Post Content

Apartment 3-G, 7/16/07

On Saturday, Eric Mills announced that he had picked up “something priceless” from the Orient. Today we learn what that priceless item is: his brother’s mouldering corpse. Actually, if he found it on the cold, dry Tibetan plateau, it may in fact be freeze-dried rather than mouldering, but either way it’s technically “priceless” because of course nobody would pay good money for it. (This also meant that he didn’t have to declare it on his customs form upon his return to the States.)

This shocking fact has sent his sister-in-law into a Level Four Swoon, though the segue from “missing” to “prayed his body would be recovered” seems to have skipped over a vital point. Presumably once a death certificate is on file, their illicit love affair can be upgraded from actual adultery to merely kind of icky, and Eric can dispense with his Margo-dating pretense. That should get ugly fast.

Gil Thorp, 7/16/07

There are few things in this world more disturbing than panel two of today’s Gil Thorp. I mean, sure, we all like to see ol’ pearl-earring-wearing Heat-Miser-lookalike Coach Kaz give a drunken lout what for by punching him right in the teeth, and the fact that his girlfriend responded to his act of lightning-fast violence with a look that says “Do me right here in the middle of CAFE, I beg of you” is only to be expected. But where the hell is the rest of Kaz’s arm? As disturbing as the thought that his fist might have gone right through the Lout’s teeth and headed back towards the uvula is, at the angles we’re seeing, it just doesn’t seem possible that Kaz’s fist isn’t protruding out the back of the drunken fellow’s head. My theory is that the inside of this bottle-wielding field’s body is some kind of dimensional anomaly: he’s literally bigger on the inside than on the outside. This bizarre evolutionary adaptation presumably allows him to ingest a greater volume of alcohol than a normal human could contain without bursting open.

Archie, 7/16/07

Today the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000 has actually manage to cobble together a gag that, if not “funny” per se, at least makes a vague sort of sense and is based on the Archie gang’s (admittedly broad) established characterizations. However, we do get an interesting indication that the AJGLU 3000 is not connected to the Internet. Sure, bizarre fake domain names are in fact used as the names of retail establishments in real life — my favorite is the newsstand at the Oakland airport called WWW.NEWS.OAKLAND — but Eat.com is actually the homepage for for Ragú®, currently featuring some “Soccer Mom Shortcuts.” (“Today’s tip: Your kids don’t have what you’d call ‘discriminating palates,’ so don’t feel bad about feeding them mediocre spaghetti sauce out of a jar.”) Presumably the domain was reserved by some smartie in the IT department of whatever multinational corporation owned the rights to the Ragú® brand in 1998; the current owner, Unilever, has deep Dutch pockets and teams of lawyers, so look out, AJGLU 3000, is what I’m saying.

(Note to outraged soccer moms everywhere: I feed myself mediocre spaghetti sauce out of a jar, and I don’t have kids who I have to shuttle to soccer practice, or even a job that requires me to leave the house, so please do not take offense at the above.)

For Better Or For Worse, 7/16/07

Coming this summer, to theaters from Vancouver to Halifax:

When does their house … become your home?

When does accommodation … become self-abnegation?

When does a doormat … say enough is enough?

When does murder … become emotional self-defense?

Will any jury convict her?

All these questions and more will be answered in the thinking person’s summer blockbuster: Oedipus Wrecks: The Housening!

Gasoline Alley, 7/16/07

Driven to madness by the incessant basketball-dribbling of a bunch of young African-American fellows, Slim has decided to destroy the public court on which their noisy pastime is played by simulating a meteor strike. Dear God, I wish I had a made up a single word in that previous sentence.

Family Circus, 7/16/07

“So you see, the Great Leader used his Third Sight to recognize the sympathetic vibrations between us during Morning Inspection at the Compound. Three weeks later, we were joined in the eyes of the Unknowable God in the Sacred Dell, along with three hundred other people. The end. Now go do your homework.”

They’ll Do It Every Time, 7/16/07

Hey, everybody! Today’s TDIET was submitted by “Allison Everett,” who’s really faithful reader Allie Cat! “Just to give you some backstory,” she says, “I log a lot of phone time with my work; my colleagues and I all get voicecalls (although we call them ‘voice mails’) like this daily and they’re irritating (and I haven’t learned how to rewind on my current system, so that makes me an idiot in my own right, but we won’t go there). Also, I don’t currently own a black sweater vest, but it’s on my list for fall fashion must-haves.”

Beetle Bailey, 7/16/07

Beetle and Killer are not putting their IED training to use in the ways that their superior officers might have hoped.

Post Content

Apartment 3-G, 7/14/07

“I found the legendary Marg-Po idol in a monastery high in the mountains of Qinghai province, just like the old man at the museum said. The monks said that its mystical power was the only thing that could defeat Margo. It seems crazy, but I think it’s our only chance.”

