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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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Momma, 5/7/10

I keep trying to fit this strip into a shape that isn’t horrible, but this is all that I can come up with:

• After running out of socks, Francis also ran out of toilet paper.
• Francis uses socks as toilet paper.
• Francis is going to masturbate in Thomas’s bathroom, using one of Thomas’s socks to clean up with.

Oh God, oh God, I need to stop there unless I…

• Francis has already masturbated into Thomas’s laundry hamper, and now needs to use the bathroom, for unrelated reasons.

ARGH ARGH ARGH MUST MOVE ON

Crankshaft, 5/7/10

Crankshaft is of course a terrible, hateful character, but I do sort of respect his refusal to cower in the face of the obvious cruelty and misanthropy of his creator. Crankshaft’s friend there is glum and resigned in the face of the specter of death; Crankshaft sneeringly demands to know the day and time of destruction, so that he may laugh at it all the more. Until then, he will live every day as if it were his last, making everyone around him as miserable as possible.

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Judge Parker, 5/6/10

I’ve frankly been pretty bored with the Neddy’s-triumphant-return storyline so far, but things may in fact be looking up. I expected to Jules to be some sort of mishmosh of Frenchy/fashion designer/metrosexual stereotypes — effete, histrionic, lascivious — but it would be much more interesting if he were an actual crazy person. Perhaps he designed the perfect shoe years ago, and just looking upon it left him the wild-eyed madman you see in panel three. The cruelest aspect of his mental illness is that he can no longer even remember his great moment of shoemaking apotheosis! All he can do is carefully balance the heels of his latest creation on his thumbs and mutter lunatic nonsense.

It’s also possible that Jules’s weird, aberrant behavior is drug induced. This would be great, as this strip has lacked a good drug story since Abbey got high on accident a couple of years ago. Jules will presumably claim that, because of his spasming back, he had to take a whole fistful of “medicinal” shrooms.

Apartment 3-G, 5/6/10

Speaking of drug-fueled descents into madness — uh, Margo, I’m all for substance abuse to ease the pain of losing your fiance, but don’t take the angry ones, OK? I know it’s useless to reason with someone in a paranoid rage, but might I point out that, in order to be manipulative, you have to be smart?

Mark Trail, 5/6/10

This Mark Trail story, which started out as “Mark finally agrees to have the relations with Cherry,” looks like it’s about degenerate into “Sassy runs off without her collar.” This will inevitably lead to lots of Rusty running through the woods with his emotions running high, and whether the boy is amped up or terrified he’s awful to look at, so no good can come of it. Plus we’re forced to contemplate just how “not pretty” that dumb little dog smells now.