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Apartment 3-G, 7/26/07

I know you’re not supposed to think about Apartment 3-G too much, but I can’t help it; it’s what I do. So I’ve been thinking, and I’ve got some questions. Here are the starters: Did Lu Ann and Alan rekindle their love on the adjustable bed in her shared hospital room? Does Lu Ann not realize that Alan’s the one who set her up with the poorly ventilated studio in the first place? Did Alan do it deliberately because he likes his girlfriends dumb, and somehow pre-carbon-monoxide-poisoning Lu Ann wasn’t dumb enough? Was Ghost Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose phantasmagorical svengalisms we had to endure for months and months, entirely a product or Lu Ann’s oxygen-starved brain cells? Are we going to have to endure some kind of carbon-monoxide-poisoning-awareness storyline for months and months? Will there be a telethon? Will Margo plan the telethon? Is “Yay, you may or may not have permanent brain damage” the most gruesome theme for a party ever? Is that why Margo looks so chipper in panel one?

Speaking of Margo (and God yes let’s speak of Margo instead of Lu Ann “Cascade of Noble Tears” Powers), in panel one you can sort of see around Lu Ann’s addled head that our favorite bun-headed brunette is being sized up by cousin Blaze. In a storyline from several years ago, back when she was pretending to be a publicity agent in an attempt to meet a rich man instead of pretending to be an event planner in an attempt to meet a rich man, Margo was supposed to be doing publicity for an off-off-Broadway play Blaze wrote or was directing or producing or something (yes, he’s not just a moron who wanders around wearing ludicrous cowboy clothes, he’s also involved in the legitimate theater!). Only Margo got distracted by something — I don’t remember what, it was probably a rich man or a shiny object or her reflection in the mirror — and she completely forgot to do any publicity at all, and the play flopped. Naturally Blaze was somewhat peeved. Presumably Margo has now completely forgotten who Blaze is, but I’m hoping he’s is sitting there in a state of cat-like readiness, awaiting the perfect moment to lunge and strangle her. And then the noble tears will really start flowing.

B.C., 7/26/07

I don’t believe that fruitcake actually exists. I suppose there are still physical fruitcakes here and there, but I think those real-world manifestations of this traditional holiday treat are hugely outnumbered by jokes about their inedibility, told by and laughed at by an audience that for the most part has never seen one. I accept that ritualized jokes like these, ones everyone gets even though they’re several steps removed from the thing being joked about, are part of the landscape of humor, but in this case part of the ritual is that you make the joke at Christmas time, not in the last week of fucking July.

See, this is why zombie B.C. pisses me off much, much more now than it did when Johnny Hart was writing it and reminding me that I was going to hell. At least then I could say, “Oh, it’s the idiosyncratic output of a somewhat deranged old man who’s been doing this so long he’s in his own little world.” Whereas now I have to imagine the current team saying, “They’ll run this crap for decades no matter how nonsensical the jokes. Ka-ching! Tee time, everybody!”

For Better Or For Worse, 7/26/07

Helpful tip to MCs everywhere: if you have to explicitly tell everyone that the event you’re MCing is great, it’s probably not actually great. (This does not apply to hip-hop MCs, since boasting of one’s own greatness is an well-established convention of the genre.)

Given the strip’s recent unsettling obsession with bathroom matters, I’m a little anxious about the “#2” on the wall in the third panel. Hopefully Gerald has not just interrupted April in the telethon’s poopatorium.

Gil Thorp, 7/26/07

Coach Kaz is going to jump at the chance to switch careers; after all, he’s a coach at a public school, and they have all these liberal namby-pamby rules now that say you’re not allowed punch your students in the face. Since he’s being hired for a delicate and sensitive position based entirely on his proven ability to hand out savage beatdowns, I look forward to the shocking climax of this storyline, in which “Thorpstock” becomes synonymous with “Altamont.”

Mary Worth, 7/26/07

For a brief moment, Wilbur demonstrates that he’s well aware of the thick, choking layer of anguish that is the atmosphere of Planet Weston. But he’s so used to life at the bottom of the well of despair that he sees even the tiniest flicker of happiness as a threat that must be brought to light and then destroyed.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/26/07

Ha ha! Snuffy Smith got mauled by a bear! Good times.

