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Apartment 3-G, 6/7/10

Ha ha, did you think that Ari was talking to his pill-popping love Bobbie, who he just weeks ago bundled off to some private upstate nuthouse? Don’t be silly; obviously he would recognize her voice on the phone, and surely no facility that specializes in making the problematic relations of rich people conveniently go away would allow its patients any method of communication with the outside world. No, I think we have to assume that the Professor has been sending out thousands of emails that begin with “Dear One: Do you want h1gh-quality prescription MEDZ, cheap?” and has finally managed to snag a customer.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/7/10

We’ve already established that Herb’s marriage fills him with nothing but dread, so it’s probably to be expected that Herb will plunge his living room into total darkness not so that he can get amorous with his wife, but so that he doesn’t have to see her.

Marmaduke, 6/7/10

A “face-off” with Marmaduke generally ends with somebody getting his or her face bitten off.

Oh, and hey, you know what? If Mark Trail is going to keep showing us day after day of Rusty face-horror, then I fully intend to keep sharing it with you, at full magnification:

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/7/10

Rusty’s eyes, having once shone with a terrifying inky dark light, have now shriveled down to tiny pits, and his cheeks have grown hollow with grief. He pretty much looks like the guy from “The Scream,” after he’s stopped screaming.

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Dennis the Menace, 6/6/10

Let’s pass over for the moment the fact that if, as I’d guess, Mr. Wilson is around 75, he himself would have grown up with the first generation of comic book superheroes, and thus would not find Dennis’s own media consumption choices to be so sneer-worthy; let’s ignore too his seeming assumption that Dennis would view a world where basic services were performed by humans to be baffling and alien, as if he lived in a culture where people were tended at all times by advanced robots. Instead, let’s focus on the middle panel of the bottom row, in which Dennis imagines Mr. Wilson’s mail-delivery alter ego as a wild-eyed psychopath, who presumably used his job dealing with the public and the protection of his public employees’ union to go on a years-long killing spree that no doubt held the entire city in terror.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/6/10

When comics strips lavish loving energy on the depictions of the ass-cracks of adults, it can be kind of sexy! When they lavish the same amount of attention on the ass-cracks of prepubescent children, it’s just disturbing.

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Mary Worth, 6/5/10

Mary Worth is always just throwing quotation marks around sentences and pretending they’re chunks of profound wisdom, but in this case, that’s a real quote from five-time NBA MVP Bill Russell, at least according to a citationless collection of Bill Russell quotes on the Internet. The question is, why did Mary fail to credit the Celtics great for his deep thoughts on love and loving? Is she afraid that the good doctor isn’t a basketball fan and will think less of her because she follows such frivolous things as professional sports? Does she fear that her familiarity with a professional athlete active in the ’50s and ’60s will mark her out as elderly in the eyes of this young whippersnapper that she’s trying to bed? Or does she just obsessively read books of quotations, committing the quotes to memory but not the quotees?

Dr. Roberts’ own thought balloon is a little ominous. “Hmm, this woman, with her preternatural grasp of human nature, seems to have determined rather quickly that I’m a sociopath incapable of feeling anything for my fellow human beings! She wasn’t on my list of people to hunt and kill for sport, but I guess I’ll have to add her.”

Spider-Man, 6/5/10

“I’m turning off the light so you can’t see the copious weeping that will inevitably arise from my many, many pointless insecurities about our relationship!”

Oh, hey, and it looks like it’s a full-on Rusty-horror weekend!

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/5/10

AHHH AHHH HIS EYES ARE INFINITE BLACK POOLS OF GRIEF AND PAIN