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Comics archive!
July, 2005
Apartment 3-G, 7/31/05
Oh, they’re joined somewhere, Tommie, but it’s not at the hip.
Ahem. OK, got that one out of the way early. My non-double-entendre comment here is that this may be the lamest use of the large-scale Sunday format in Apartment 3-G to date. Of course, there’s nothing more visually interesting than two people sitting and talking in a car, so it’s best to show that from every possible angle, with loving attention paid to the relative level of tension Tommie and the Professor are putting on their seatbelts in various poses. And we really wouldn’t be able to properly appreciate all this sitting-in-car action if the conversation were scintillating, so thank goodness these two clowns are doing their best to demonstrate why they’re consistently not featured in Apartment 3-G storylines. If the Professor’s vague prattling about the agony and the ecstasy of European travel does not turn out to be a vital plot point, I will lose my remaining respect for him, his academic status and weak heart be damned.
Family Circus, 7/29-30/05
Jeffy, Jeffy, Jeffy Keane: always the observer in the cavalcade of family dysfunction. Check out the little tyke’s blank, uncomprehending expression in these two panels. In the first, he doesn’t seem to pick up on the significance of the Cathy-style sweatballs flying off of Billy’s head as the elder brother faces maternal wrath for some unidentified and arbitrary slight. Will his literal-minded interpretation of Mom’s cruel threat save Billy from the threatened punishment — or make it that much worse, when the time comes? We’re left to wonder. In the second panel, Billy looks on passively as Dolly uses his presence as an excuse to cruelly remind Grandma of her washed-up, pre-technological, ice-floe-ready status. All this ambient hate and rage doesn’t register on the surface, of course, but you just know the seeds of deep subconscious trauma have been planted. Both these panels have the feel of someone looking back and saying, “Oh, yeah, so that’s why I am the way I am.”
Mary Worth, 7/28/05
Ah, the glory and pageantry that is a Charterstone pool party! Where tongs daintily drop ice cubes one at a time into tall, frosty glasses of what have you, and where the gentlemen artfully hide their middle-age spread by tucking their polo shirts into their electric-blue slacks. Today Mary, sporting her favorite paisley magenta sweater, is learning a valuable lesson about the world: you can be sucker who gets her treasured swans broken by an ungrateful houseguest, or you can be a self-important, intolerant ass like beardo here. What thoughts are whirling behind those guarded eyes in panel two? Is she thinking, “I just have more compassion than you, Ian, and can see the good in even the most self-pitying of drunkards?” Or is she thinking, “My God, he’s right — what was I thinking, turning my nice apartment into some kind of flophouse for boozehounds?” Mary’s face is inscrutable. And by “inscrutable,” I mean “poorly drawn.”
For Better Or For Worse, 7/27/05
(Once again, not gonna piss off Mt. Foob by posting the strip here. No, sir. Read it here.)
So let’s take stock of feminism north of the border, shall we? Remember, a woman can do anything a man can do! Operate heavy machinery or what have you! And if you try to tell ‘em otherwise, why, you’re nothing but an boorish jerk with a receding hairline and a misshapen skull and a … a … weird little … thing in the middle of your forehead! Yeah! Jerk!
This only applies, of course, to women who haven’t had kids. Once you’ve had a baby, of course, your job is to stay home and raise ‘em. Yup, that’s what’s in your future till they can take care of themselves! What’s that? You say that you’re committed to your career and that your husband is perfectly willing to take over the childcare duties? You think that sounds like an equitable arrangement? Wrong! The gods of narrative will make sure that you come across as an emasculating wench, you … you … francophone!
Meanwhile, let’s see the proof that spider-sense doesn’t make for good financial sense.
Spider-Man, 7/27/05
Yeah, because the last thing I’d want if I had a high-stress job, time-consuming job that paid exactly nothing — like, say, being a superhero — would be for my wife to suddenly become extraordinarily wealthy. I mean, dude, you can climb up walls and what not, and now you’re feeling inadequate because you make less than your woman? I would definitely like to sign up for this sort of marital problem. I’m sure I’ll feel a twinge of discomfort, just before I dive head first into my Scrooge McDuck-style swimming pool of money that I didn’t have to work for.
B.C., 7/26/05
Here’s what the future Mrs. C. had to say about today’s B.C.:
“Some comics make you laugh, some make you think. Unfortunately, this one does neither.”
Actually, though, this strip did make me think, specifically about what ol’ Johnny’s smoking, what with his legs-protuding-out-of-the-armipits fish there. Because you know that the idea of some sort of fish that could, in defiance of God’s law, go up on land is totally removed from reality.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/25/05
Dr. Hamilton is, of course, a man of science, so when he expresses combined-bold-and-italics-level shock at the notion that Buck was sired by a human male in the usual way, I assume it’s because he had already settled on an alternative explanation for the young man’s existence. Here are some potential theories:
- He was brewed up in a lab by a secretive clan of scientists looking to create the ultimate, fearless manifestation of modern man in all his wonderful and terrible glory.
- He was shot forth self-living out of the bosom of the Earth, perfectly formed, with a day’s growth of beard and every sexy blond hair out of place just so.
- He arrived from outer space in a glowing disk of light, with so much to teach us about our place in the universe … and about each other.
- He was born of a virgin, and was beaten within an inch of his life with a fence post for our sins.
- He just showed up one day on the outskirts of town, hitching a ride in on an old pick-up truck. We never did catch where he came from, but things sure are less exciting around here now that he’s gone.
With such lofty ideas in mind, I can understand that it must come as a shock and disappointment to Dr. Hamilton to learn that Buck’s genesis came about in the usual way. Especially when he got a load of the combover on one half of that genesis.
