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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.

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Apartment 3-G, 4/28/11

Gosh, I don’t know, Tommie, maybe it’s because he’s drawn to look exactly like every other non-Dan Diller walk-on male character in Apartment 3-G? I’m much less interested in you déjà vu/first inklings of the extreme shallowness of your universe’s gene pool than I am in Dan Diller’s suddenly obvious sandwich addiction. As this picture shows (and, side note, don’t browse through Wikipedia’s American sandwiches category while you’re hungry, by the way), the reuben is not a sandwich to be treated lightly, and surely most people don’t order their next reuben with the Thousand Island Dressing from the previous one still moist in their beard. Like Wilbur Weston, Dan needs a serious sandwich intervention.

Peanuts, 4/28/11

Yes, it’s a slow day in the comics when I’m tackling Classic Peanuts, but … Linus should really be thankful for his frizzy hair, as nobody likes it when a little kid shows up to a party looking uncannily like Hitler.

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Phantom, 4/27/11

I’ll say this for the Phantom: Whatever its questionable history of depictions of Africans decades ago (a little digging will find you some howlers), the current version of the strip makes a reasonable attempt to accurately depict a post-colonial African state. Today’s strips neatly encapsulates the tension between the multiple sources of identity that can compete for the loyalty of citizens of such nations. Most residents of Bangalla probably aren’t more than a generation or two removed from their ancestral villages, where ties of clan and tribe are paramount; yet many of the young have moved to the modern capital of Mawitaan, where they’ve mingled with people from other parts of their country, and have perhaps begun to see themselves more as citizens of Bangalla than anything else. Which I imagine might cause problems for this whole Chatu-wrangling thing. “Wait, you want us to come home and do what now? Uh, yeah, see, we have this nice construction gig thing going here … cool shared apartment down on the lower East side, near some decent Bandar restaurants … why are you guys running a prison anyway? Don’t we pay taxes to the Bangallan government to run a prison system? Oh yeah, that’s right, you don’t participate in the whole monetary economy thing. Well, anyway, I think we’re going to stick around in the city for a while, but thanks for asking! Say hi to Grandpa for us!”

Herb and Jamaal, 4/27/11

Oh, that wacky Herb and Jamaal, unable to bring itself to use such specific terms as “GI Joe” or “soldier”! But this zaniness masks the important issue here: If the information I’m getting from Funky Winkerbean is correct, Herb’s GI Dude will be suffering from PTSD after years left abandoned in that box.

Family Circus, 4/27/11

“Just like all the messages we send to Mommy on Twitter begging her to love us! They never work either.”