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I admit to having been slack over the past few days, forcing you to hit Refresh on your browser over and over again, hoping to see a new post here and being mocked by an ad for Comics Curmudgeon tchotchkes. (An offer almost nobody has taken up, incidentally. Come on, don’t you know that everyone will worship you like a new god if you wear a “More zippers, mule!” t-shirt?) To make it up to you, I offer you not one, not two, but three fresh comics for today.

B.C., 2/1/05

I don’t think Jesus likes that punchline very much, Johnny. Also, I don’t really get the grandpa angle of the joke, nor the being-hip angle. If you’re going to set up this joke — and, I need to emphasize, I really don’t think you should — then you could probably find a better way to go about doing it.

Luann, 2/1/05

To my mind, this is the funniest Luann in weeks. It’s also evidence that a strip doesn’t need to have a punchline per se to be funny. Things I like about it: Brad casually saying “Whatev.” (complete with period) while raising one eyebrow, in panel one; T.J. solemnly offering a box of Oreos to Brad’s grave; the poem on Brad’s imaginary tombstone (you probably can’t read it in this graphic, but it reads “Brad DeGroot/ Ran out of luck/ Fell in love/ Forgot to duck); and the fact that T.J. hasn’t felt the need to dress up for his visit to the graveyard.

T.J. appears to have an earing, something I never noticed before. You’ll also notice that he’s entirely mum on the subject of dealing with sexual pressure.

Mark Trail, 2/1/05

Never mind the thrashing around, Mark; maybe you should STOP SHOUTING! I swear, if I were a shark, I’d eat him just to shut him up.

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Apartment 3-G, 1/31/05

So here’s Lu Ann’s long lost … well, what, exactly? Trying to guess just what sort of relative this creepily chipper person might be made me realize that I have no idea how old any of these people are supposed to be. In the comics, when you can’t see someone up close and count their liver spots, you really have to go on cultural cues to try to figure out things like people’s ages, and when everyone seems to get their clothes from a Hollywood costume designer circa 1962, that’s kind of difficult. Is this young person a teenager? Roughly the same age as Lu Ann? And how old is Lu Ann, anyway? 20? 25? 35? Anyone? I had a Texas correspondent who said he’d “been through a lot with these ladies”; maybe he knows.

Anyway, the reason I’m so eager to know this is that I cherish secret hopes that this stray may in fact be Lu Ann’s secret abandoned daughter. Alas, I think they’re far too close in age for that, but it would add a bit of interest to Lu Ann’s otherwise mind-numbingly goodie-goodie personality and backstory.

Margo’s “Hum…?” in panel three is no “More zippers, mule!”, but it is a pretty strange sound effect. I defy you to try to reproduce the actual noise being rendered here. She’s just disgruntled that she’s suddenly not the center of attention anymore, and will no doubt soon retreat to her bedroom to work on her White Slavery Scrapbook.

Bad dye job alert: Mimi the Mysterious Stranger has gone from Manic Panic Redhead on Sunday to mousy blonde during the week. Somewhere in a Malaysian comics-coloring compound, an enraged supervisor is shouting “More red ink, mule!”

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Opus, 1/30/05

So like any right-thinking person who enjoys the comics, I consider Bloom County to have been one of the greatest strips ever. Thus I’ve been primed to love Opus, which is essentially Bloom County in Sunday-only form. Except that … I don’t. I don’t hate it, but I’m not sure to what degree the enjoyment I do get out of it is a result of residual goodwill. This strip is a good example of the reasons for my frustration. The strip uses the expansive large-format space that Berke Breathed extracted from the syndicates thanks to his clout in order to set up … Steve Dallas getting hit in the genitals with a baseball! Berke Breathed’s a genius, so there are plenty of nice little touches that you catch on the second and third reading — I’ve always loved the way he inserts photographs into the strips as he does in the top row, and I think the chickens fleeing in various directions in the next-to-last panel are funny. But still, it’s all in the service of a man-getting-hit-in-the-balls joke. Am I getting too mature in my old age?