Archive: Apartment 3-G

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Apartment 3-G, 3/15/05

After years and years (OK, I guess just years) of reading Apartment 3-G, I can now finally say that I’ve seen something in its panels recognizable as being a potential part of the New York I’ve visited. This combination laundromat-restaurant is exactly the kind of twee, high-concept wackiness I expect from those people up there. Down here in Baltimore, we just like leave the house and pay someone to cook for us, but apparently in New York, you need to have a theme to pack ’em in. Of course, in real life this joint would probably just be called “Laundromat” or something similarly minimalist for extra confusion — “Laughs & Laundry” strikes me as, you know, trying too hard. Kids today! With their laundry bars and their oxygen bars and their cereal bars and their flim-flam and their hoo-hah and their pants hanging down so you can see their underwear! It makes me sick.

The stab at modernity is sort of undermined by the young woman in the background of panel one, who appears to be on spring break from Vassar, circa 1962. Or is she a retro-hipster, fresh from Williamsburg? Only Frank Bolle and Lisa Trusiani know for sure!

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Longtime readers know that I am very strict about my commenting-on-one-comic-from-each-day policy. Except, you know, when I’m not. But Sunday’s pickings were pretty slim (except for the appalling Family Circus that was well covered in the previous post’s comments section), and there were two comics on Monday that screamed out for attention, so here they are.

Curtis, 3/7/05

In its continuing efforts to offer a positive image for today’s black teens, Curtis has taken some interesting steps. First it portrayed its tweenage hero as a leering, bug-eyed misogynist (I still can’t get the phrase “nothing more to him than a sexual playtoy” out of my head). Today, we see that he’s so hypersexualized that even his relationship with his bed is layered with lust. Now I have as hard a time getting out of a warm bed as the next guy, but the blandishments (which we can only hope are happening inside Curtis’ cap-adorned noggin) used here are way too smooth-jazz-style flirty for my taste. For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I find the term “hunny-pot” particularly vile.

The ass-scratching in panel two is a nice touch as well.

So that’s what’s going on in Harlem. Meanwhile, down in Midtown:

Apartment 3-G, 3/7/05

Why don’t you relax and enjoy your “Cereal”-brand cereal, Margo? Every night that Mim spends in some sex-crazed 19-year-old’s filthy Bed-Stuy walk-up is a night that she doesn’t sleep on your couch, which as of two weeks ago was your primary concern in life. For her part, Tommie here shows us that, thanks to her roommates’ longstanding policy of ignoring her, she’s quite good at holding conversations with herself. She’s her own best friend!

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For Better Or For Worse, 3/4/05

Kudos to FBOFW! Generally speaking, pop culture depictions of the first three years of any human’s life are shown through some sort of rosy, gauzy filter, depicted as a nonstop cavalcade of pure unadulterated love and hugs and family togetherness and candy canes and happy happy oogie woogies boo boo bean. Too often left out are the crapping and the puking and the screaming and the screaming and the OH MY GOD THE SCREAMING MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP. I mean, I know about this stuff and I don’t even have kids. But too often if you bring any of this up, especially if someone who has chosen to bring forth precious new children into this vale of tears we call “life,” you get accused of hating children in general, of hating your interlocutor’s children in particular, and of hating America.

Fortunately, our friends the Pattersons have already proven their hatred of America by their insistence on being Canadian, so FBOFW can depict the non-Ann-Geddes-little-angel side of toddlerdom with impunity. Though good taste has prevented them from taking on the feces and the vomit, they’ve tackled the screeching with gusto. Fortunately for our protagonists, in the strip after this Michael and Deanna were offered rent-free use of the apartment above them by their landlord (more proof of Canada’s capitalism-spurning anti-American hate). But at least we got to see them get close to the breaking point, which wouldn’t happen in, say, Marvin, even if they don’t actually snap.

Apartment 3-G’s Mim, who recently declared that her baby-sitting experience has, like, totally prepared her for motherhood, is clearly someone who needs to be reading this strip. Her rendezvous with Chuck is inching forward ever so slowly, but I thought this exchange was worth reproducing:

Why would Margo be mean? Um, Lu Ann, where have you been? She doesn’t need a reason — she’s Margo!