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Apartment 3-G, 5/24/12

Oh, say, what’s been going on in History’s Greatest Love Story, the tale of Nina and Scott Gaines? Well, Scott is determined to win back Nina’s love, and has decided that the best way to do that is to spend all his free time hanging out with the woman he was caught smooching, in a wacky misunderstanding of a totally innocent moment drunken face-mashing. Margo, whose plans to derive sexual pleasure from Scott have been stymied, now decides to try to extract some money from him instead, in the form of lucrative fees for her shoddy PR services. Scott is cartoonishly wealthy person, but there’s never been evidence that he’s ever done anything interesting enough for the rumor mill to take notice of, though that may soon change now that the woman he’s rumored to be having an affair with has suddenly been put on his payroll.

I don’t want to tell Margo how to do her job (really, I don’t, men have been killed for less), but if I were Scott’s PR manager, my first bit order of business would be to forbid him from leaving the house in a turtleneck/sports jacket combo (aka “the Robert Wagner”) ever again.

Mark Trail, 5/24/12

Wow, we’re all pretty hard on Mark for his inability to understand the motivations of humans or love his wife or talk as if he weren’t a soulless mandroid. But is it possible that he exhibits those behaviors only because he focuses all his mental energy on collecting seemingly insignificant bits of information and sifting through them like a Sherlock Holmes-style supersleuth? Ha ha, obviously not, we all know Mark is a moron. Anyway, since the mystery of Who Killed The Guy Mark’s Friend Gene Certainly Didn’t Kill is now solved (SPOILER: IT IS THE DEAD MAN’S WIFE, WHOM WE MET EARLIER THIS WEEK AND WHO IS OBVIOUSLY SHADY AND PROBABLY RECENTLY QUIT SMOKING, JUST YOU WAIT) maybe we can focus on the brutal murder of that innocent bird, which is going on in plain sight of Mark as he natters on about gum wrappers.

Pluggers, 5/24/12

Pluggers refuse to acknowledge that everyone they’ve ever known and loved is dying. “Gizmo isn’t dead, do you hear me? James M. Smith, Jr., that man in the coffin — I’ve never heard of him. I can call up my old buddy Gizmo and talk to him anytime I want. Don’t feel like doing it just now, but it’s good knowing that I can.”

Mary Worth, 5/24/12

ROMANCE TIP: You need to give your ex a little time before inviting her to have a three-way with you and your new girlfriend.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/17/12

“Never mind June being left at home to manage a sexy, charismatic, half-naked drunk lady,” you’re saying to yourself. “This strip needs to focus on its core strengths. Has Rex been a dick about anything lately?” Well, good of you to ask! You might recall that, right after the sadly departed Foster changed his will leaving everything (including $25,000 nobody knew he had) to Rex, he (supposedly) fell down the stairs while under the supervision of (estranged? ex-?) wife Mabel, who was not wise to this sudden will-change. There’s a couple of strange things going on here, and guess which one has been exercising Rex’s mind more? “You’re not implying that Mabel had anything to do with it!? Because if the police decide that she did, that might slow down the implementation of the directives in his will, and obviously nobody wants that!”

Apartment 3-G, 5/17/12

“Do you understand? I killed her!! And once I tasted blood, I couldn’t stop! My mother was the first of my many victims. And now I fear that my baby will start the cycle anew … with me. You have to help me maintain my position as Satan’s High Priestess of Death!”

Ziggy, 5/17/12

Congratulations, Ziggy: You have baffled me. The only scenarios I can wring out of this that make any sense at all are “Ziggy lives in a dystopian future when all forms of life other than people have been wiped out, and it makes him said to see the biodiverse glory that once was” or “Ziggy is watching a show about evolution and is the last survivor of a short, gnomish species of nonhuman primates.”

Crankshaft, 5/17/12

I’ve spent most of my life avoiding golf and golf courses at all costs, so I’m not really familiar with the social mores that prevail in those contexts. Is the sort of angry mob justice that’s looming in panel two typical, or is it just a strong but justified reaction to Crankshaft’s behavior and/or personality?

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Wizard of Id, 5/8/12

It’s really kind of sad that this fearsome, powerful wizard, heir to a long tradition of human beings who have managed to pierce through the barrier separating our mundane world from the realm of magic, having just used his unspeakable powers to bring a poor mortal back from the brink of death, feels a need to make a terrible and barely coherent joke relating to Apple’s electronic gizmos. It ought to be just as sad that cartoonists working on long-established strips that run in hundreds of newspapers around the world also feel the need to make terrible and barely coherent jokes relating to Apple’s electronic gizmos, but, you know, that ship sailed long ago, so it’s hard to feel more than just mild disgust about it at this point.

Family Circus, 5/8/12

Aw, look at that, the name of the mall the Keanes have descended upon sounds like “Bless ’em all,” isn’t that nice? For my money there are not nearly enough mall/all puns out there in the world. For a while, when I lived in Oakland, there was this truck from Lavine’s Heating & Cooling that was often parked near my apartment that featured prominently the company’s URL, kingofthemall.com, meant, I assumed, to indicate that Lavine’s was King of Them All, with “them all” referring to all the HVAC contractors out there (or who knows, maybe it meant all of humanity, but the on-truck marketing copy didn’t seem that grandiose otherwise). I always saw that and thought “Boy, the King of the Mall must be pissed that he didn’t grab that URL when he had the chance.” Anyway, I’m curious as to whether an encounter with the horror of a litter of Keane Kids will make Blessem Mall’s management regret being so universal with their blessings.

Apartment 3-G, 5/8/12

Haha, this some high-quality amateur Freudianism going on right here! Nina’s mother died giving birth to her, so now she’s ambivalent about having a baby because she … never had a mother to love her? Or maybe because she did have a mother, and then that mother died horribly while giving birth to a baby. Just a thought!