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Apartment 3-G, 7/12/10

Our terribly dressed makeover artists can insult our girls all month, as far as I’m concerned, but I think their barbs might be missing their mark to a certain extent. Sure, Margo looks like an old-fashioned schoolmarm — the sort of old-fashioned schoolmarm with sex appeal smoldering just beneath the surface, not least because she’s teaching in an old-fashioned schoolhouse, where corporal punishment is still permitted. Lu Ann may be a blonde, but she has far less depth and intelligence than the average Barbie doll. And, of course, nothing about Tommie could possibly be described as a “hot mess,” as that phrase is generally reserved for spectacular failures in aesthetics and personal habits, not sad, desperate attempts to fade into the background so that nobody can see you. “Hot mess” will presumably be what all three of these girls will look like once Kat and Kitty are done with them.

Dick Tracy, 7/12/10

Man, is Dick Tracy actively trying to get kicked out of the paper now? Apparently showing mangled corpses at an oblique angle wasn’t enough, so now we’re being treated to a woman more or less cut in half by a falling airplane, her face frozen in the look of terror that came over her when she realized her death was imminent, her hands raised up in a feeble attempt to stave off the inevitable. Delightful!

Gil Thorp, 7/12/10

With the Mudlark spring teams finally, in the second week of July, eliminated from contention, at last we can launch into Milford Summertime Wackiness™. This year’s zany summer story looks like it will revolve around the Thorps’ divorce. “Thanks, but what are you still doing here? You know what the judge said, and my lover Carlos will kick your ass if he catches you. I’m sorry you don’t have any containers at your sad apartment; just take the pitcher and get out.”

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/9/10 and (panels) 7/11/10

I have to admit to having been scandalized by Friday’s Snuffy Smith, in which a local young woman casually admits that her paramour has left her to enter into a polygamous relationship with sisters. What could be the cause of this attack on traditional values in Hootin’ Holler? Could the male population have been so reduced in number by moonshine still explosions that the women have to share them? The throwaway panels, in which another local admits to fathering more than a dozen children with who knows how many women, points in the same direction. It’s also possible that some multinational chemical conglomerate is using whatever fetid lake serves as Hootin’ Holler’s water supply as a illicit disposal site, with the noxious substances causing a freakish increase in the libido of the male inhabitants.

Panels from Apartment 3-G, 7/11/10

Was this all that Tommie ever wanted — shared humiliation? She knows that her own world of sadness will never end, but now that Lu Ann and especially Margo have been dragged down with her, she allows a brief smile to cross her face.

Hey, everybody, do you know what today is? It’s the sixth anniversary of the beginning of this blog, which in Internet years is several lifetimes! Look back in wonder at my first-ever post, in which I talk about Non Sequitur (something I would almost never did again) and break my own (later-instituted) Don’t Talk About Mallard Fillmore Rule right in the title. I think I have come a long way in my writing skills and comics appreciation in the 2,400+ posts that have followed, and both my skills and my appreciation have been honed by the 369,000+ comments that readers have added to the site. Thanks to all of you, whether you’ve been reading for six years or six days — it’s only knowing that so many of you enjoy the site that keeps me doing it. And don’t worry, I plan to carry on until the Internet is replaced by something even more irritating and time-sucking.

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Apartment 3-G, 7/10/10

OMG YOU GUYS TRIPLE MAKEOVER! At long last, the A3G girls will be returned to their sexy, sexy glory days, after they are transformed into such visions of fashion-forwardness as … uh, Kat and Kitty here.

Seriously, this would actually be a pretty intriguing way to transition to a new artist, one with a sexier, more modern style. But I can’t find any information about such a shift of personnel online. Surely King Features would at least put a press release out about it, right? Or just hand-deliver it to me, since my blog is probably the only “media outlet” that would care?

Funky Winkerbean, 7/10/10

Aw, it looks like Funky isn’t dead or traveling through time to harass his younger self after all, just hallucinating from the agony of his body being shattered in a car wreck. “You’re going to be okay, buddy,” the paramedic says, knowing that in Westview, having your deluded mind living out fantasies within your mangled physical form is as “okay” as it gets.

Slylock Fox, 7/10/10

I’m a non-driver and a firm advocate for public transit, but even I will admit that taking the bus reduces’s one’s pimp-cred considerably.