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Apartment 3-G
Mark Trail, 7/26/10
Ha ha, dognapper! Mark Trail and Officer Murphy have used technological wizardry to track your ransom call back to your home! Dognapping being a crime of the most heinous nature, they don’t need any warrant from any fancy judge in order to rip your house to pieces looking for the poor mutt! In fact, since this is a “ticking time bomb” scenario (who knows what horrors he has planned for that dog, or for America?), they’re well within their rights to torture you, by letting loose that horrifying demon-thing at the lower left of panel two! Let’s take a closer look at this gap-toothed, bug-eyed monster, shall we?
Yes, we can see why you wouldn’t want this little demon in your house, screeching and clawing at the faces of your wife and family. But I guess you should have thought about that before you became a crime suspect, crime suspect!
Apartment 3-G, 7/26/10
In panel three, it’s clear that Tommie has become far too accustomed to the abuse that everyone heaps upon her, as it appears that she’s decided to save everyone a lot of time and just punch herself in the face.
Gil Thorp, 7/20/10
Oh, look, it’s two kids named after gated housing developments who are bratty and so notorious that Gil’s heard of them both! This addition of irritating, privileged WASP teens is probably Gil Thorp’s misguided attempt to cash in on Gossip Girl fever, several months after it faded.
Apartment 3-G, 7/20/10
Oh, man, this A3G storyline is determined to keep bringing us new delights, isn’t it? The best part about today is how quickly Tommie has switched allegiances to the latest mean girl to come on the scene and tell her what to do. Forget you, Margo, it’s all about Kat now! Oh, God, we can’t keep Kat waiting! I’ve put on my robin’s-egg-blue sweatshirt, do you think it’s ugly enough? Will Kat think it’s ugly enough?
Crock, 7/20/10
I know the kids like their comics “dark” and “edgy” these days, but I’m not sure I’m ready for Crock to devolve into Eli Roth-style torture porn.
Mary Worth, 7/20/10
That’s right, ladies: when a man doesn’t call you after a date, it’s probably because he can’t deal with how intense his feelings for you are. It’s all detailed in my new dating advice book, He’s Just Into You So Very, Very Much That He Doesn’t Know How To Express It. These sorts of plot developments explain why Mary Worth isn’t more widely read: it’s too raw, too real.
Family Circus, 7/20/10
Billy, you don’t have to do what that man says! He’s obviously no police officer: He’s a stripper-cop, and he’s just a little lost as he looks for that oceanside bachelorette party he was hired to entertain.
Rex Morgan, M.D. 7/20/10
“Or if he hears it from my wife, or one of the twelve other people I shot my mouth off to about it on my way into work today.”
Mary Worth, 7/18/10
All you whippersnappers out there, finding love on the so-called “Internet”: Does Match.com provide this level of service? Does it provide a bony, leathery shoulder to cry on after your date fails to follow up a little light beach dancing with nonstop attention? Does it provide rock-solid references and assurances about the character of your potential inamorata, based on about ten minutes of awkward, twitchy conversation? Does it promise to pursue that caddish failure of a human being to the depths of hell itself if necessary to make him love you?
The final panel of this strip shows the proper attitude to take towards a cell phone that might at any moment attempt to broadcast Mary Worth’s voice at you. Hold it at arm’s length, watch it warily, and hurl it as far away as you can at the first sign of trouble.
Mark Trail, 7/18/10
Look, kids, if you get eaten by a bear or shark, don’t come crying to Mark, OK? These majestic beasts don’t follow your so-called human “morality” or “law.” This may be Mark’s own way of justifying his insatiable desire to punch hairy people; his violent actions are governed entirely by instinct, and have no more relation to an ethical code than a skunk’s spraying.
Panels from Apartment 3-G, 7/18/10
Oh, God, it’s even more delightful than I could have imagined! I particularly like Lu Ann regarding that bottle of delicious, delicious gin with her eyes crossed. Can we just jettison the whole makeover plot and get two weeks of “Margo and Lu Ann get blotto”?
Dick Tracy, 7/17/10
Dick, it’s obvious that anyone who would pay good money to see a play starring you would do so in the anticipation of carnage. Your appearing before the audience bruised and bandaged is a good start, but they probably will quickly grow bored with your jawing, and will start shouting angry demands that you show them the corpses.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/17/10
Kudos to Res Morgan for having a storyline about prostate cancer that will be non-sensationalist and not suffused with Funky Winkerbean-style gloom; still, there seems to be a disconnect between Rex’s soothing words and the mayor’s dramatically gobsmacked expression in panel three. “Grandkids? But … but I don’t have any grandkids!” “Oh, yeah, about that, your 16-year-old daughter was here the other day, and…”
Apartment 3-G, 7/17/10
Angry Margo + emotionally vulnerable Lu Ann + tiny bottles of booze = inevitable sexy hilarity.
Gil Thorp, 7/14/10
Hey, Gil Thorp! We waded through like six months of baseball season because we were all psyched for summer, and you know why? Because summer is when awesome things happen in Gil Thorp! Awesome things like Kaz kicking ass and Marty Moon getting grifted and Milford students saving grown-up ladies from stalkers and and little girls getting into fistfights and Kaz chillin’ in his dojo! What we specifically don’t want is the same stuff we get during the school year, namely Gil doing a half-assed job of coaching today’s youth in some sport or other, which appears to be what we’re getting. Still, it’s kind of amusing to see how limited his set of coaching techniques is. “So, let’s do some laps to build up your endurance!” “But coach, this is golf, and…” “I SAID LET’S DO SOME LAPS!”
