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Comic mockery takes character — the mental toughness to cackle at metastasis and ridicule heartbreak. That’s why we reserve special scorn for characters who surrender to mawkish sentimentality — as in today’s shameful display.

Mark Trail, 9/1/07

The more this Homer hangs around Shirley the Duck, the softer and balder he gets. On track toward the Omega Point of hairless virtue, he can face Mark without fear.

Mary Worth, 9/1/07

Introducing Playa Drew Corey’s Love Philosophy: “Let it Slide” — or, in his own taxonomy, “Let it Die.” Tell us how that works out for you, Drew, baby — we’ll be . . . waaaaaay over there. Oh, and Clambake called. He wants his hand back.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/1/07

Peter, you lame-ass. Make the evil-eye all you want, you are making coffee for your boss’s nanny. Got it? The Shocker would be ashamed — and that’s a looooong way down, pal!

Apartment 3G, 9/1/07

Who’s that gal muffin-toasting her new beau? Noooooooooo. . . .!

— Uncle Lumpy

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What could be more obvious, more crank-turningly predictable than pre-Labor Day back-to-school themes? Nothing, that’s what! So let’s get started!

Dennis the Menace, 08/31/07

Here’s an archetypical back-to-school strip: cozy old theme, a little wordplay, easy on the menace, bang, out of the studio and beat the bridge traffic to the shore. Oh, and Alice Mitchell looks hot in that old-school put-together way. Knows it, too. Mmmm. But I digress.

Curtis, 08/31/07

Nobody turns the crank like Ray Billingsley — it’s like he’s the one working a desk at the DMV. Michelle spurned Curtis? Check! Here comes “Mom won’t buy what I want” as night follows day. Cue Magical Gunk! Barry, wet up that bed! On in five, “Onion”! Greg, smoke ’em if you got ’em! How Billingsley must pray for Kwanzaa, when the mushrooms ripen at last and his mind can soar free.

Crankshaft, 08/31/07

Tom Batiuk once had no peer at whimsy — the hall-monitor machine gun, soliloquies atop the gym rope, band gales. All swept from the cancerscape of FW of course, and alive in Crankshaft only as this ham-handed pretext ginned up to showcase Ed’s relentless petty spite.

Sally Forth, 08/31/05 and 08/28/07

Hey, look — Hilary’s going into the sixth grade. Stretchin’ right out, too — King Features might want to rethink that “precocious 10-year-old” business. And I’m pretty sure that’s her Dad’s manic glint in the second strip. Poor Sally.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Spend half your life in school and the end of August brims with dread. Here comes!

Mark Trail, 8/31/07

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It begins with smiles — smiles and good, hot coffee savored with the one you love, in a special place in the sun it feels like God created just for you. But it ends in fists — fists, and hair.

So, Elrod — pick up the pace a little, willya?

Apartment 3G, 8/31/07

Oh, this will end in tears. Not only does Tommie have a chance at happiness — she has two, in the persons of Gary Bland and Dr. Joe Doctor. Apparently, this ages her from a toddler in panel 1 through panel 2’s young adult, to the garish, pitted, furrowed crone of #3. Tomorrow’s strip may have her crumbling to dust, muttering somebody’s name — but whose? Meanwhile, Margo’s fixin’ to hate on her, no matter how it turns out.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/31/07

It’s a measure of how far we’ve come in Funky Winkerbean that the arrival of Les’s bête bleu (extruded into the narrative as “my imagination’s wicked way of personifying depression”) is the most interesting thing to happen in months, birthchild reunion and Congressional testimony notwithstanding. With any luck, we’ll enjoy weeks of manufactured irony: “It’s Lisa who’s dying, but Les who is sick!”

Pearls Before Swine, 8/31/07

Theme or no theme, there’s some stuff you just can’t pass by. You gotta love panel 2’s Socialist Realist fanart of Jeffy, and the Dolly pennant. Dare we dream of a day when all the comics exist solely to mock other comics, and our work here is done? Because that would be a day, my droogies; that would be a day.

— Uncle Lumpy