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Apartment 3-G, 9/18/04

For my money, I say we don’t get nearly enough of Margo’s stereotyped, somewhat accented mother in Apartment 3-G. But this week’s sequence, in which she looks into Margo’s future and gives her vaguely ethnic premonitions of danger, makes up for her long absence. It doesn’t take a mystical knowledge of the fortune-telling arts of the old country to guess that Margo is going to get into trouble on any given day, of course, and anyone less self-absorbed than our scheming brunette publicist would have noticed that her new client is more Ernst Bloefeld than George Soros. Still, I appreciate a good card reading — we need more of them in the comics.

(I should say here that I guess I’m only assuming that Gabriella is Margo’s mother. I can’t figure out what else the relationship could be, though Margo, that saucy career girl, always calls her by her first name.)

Bonus observations: Margo may not know of two opposites in one heart, but she certainly seems well aware of two different degrees of collar flip-up in one cartoon. And I don’t want to know what she’s doing with her hands in the first panel.