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Mary Worth and Gil Thorp, 5/20/10

A pair of truly nightmare-fueling visages in today’s comics! Dr. Jeff has chosen exactly the wrong evening to come out of his hidey-hole and once again eat thawed-out halibut with his paramour, as Mary is clearly in the throes of a meddling binge. Eyes the size of dinner plates, she rapturously details her intention to not only “help” poor Bonnie with her problems, but to change the woman’s very essence so that it’s more in line with what Mary expects and demands from a human who’s fallen haplessly into her orbit. Jeff almost looks taken aback in the first panel as he takes in Mary’s meddle-glow. I thought that my sacrifice was enough, he thinks. I thought that by submitting to her requirements, I would keep the rest of humanity safe. But now I see that she’ll never be satisfied.

Meanwhile, in Gil Thorp, country star/weirdo Slim Chance is giving Cassie advice on undoing the pariah status she earned by scheduling an abortive elopement the day her basketball team was playing its Big Game. Said advice seems to have mostly consisted of “Be nice to the girls who hate you with good reason,” and today we see it’s finally worked — with Ashley Aiello, last seen as a wrongly accused suspect in the great Nutboy caper. Ashley went through her own social trials in the wake of that incident, if I’m remembering correctly, and the way her head swivels raptor-like towards the sound of her name in the final panel is frankly creeping me out. “POSSIBLE FRIEND?” she thinks, her eyes lighting up like high-powered laser beams.

Pluggers, 5/20/10

It’s sad when Pluggers can’t even master something simple, like the rhythms of how ordinary down-home Americans (or freakish man-animals, in this case) actually talk. It’s the lack of a contraction, “you will” instead of “you’ll”, that’s really setting me off; it sounds to me like nothing so much as a line that would be delivered by some stereotypical Jewish pawn broker in a movie made in the ’30s. This may be a defense mechanism, though: perhaps my inability to hear “will” as anything other than “vill” is preventing me from seeing the stilted sentence construction as an exaggerated faux-courtly pass, which will in short order lead to plugger-on-plugger coupling, right there on the hair-strewn linoleum.

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/19/10

Oh, Funky Winkerbean, I’m glad you’ve finally decided to give in and just embrace emotional devastation as the engine for all your drama. Today’s strip, both in form and in content, could be the basis for some bleak avant-garde art film that would play tiny, pretentious cinemas in New York and LA for two weeks before being released in a Criterion Collection DVD. For those of you not familiar with all the ins and outs of the strip’s depressing backstory: the brown-haired lady who is attempting to bust in on Les’s budding sexless romance with Cayla is Susan, who, pre-time-jump, was one of Les’s students who developed a crush on him for some incomprehensible reason, and who tried to kill herself (the incident depicted in the second panel) when her advances were spurned. Thus, what we have here is pretty much “mild low-level flirting mild low-level flirting INTRUSIVE SHARED BUT UNSPOKEN MEMORIES OF HORROR mild low-level flirting,” which is pretty hardcore. The kicker, for me, is the panel two’s “sepia-toned photo in an old-timey album” motif, which serves as a visual cue for flashbacks in the Funkyverse. In this case, it colors a grim, painful moment with a sort of ghastly nostalgia, as if Susan and Les will be laughing about it in retrospect after the consummate their mopey love.

Also, I know that the time jump wasn’t supposed to move us a decade forward in absolute time, but I’m not sure which prospect I find more unsettling: that big shoulder pads will be back in style for ladies by 2020, or that they’re coming back into style now.

Dennis the Menace, 5/19/10

Since I basically just egged Funky Winkerbean on to whatever Grand Guignol emotional excesses it might dare to achieve, I guess it’s OK for me to express my disappointment that we’ve missed Mr. Wilson’s loving descriptions of all the tortures Dennis the Menace’s damned soul will be experiencing, in hell.

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Mary Worth, 5/18/10

I have yet to read any of the comments you fine people have put up about today’s comics, but I look forward to any number of angry diatribes from mental health professionals about how Mary’s crockpot 30-second visualization exercises are in fact not an adequate treatment regimen for hoarding and other obsessive-compulsive disorders, and that she should instead seek help from a trained therapist who specializes in these issues. Or, who knows? Maybe there’ll be comments from people who say that, yes, this is exactly the way to break out of addictive behavior, hooray for Mary! I kind of doubt it, though.

One thing I’m not looking forward to is the inevitable crass suggestion that Mary is attempting to force Bonnie to her knees in panel two so that our poor shopping addict might sexually service her. Please! Mary simply wants Bonnie to prostrate herself and offer her the worship that she deserves, for her heroic meddling efforts. The feelings of pleasure Mary will derive from this go far beyond the sordid enjoyments of the flesh.

Herb and Jamaal, 5/18/10

Wow, this went very quickly, and with a lot of leaps of linguistic logic, from “You will rest your head on a needlessly uncomfortable object” to “God, my domestic life is SUFFOCATING ME.” But, hey, I’m not in a position to argue with whatever these two guys need to do to lay the groundwork for a camping trip full of on-the-down-low gay sex, I guess.

Six Chix, 5/18/10

This comic would have worked a lot better if the waitress had a pair of cooked human babies on her plate.