to say a few words in memory of this noble mountain goat. He was innocently attempting to leap dramatically from crag to crag, as is the wont of his species, when he was brutally impaled by an errant word balloon and pinned to the sky like a bug in an entomologist’s collection. He deserved a better fate and will be missed.

Mary Worth, 6/11/11

Remember, everyone, Mary thinks that the best way to deal with these sorts of “delicate matters” is to bully the poor lovestruck delusional soul until he or she is driven to suicide, which explain why she’s stroking her chin like a sinister supervillain in panel two.

Family Circus, 6/11/11

Normally I don’t want to see any kind of bodily fluids dripping from any member of the noxious Keane clan, but I have to admit that I’m rather enjoying the sight of sweaty, exhausted Billy. It summons up a vision of him dressed in his fancy tennis clothes and hitting the ball again and again into the net, growing increasingly frustrated and saddened at his own incompetence, which I frankly find hilarious.

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Mary Worth, 5/31/11

I ran into a friend of mine at the supermarket yesterday and he asked me, because I’m “that guy” now, what was new in the comics, and because I embrace my role as “that guy,” I started waxing rhapsodic about the stalkertastic action in Mary Worth, and for the first time it really occurred to me that the strip may be actively trying to recapture the stalky magic of Aldomania 2006. They’re going to have to really amp up the crazy to top that legendary storyline, of course, but today’s installment is promising. Liza will apparently go to any length to prevent Drew from breaking up with her, and if that means arranging an impromptu surprise birthday party for him on a day that is very much not his birthday, then so be it.

B.C., 5/31/11

As noted, neo-B.C. is putting way too much effort into gags like this, which were transparently created as excuses to photocopy some clip art and then call it a day. Today’s installment is actually an example of how trying too hard actively lessens the strip’s quality. Since beloved B.C. character Grog is a subhuman dullard and almost certainly illiterate, it would have been more realistic to portray him as continuing to stare dumbly ahead for two panels, rather than react with horror at the thought of a small business and all the precious but desperately hocked items within going up in flames.