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Mary Worth, 5/11/11

Oh, Dr. Drew, it looks like your lady-dumping technique still needs work! The bored florist may have convinced you that this sad, overpriced mishmosh he threw together quickly is a genuine “Let’s Just Be Friends® Bouquet,” but I think any lady who sees you show up at your door with flowers in your hands is going to find some mixed messages in your breakup speech.

But! Not to worry, folks: Liza is sure that she and Drew are going to do more than talk tonight! Assuming that she doesn’t have an extended game of charades planned, that means that she likes nonmarital nonprocreative sex, like Charley, which in the world of Mary Worth makes her one of history’s greatest monsters, whose feelings need not be taken into account.

Hi and Lois, 5/11/11

This would be just another lame Hi and Lois strip among so, so many if not for Trixie’s gobsmacked expression as she crawls away from her bickering siblings. She’s not commenting wryly on their contentious ways; she’s suffering visibly from the free-floating anger in the house that she encounters whenever she leaves her “safe space” in front of the living room window, where she is generally blessedly ignored.

Spider-Man, 5/11/11

“Their banter … is giving me reason … to live again … so witty … almost like … watching TV…”

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Mary Worth, 5/10/11

Look at that face! Have you ever seen a man more grimly determined to let a woman down easy before? He’s massaging the back of his neck with his tie, the better to keep a cool head for the coming letting-down-easy process. Keep in mind that, in Drew’s last attempt to break up with someone, he decided that the best technique would be to just stop returning her calls, a move that led to physical assaults on his person and his dignity and, ultimately, his exile to Vietnam, so he realizes the importance of acting prudently now. Plus Liza seems like she might get stabby when crossed!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/10/11

Oh, that Clovis! He and his wife might fuss and feud, but we all know that eventually at her wishes he’ll be baptized and will accept a version of Christianity based on the Nicene Creed, thus determining the religion that will dominate Western Europe for the next thousand years.

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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.