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Apartment 3-G, 8/20/10

“Going soft?” Bite your tongue, Lu Ann! Margo isn’t freaking out about getting her hair cut because, unlike you, she hasn’t linked her sense of self-worth to something frivolous and external like a hairstyle. Margo knows that hairdos come and hairdos go, but that whatever happens to her hair, nobody can touch her heart, her core. Margo will always be Margo. Her self cannot be harmed by whatever silly makeover plans Kat and Kitty have in store.

She also sees the hair-styling portion of the show as a great opportunity for escape: all she has to do is grab a pair of scissors and stab her way out.

Crock, 8/20/10

What if you wrote a comic strip that nobody, not even your editors, read or cared about? Would you keep dutifully churning out the lame jokes, day after day, so long as the checks kept clearing? Or would you grow resentful and eventually just replace the dialogue with banal non-sequiturs, just to see if anybody noticed?

Mary Worth, 8/20/10

“And if one of the bums I interrogated didn’t know anything, I made ’em switch clothes with me. That might seem strange to you, kid, but I was on the street, and I had to live my life by the codes of the street. And those codes say that when a man doesn’t help you with your vengeance mission, he forfeits his right to his clothes. That’s how it works. On the street.”

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/15/10

Poor Slylock! He’s an expert at fancy deduction and ratiocination, and a savant at picking out seemingly insignificant details from a crime scene that may be important, but it appears he’s not cut out for the rough and tumble of real crime-fighting. For instance, some member of the strip’s rogues gallery — Harry Ape? Slick Smitty? Reeky Rat? — has trashed Slylock’s home, sending a message that he’s not safe anywhere. And yet all Sly can do is obsessively try to figure out the exact time when this act of intimidation took place. Do you think whatever thug wakes you up tomorrow with a well-placed fist to the snout is going to be impressed by this, detective? You’re officially in over your head.

Apartment 3-G, 8/15/10

Oh, dear, we appear to have reached the point in the storyline that I most feared, when the makeover would reveal the limitations of Frank Bolle’s ability or willingness to depict clothes worn by human females in the year 2010. The dress Margo is holding up in panel four would in fact make Lu Ann look old, and not cute, if by “old” we mean “a reanimated zombie of a woman from the 1910s in her burial dress.” And speaking of age, Tommie’s dress in the final panel looks more to me like “overdramatic prom dress” than “sophisticated thirtysomething professional.” At least her facial expression of forced sultriness barely masking profound discomfort is pretty accurate.

Blondie, 8/15/10

Here again is an instance of a Sunday strip whose top row of throwaway panels changes the narrative’s entire complexion. In those papers where the strip appears without the throwaway panels, it’s just a dumb joke about Dagwood getting a bowling ball stuck on his hand. With the throwaway panels, it’s a poignant story about a man whose best friend doesn’t remember his birthday, and tries to make up for it by just giving him some bowling ball he found in his basement, the finger holes clearly drilled for somebody else.

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Blondie, 8/14/10

As is often the case, I find some of the incidental details in this Blondie to be much more amusing than the supposed punchline. For instance, although this establishment has the extremely generic name “Ice Cream Parlor,” we can see that the management has not only made the clever decision of outfitting a child in a banana suit to harass passersby, but has given this mascot a name, “Banana Bob,” establishing a brand identity that can be leveraged across media platforms. (Could they be behind the locked Bananabob Twitter?) Even better, the store’s flagship product is something called a “Sundae Maniac,” which really strikes me more as a description of someone who likes to eat sundaes (or possibly garnish sundaes with the blood of their victims), rather than a good name for a sundae proper; still, I always root for any commercially sold product with the word “maniac” in the name.

Apartment 3-G, 8/14/10

People have been doubting Margo because she refuses to engage her enemies Kat and Kitty directly, but like any crafty warrior, she knows how to win a fight against a more powerful opponent. Here we can see that she’s engaging in guerilla warfare, draining her enemies’ coffers until they can no longer afford to imprison her in a fancy midtown hotel. Do not underestimate the Margo! In panel two her eyes are crossing in delight as she contemplates her cleverness.