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Apartment 3-G, 8/10/04

Time and harsh experience have more or less cured me of my love for mean girls, but I must admit that Apartment 3-G’s Margo sometimes reminds me why I used to like ’em. No face masks! Lead hazards! Ownership responsibities! You set them straight, sister! I love the look of sexy outrage on her face as she describes these horrors. In the next day’s strip, she goes on a further tirade about historic building tax credits. It’s these kinds of riveting storylines that keep the kids coming back day after day. From the dialog here, it sounds like the ladies’ apartment building has only recently gone co-op; I’m sorry I missed that plotline, as it no doubt involved six thrilling weeks at a real estate lawyer’s office.

Bad-coloring-in-daily-strip alert: Margo seems to have taken time in the middle of her lecture to hastily apply some lipstick between the first and second panel. Also, the professor’s hair seems to have gone completely grey since the last Sunday strip he was in. Perhaps it’s caked with lead dust.

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Eager readers simply will not let the question of Apartment 3-G‘s swapped panels die. Alert reader Dalton has swapped the art, but not the text, of the second and third panels of Thursday’s Apartment 3-G to reproduce the original author’s intended effect. It’s like the special edition of the original Star Wars trilogy, only significantly less crappy.

“Behold my l33t p40t0s40p ski11z,” says Dalton.

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Boy, do I have prompt and responsive readers! For those of you who have been on tenterhooks about the career paths of the Apartment 3-G girls, but too lazy to read the comments, my plea to the public has been answered. A reader who goes only by the gender-ambiguous name of “Robin” says: “Tommie is a nurse. Margo is in PR or marketing or something like that. I *think* Lu Ann is a teacher.” That all sounds right to me (as Robin says, “Isn’t that all just painfully obvious, when you think about it?”), and if I had even the vaguest desire to do fact checking, I wouldn’t have posted the question to begin with, so I’m declaring Robin the winner, with the prize of getting his/her name published in the blog. You go, Robin!

Robin also points out that Lu Ann and Margo’s facial expressions would make much more sense if the art (but not the dialog) for the second and third panel were switched. If you look at the strip with this in mind, it’s so striking that I have to believe that somehow the panels got swapped during production. It’s just more proof that comics ought to be drawn, written, and composited in unionized facilities right here in the good old U.S. of A., rather than in poorly-ventilated third-world comics sweatshops.

There were also alternative suggestions as to what’s in Lu Ann’s cereal box, but they’re far too vile to report here. Have you people no decency?