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Apartment 3-G, 9/18/04

For my money, I say we don’t get nearly enough of Margo’s stereotyped, somewhat accented mother in Apartment 3-G. But this week’s sequence, in which she looks into Margo’s future and gives her vaguely ethnic premonitions of danger, makes up for her long absence. It doesn’t take a mystical knowledge of the fortune-telling arts of the old country to guess that Margo is going to get into trouble on any given day, of course, and anyone less self-absorbed than our scheming brunette publicist would have noticed that her new client is more Ernst Bloefeld than George Soros. Still, I appreciate a good card reading — we need more of them in the comics.

(I should say here that I guess I’m only assuming that Gabriella is Margo’s mother. I can’t figure out what else the relationship could be, though Margo, that saucy career girl, always calls her by her first name.)

Bonus observations: Margo may not know of two opposites in one heart, but she certainly seems well aware of two different degrees of collar flip-up in one cartoon. And I don’t want to know what she’s doing with her hands in the first panel.

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Apartment 3-G, 9/12/04

This gets my vote for one of the creepiest installments in the comics since I started doing this blog. There’s something deeply weird about Lu Ann’s need to atone for her ancestors’ slave-owning ways by closing herself into this Underground Railway hiding place. Since she went through a bout of agoraphobia last year, when she didn’t leave her apartment for weeks, we know she likes enclosed spaces, so maybe her desire to learn in this way is a little self-serving. It’d almost be kind of kinky, if Lu Ann weren’t such a sexless goody-goody. The weird way she’s colored in this strip, with her lips the same color as the rest of her face, make her look almost corpse-like — just adding to the creepiness of entombing her.

In subsequent installments, we learn that Lu Ann’s harrowing, life-changing experience in that dark chamber has led her to boldly confront her past by researching slavery on the Internet. Maybe someday soon she’ll meet an actual black person!

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Apartment 3-G, 8/29/04

Apartment 3-G, like all other forms of visual entertainment, needs to please that all-important demographic of males between the ages of 18 and 54 (aka “the violent and horny years”). It can’t offer much by way of car chases and explosions, so it makes up for it with occasional cabana fantasy sequences like this one. I’m not really sure what the bizarre undergarment that Margo is wearing in the first panel is supposed to be, but once she changes, things really get started. She’s upstaged, of course, by her new boss’s bikini-clad daughter. The mention of “private school” offers us a tantalizing hint of jailbait, but because Apartment 3-G has a sketchy drawing style and a complete lack of cultural cues understandable to anybody under the age of 65, it’s impossible to tell with any degree of certainty how old she actually is; the oversized cocktail glass indicates that she probably just goes to Vassar or something. All in all, however, it’s still pretty sleazy, though nowhere near as bad as the time that the tiny-towel-wrapped trio of roommates spent an entire week sighing ecstatically in a sauna.

Actually, current plot developments may lead to car chases and explosions yet. The secluded mansion, the eccentric and domineering billionaire, the team of weirdly submissive female servants dressed in matching jumpsuits — all signs seem to indicate that Margo’s new client is some sort of James Bond-ian supervillain. This should make for a more exciting storyline than LuAnn’s studio’s ventilation problems. Hopefully the whole thing will climax with Margo battling an army of bodyguards, or possibly robots, for control of a giant death ray — while still wearing her borrowed bathing suit, naturally.

By the way, my hometown paper cuts off the first two panel of this strip on Sunday, so this is the first time I’ve seen the logo in the first panel. I have to say that the grinning, floating, disembodied heads of our heroines creep the living bejeezus out of me.