Mary Worth, 7/14/10
At last, the drama in this Mary Worth plot has been revealed! It’s been a week since Jenna and Mike got high on the beach, and he apparently hasn’t returned her calls or emails or texts or whatever other forms of misspelled communication she’s been bombarding him with. Tonight it’s time for her to mourn, alone with her circa-2003 Danger Hiptop and her bottle of fortified ketchup wine; tomorrow she seeks out and destroys the person responsible for her emotional devastation (Mary).
Funky Winkerbean, 7/14/10
One of the striking features about Funky Winkerbean over the decades has been that its title character had receded in importance in favor of Les Moore, who bore the brunt of the strip’s grimness but still, despite terrible psychological damage, managed to remain mildly optimistic (if creepy). But since the most recent time jump, it seems to me that Funky’s narrative focus has come back more often than not to Funky. And why not? He’s an angry, bitter recovering alcoholic on the verge of relapse, who’s managed to screw over or alienate his son, his mentor, and at least one wife. This time travel storyline actually started out sort of whimsical and interesting — I’ve had a lot of people writing me to say that they can’t believe that they’re looking forward to seeing how it turns out — but naturally it’s quickly come to this, a prematurely old man wandering about his own past, raving like a crazy person about Elvis’s corpse, and unleashing a string of metaphors whose incoherence (his issues are baseball-playing sharks on a road?) can’t mask his essential awful self-loathing. The sad thing is that in his current state he’s probably still happier than he’ll be if he wakes up in the present.
Apartment 3-G, 7/14/10
Oh, how convenient of Kat and Kitty to list all the people who helped further the humiliation of our gals, right here on TV! It will make it easier for police to link what might otherwise seem like an unconnected series of brutal stranglings committed by an unknown assailant’s ultra-powerful “quoting fingers.”
Archie, 7/13/10
Archie takes a break today from typical teenage whimsy to explore Riverdale’s grim economics. Lazy layabout Jughead can’t maintain the income necessary to fund his burger habit; Archie, who is marginally more employable and may be writing himself checks from the checkbook stolen from Mr. Lodge’s desk, has agreed to float his friend enough cash to keep him fed, but at significant interest rates — and now those debts are coming due. Terrified at Archie’s suddenly revealed violent side (he’s holding a gun in his left hand in panel three, just out of our field of vision), Jughead seeks out “Pop,” his substitute father figure, coming up with some feeble excuse to try to beg for shelter and protection without Archie noticing. But we can see from his rage in panel two that, if Jughead can’t afford his greasy diner food, Pop wants nothing to do with him, and in panel three he shows that he wants no part of this scene. Jughead will be lucky to escape Archie’s implacable wrath with only a missing thumb or two.
(Seriously, though, if someone could explain to me what’s actually supposed to be happening here, I’d sure appreciate it.)
Apartment 3-G, 7/13/10
Speaking of sudden turns to grimness, I Dressed In The Dark is beginning to look less like What Not To Wear and more like a reality-show version of 24, with the sadistic Mama Kat taking the role of the chief torturer. The girls will submit to her aesthetic demands, no matter how many beatings she has to dish out. But the once bickering roommates will come together now that they’re literally under attack from outsiders; naturally, Margo has taken a leadership role, and she’s demonstrating exactly why, for all her faults, you want her on your side in times of trouble. I look forward to this battle of implacable wills!
Mark Trail, 7/13/10
You might think that Mark Trail owning a cell phone is terribly anachronistic for this strip. The police officer certainly does, based on his puzzled expression in the final panel (“Hey, my uniform indicates that I just arrived here from 1965, and this freak is talking into some tiny sci-fi gadget!”). Still, you have to admit that a mobile phone really allows Mark to ignore the feelings of the people around him, as is his wont. “Excuse me while I take this call … Hi, honey, what’s up? No, I’m not busy, there’s just some old lady here weeping about how they’re going to take away the only things that make her life worth living, some crap like that, I dunno.” Cherry’s glad to be able to get a hold of Mark now, but she’ll regret it when she realizes that with his new phone he doesn’t even have to return home from a romantic horseback ride to get a call from his editor Bill Ellis that will take him out of range of her clumsy seduction attempts.
Dennis the Menace, 7/13/10
Dennis the Menace the character may no longer be menacing, but today’s Dennis the Menace the cartoon panel was apparently menacing to the colorists, who decided that trying to render the vibrating Mitchells in color using the Photoshop tools at their disposal wasn’t worth the effort. This in no way makes up for the fact that the whole “joke” here is that Dennis belched forth a punny malapropism. That’s the sort of thing that Jeffy Keane does, Dennis. Do you want to be like Jeffy Keane?
Cathy, 7/13/10
We interrupt our usual studied ignorance of Cathy to note that today’s “punchline” contains the phrase “poop bags.” We now return you to our usual refusal to acknowledge Cathy’s existence.