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Apartment 3-G, 1/31/05

So here’s Lu Ann’s long lost … well, what, exactly? Trying to guess just what sort of relative this creepily chipper person might be made me realize that I have no idea how old any of these people are supposed to be. In the comics, when you can’t see someone up close and count their liver spots, you really have to go on cultural cues to try to figure out things like people’s ages, and when everyone seems to get their clothes from a Hollywood costume designer circa 1962, that’s kind of difficult. Is this young person a teenager? Roughly the same age as Lu Ann? And how old is Lu Ann, anyway? 20? 25? 35? Anyone? I had a Texas correspondent who said he’d “been through a lot with these ladies”; maybe he knows.

Anyway, the reason I’m so eager to know this is that I cherish secret hopes that this stray may in fact be Lu Ann’s secret abandoned daughter. Alas, I think they’re far too close in age for that, but it would add a bit of interest to Lu Ann’s otherwise mind-numbingly goodie-goodie personality and backstory.

Margo’s “Hum…?” in panel three is no “More zippers, mule!”, but it is a pretty strange sound effect. I defy you to try to reproduce the actual noise being rendered here. She’s just disgruntled that she’s suddenly not the center of attention anymore, and will no doubt soon retreat to her bedroom to work on her White Slavery Scrapbook.

Bad dye job alert: Mimi the Mysterious Stranger has gone from Manic Panic Redhead on Sunday to mousy blonde during the week. Somewhere in a Malaysian comics-coloring compound, an enraged supervisor is shouting “More red ink, mule!”

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Faithful readers, the day you’ve been waiting for pretty much your whole lives is here. Now, thanks to the good people at CafePress.com, you can purchase high-quality shirts and mugs with your favorite bizarre and incomprehensible quotes from the daily comics. First up is are t-shirts commemorating the catchphrase that swept the nation after it was bellowed at Margo, Apartment 3-G’s enslaved brunette:

Next are some shirts that salute north-of-the-border jive talk from For Better Or For Worse. If you wear this shirt, your friends and school will know that you’re no foob:

And finally, enjoy a little stimulation with your morning coffee when you drink out of a mug adorned with one of Mark Trail’s pearls of pharmacological wisdom:

Act fast if you like these: since I’m too cheap to upgrade beyond the free version of CafePress.com’s story, I can only have one graphic per type of shirt, so I will probably be rotating in new stuff as it comes up. To see what these images would look like actually on the products themselves (and, of course, to buy said products) just visit the Comics Curmudgeon store at http://www.cafepress.com/joshreads. Remember, every penny of profit goes to help pay for my bandwidth costs, and, if I cover that, to help pay for my sweet, sweet booze.

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Apartment 3-G, 1/18/05

Jiminy Cricket, that is one ugly paperweight. The image quality isn’t very good, so you may not be able to see that the little tag hanging awkwardly off the side of it reads “Butterflies are free.” It’s sad, but probably accurate, that the sort of people who would be nice enough to send a holiday gift to a pretty young middle-class white stranger who was briefly forced to work in a sweatshop are also the sort of people who would be charmed by this kind of heinous kitschy crap.

Ironically, the paperweight itself was almost certainly made in a sweatshop somewhere in Southeast Asia.

In the aftermath of her release from captivity, Margo had threatened to start thinking of others before herself and worrying about important issues in the world at large. In other words, she was on the verge of becoming as dull as LuAnn, though admittedly smarter. Fortunately for Apartment 3-G lovers everywhere, the outpouring of sympathy and devotion she’s receiving here will no doubt soon inflate her ego back up to its appropriate level.