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Herb and Jamaal, 5/8/10

This strip, which consists entirely of Herb sitting around silently ruminating about his own inadequacies, would have been depressing enough if it had run, as you might expect from its set-up, on Monday. Had it appeared at the week’s beginning, we could at least console ourselves with the thought that perhaps Herb was being too hard on himself, and that he might find to his own surprise that this week would see some triumphs, large or small. But as it instead appears on Saturday, there’s really no other interpretation other than that he’s spending his weekend obsessively going over the wreckage of another failed week in his mind. The fact that all of this is in thought balloon form indicates that he feels that he can’t share these dark thoughts even with his closest friend; the next time we see our two title characters engaged in light-hearted banter or wacky antics, I for one will assume that Herb is putting on a brave face and secretly contemplating suicide.

Mary Worth, 5/8/10

“Easy for me to come here and criticize you? Bonnie, let me put it this way. When you’re tired, do you find it easy to fall asleep? When you’re thirsty, do you find it easy to drink? Do you find it easy to breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide?”

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Slylock Fox, 5/3/10

Good lord, what sort of grim PSA is this? “Forest animals who would have normally gone off to their sweet reward in Death’s friendly bosom must now live on for decades inside their broken, shattered mortal shells, thanks to the tyrannical Forest Government and its so-called public safety legislation!” Of particular note are the expressions on the faces of our paramedics; the haunted eyes and spontaneous perspiration are presumably a horrified reaction not to the bear’s mild head injury, but to the condition of whatever poor beast is still trapped in that car. (Sorry, colorists: you can’t convince me that the fluid pooling around the overturned vehicle is motor oil.) Once the the jaws of life extract the mangled form of the gorilla or crane or what have you, the poor soul will have years in a hospital ward getting nutrition through a straw to look forward to, rather than Heaven. Thanks a lot, seat belts!

While the dull-eyed pink bunny is clearly just a run-of-the-mill accident gawker, I’m betting that dog in the suit is a lawyer with a pain and suffering case on his mind.

Mary Worth, 5/3/10

I hate to actually agree with Mary for once, but … has Bonnie actually heard from Ernie that he’s staying away from her neatly stacked clutter? I mean, she’s just narcissistically assuming that his decision-making is all about her. Maybe he just met some other woman during his business trip and has fallen in love and run off! Or, maybe he wasn’t wearing his seat belt and was killed in a terrible car accident, and right now his corpse is waiting unclaimed in some far-off morgue, just because Bonnie was too full of self-loathing to make some phone calls! Won’t she feel bad then, hmmm?

Say, you know what could really soothe those bad feelings? A little retail therapy, if you know what I mean!

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Beetle Bailey, 5/2/10

Beetle Bailey’s recent flirtation with self-referential absurdism has in fact led logically to this. All the references to the misty origins of the strip — you may not have known that upon launch Beetle Bailey was a college-humor strip, until the title character abruptly quit school and joined the army a year into its run — are here systematically dismantled. His long-forgotten girlfriend has found love with another, his ancient jalopy has been sold to a classic car collector, and his room at his parents’ has had all traces of his presence eliminated. With all ties to his former life finally cut after sixty years of basic training, Beetle is finally ready to ship out to one of the various war zones, where he will presumably die in a hail of bullets almost immediately, due to his incompetence.

Mark Trail, 5/2/10

Way to bring everyone down, Mark. “Look at this adorable little mouse, washing its face with its hands, OMG SO CUTE! Later, it was ground to bits in a mechanical thresher.”

Panels from Mary Worth, 5/2/10

LIES LIES OH MY GOODNESS SO MANY LIES