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Apartment 3-G, 7/21/07

Love, Apartment 3-G-style: You’ve been waiting for months to make a move on your pretty, bland underling, so what better opportunity than her roommate’s possible brain damage? Just hand her the business card with your private number on it (the one that says “stud” instead of “brain doctor”), lean in close so she can get a good look at your bland, sandy good looks and your leer, and order her to call you by your first name. She may be leaning away from you at the exact angle that you’re leaning in, but you know she wants you.

Mary Worth, 7/21/07

Love, Mary Worth-style: You’ve never actually seen the Big Sleep, of course, but you’ve heard that in it 21-year-old Lauren Bacall seduced 47-year-old Humphrey Bogart in a restaurant with sexy horse talk, so try to babble artlessly about the noble equines in as blunt a matter as possible so that he knows you’re talking about screwing. Be sure to use inappropriate quotation marks (if we’re really talking about horses, doesn’t she long to actually, literally, get back into the saddle again?) that nobody can see, anyway. If that doesn’t work, hint darkly at your troubled past and push your hands together and pray for pity sex — since that’s the only kind of sex you feel that you deserve, what with the self-loathing.

Gil Thorp, 7/21/07

Love, Gil Thorp-style: Teach a one-legged guy how to box. I know, it’s not romantic, but its nothing short of a gesture of true love to the readers. It’s like Gil and Coach Kaz are in some kind of competition to see who can have the most bizarre summer. Hopefully it will all end in mid-August in some kind of transcendent hallucinatory explosion of joy at Thorpstock, with braids and prostheses and punching, lots of punching.

Pluggers, 7/21/07

Everyone, with the possible exception of Marie Antoinette, is a plugger.

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Crankshaft, 7/18/07

Ha ha! Crankshaft’s prostate is grotesquely swollen, making every waking moment a torture for him! Ha ha! Oh, the hilarity!

Adding to the funny, of course, is the revelation that the dickery that the ’Shaft displays pretty much every day is part of a majestic chain of misanthropy that spans the generations. At least Crankshaft Senior has some actual annoyance to overreact to, since presumably one didn’t send children off to stadium restrooms on their own, even in the sepia-toned days of yore. Since our hero does not require assistance to toddle off to the john in the present day, I guess Crankshaft III just wants to make him feel bad about being old and decrepit.

Actually, now that I think about it, I guess that’s supposed to be Crankshaft’s son-in-law, not son, since he’s the one with the unspeakably hateful Ukrainian mother. Pretty much everyone in this strip is a loathsome human being, is what I’m saying.

(Hey, isn’t the ’Shaft supposed to be a WWII vet? If he’s 70, that would have him going through his basic training at the ripe old age of 7. Of course, it’s possible that the ’Shaft-in-law just uses “70” as his synonym for “I no longer bother to keep track of how old you actually are, fossil.”)

UPDATE: As several of you who are clearly smarter than I am pointed out, the little tot in the sepia-toned first panel is a girl child, which means that the horrible, horrible adult human being next to her is the ’Shaft himself. Let this be a lesson to you about not altering the facts to fit your grandiose “cycle of hate” thesis. Presumably said pigtailed tot is in fact the wife of the non-’Shaft dude in panel two, and thus he’s dishing out a little payback on her behalf.

Apartment 3-G, 7/18/07

“Yes, Nora, in my experience, there’s nothing an impoverished Oriental peasant respects more than a white man in an electric blue suit waving hard currency around and offering him the chance to choose between selling centuries-old pieces of his cultural patrimony and starving to death. The little buggers adore me.”

Something is seriously awry with Nora’s shirt in panel three. “God damn it, if I show him my left boob, will he stop nattering on about my dead husband and the filthy foreigners he forsook me for?”

They’ll Do It Every Time, 7/18/07

Curmudgeon dominance of TDIET proceeds apace: today’s entry is from faithful reader Damian Penny, who sent this entry straight out of m************ Newfoundland, before he up and moved to Halifax. It may be the first TDIET to end in a twisted pile of steel and flesh — but not the last, I’m hoping.

HONK-A is an amusing but not outrageous variation, but I dare you to find a horn that can produce a sound like HONK-K. On the other hand, I really like the way the trucker’s wordless curse symbols are all tiny-like and entirely contained within the cab.

Mary Worth, 7/18/07

You get the feeling that Drew starts a lot of his sentences with “I love talking about my”.

Sally Forth, 7/18/07

So, long story short, that’s why everyone at Splash Land died of cholera.

Finally, I offer the latest in an extremely occasional series of potential LiveJournal icons from the comics, this one from today’s Crock:

It should correspond to “Mood: Incontinent”.