Mary Worth, 7/14/07

Welcome to phone sex, Mary Worth-style. That means it’ll take a year and a half, will take place at impossible angles on hideously colored sheets, and everyone will lose interest about a quarter of the way into it.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/14/07

Man, I could just watch hungover Hugh stand absolutely still and blink very gingerly all day. It’s kind of hypnotic. The next three weeks of this strip could just be Hugh blinking as the storyline is advanced by word bubbles coming from off-panel. They could call it The Angriest Hungover Brit in the World.

Shoe, 7/14/07

Possibly the most depressing Shoe ever. I think they’re finally figuring out that if they’re going to have Roz responding to punchlines with huge-eyed horror, they need to make those punchlines truly horrifying.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 7/14/07

Wow, Hekkie held one set of attitudes as a child, but decades later as an adult holds a different set of attitudes entirely on a number of subjects!

That … that is something they’ll do every time, actually.

Boring technical update: Apologies to everyone whose comments were eaten by the new spam filter over the past few days. I know it’s really frustrating, but believe me when I say it’s also been really frustrating for me to try to figure out how and why it’s happening and how to fix it. I switched back the other filter program; hopefully it won’t cause the site to grind to a halt again or start eating comments like it was doing last week. (For those of you who are computer nerds: I had switched from Spam Karma 2 to Akismet and now back to SK2. If you have any words of advice, I will appreciate them.)

On thing that will definitely increase your chances of getting caught in any kind of spam filter is adding a bunch of links to your post. So, I’d advise you not to do that.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 7/11/07

Ha ha! Oh, man, the Gil Thorp summer hijinks are getting started even more quickly than I could have hoped! I’m totally in love with Gail Martin, the “rock and roll Carole King,” as she was called yesterday; truly, nothing shouts “rock and roll” like a collared shirt and a long braid that you clutch dramatically to your chest while you belt out your non-hits and your banjo player grooves behind you. This looks exactly like the kind of scene where a brawl would break out, and I look forward to tomorrow’s weirdly proportioned and strangely angled fisticuffs. Since Kelly has a troubled past with guys with rage issues, this should provide excellent fuel for one of the eleven rapidly crosscut dramas that will be entertaining us until football practice starts up again.

Apartment 3-G, 7/11/07

Ruby’s dialogue says “funny Texan with more realistic ideals of beauty than these supposedly sophisticated New York City girls,” but her solemn expression in panel three, along with Tommie and Margo’s panicked exchange of glances, says “violent feederism.” In two weeks, look for the two of them to be tied to their chairs, their faces smeared with tangy barbecue sauce, begging for mercy, as Ruby says, “Nuh-uh, Maggie, you still only got one chin!”

Ziggy, 7/11/07

If you thought that the sight of a desperate, insane, bald dwarf with no pants jabbering about the dishonesty of inanimate objects while thrusting a fifteen-year-old household appliance at bemused service worker wouldn’t be funny, well, today’s Ziggy is here to be prove you wrong. I actually laughed aloud at this. Ziggy may continue to exist, as far as I’m concerned.

As I look at it more, I’m sort of hypnotized by the text in Ziggy’s word balloon. The symmetry between the sentence-initial “i” (lowercase, in defiance of all known typographical conventions) and the final exclamation mark, makes it look like he’s actually shouting “T lies!” in Spanish. Which, for my money, is even funnier.

Luann, 7/11/07

I’m only marginally less sick of Brad-Toni than I am of Curtis-Michelle, but this sequence is growing on me. If Toni ends up running off with uberskeeze TJ because of his cooking (or “cooking”) skills, I will be willing to forgive a lot that’s happened in the last few years.

Dick Tracy, 7/11/07

It just wouldn’t be Dick Tracy if the payoff didn’t include somebody writhing around in pain. This isn’t the optimistic fantasy land of Mark Trail; those eyes aren’t growing back.

Family Circus, 7/11/07

Hmm, what’s the most alarming part of this? Yeah, I’m going to have to say that it’s Big Daddy Keane’s little smile.

Gasoline Alley, 7/11/07

Gasoline Alley: the one comic strip that isn’t afraid to show you how the system is stacked against the white man.

Spider-Man, 7/11/07

In a strip that brought us such epic battles as Dr. Octopus vs. his television, Spidey vs. a bowl-hatted butler, Spidey vs. his own outdated ideas of economics and gender, and, of course Spidey vs. a brick, today’s struggle between J. Jonah Jameson and Larry King may represent a dramatic zenith.

And, finally, I’m sure sexy toast-eating is somebody’s fetish, so:

Panel from Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/11/07

Go to town, perverts!