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Mark Trail, 8/29/14

Listen up, narration box: it’s not an “open field” if there’s A HERD OF ELEPHANTS IN IT.

Apartment 3-G, 8/29/14

It may be that this inventory of obsolete boyfriends is essential for Tommie to process her oft-mentioned though seldom-seen grief for her dead fiancé, but it sure feels like the strip is wrapping things up before shipping her off to Crock or somewhere before bringing in a new girl (Beth? Is Beth coming back?). Or maybe letting Margo and Lu Ann (remember them?) duke it out one floor down in Apartment 2-G.

Anyway, here’s Tommie with her colleague and suitor, Dr. Joe Kelly:

Apartment 3-G, 4/28/09 (panel)

It didn’t end well.

Beetle Bailey, 8/29/14

Amos Halftrack is alarmed at the prospect of having sex with his wife, and terrified at her determination to carry out the act. There is an ancient and nameless horror at the core of their marriage.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/29/14

Wow, Funky Winkerbean is outsourcing its lame wordplay to a one-shot walk-on. Sets some kind of baseline, right there.

Josh has his hands full as he racks up the miles across the bosom of this great land, but still manages to keep abreast of developments in popular culture. Here, he stops in at Chi-Chis — or is it Hooters? — and bumps into Dolly Parton, titular Queen of Country Music. Then back to the car, flick on the highbeams, and damn the torpedos, it’s full speed ahead: California or bust!

OK I’m a nine-year-old, but Josh started it!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Apartment 3-G, 8/28/14

Ah, Tommie’s Parade of Paramours marches on – today it’s IT Gary, whom Tommie didn’t find so robotic back in the day:

Apartment 3-G, 12/4/07 (panel)

The background on this baffles me a little – is Gary just not that into her?

Anyway, Tommie and Gary got pretty serious until Gary pulled up stakes and headed for Colorado in search of IT fulfillment, expecting Tommie to follow. She didn’t, because as Margo helpfully explained to her at the time, “You don’t even SKI!” These days, of course, people visit Colorado for all kinds of reasons other than IT and skiing. Which raises the question of how Tommie would act if she went to Colorado and got really, really wasted — like Maureen Dowd wasted. I think she’d probably spin around the room with a vacant expression on her face, getting into endless, pointless conversations with her roommate Carol.

Archie, 8/28/14

Ooh, menace points for the little scamp in Archie. But is this even a thing people do any more? In California where I live, state agencies and TV newscasters encourage people to turn in their water-wasting neighbors for fines and reëducation; we have camps. There’s even an app to make shaming them more convenient. So it’s more likely somebody would write “Thanks” on a dusty car, and “Don’t waste water” in mud on a perfectly clean one. And then get fined for wasting water to make mud.

Gil Thorp, 8/28/14

Hey it’s Marty Moon! Marty takes a lot of grief here for being a pissy little alcoholic failure. And while that’s 100% accurate, credit him for being the only voice in Milford to call Gil on all the B.S. he dishes out in lieu of doing his damn job. Sure, right now it’s looking good with the 7-man practice of all against all and Sa’ad Shamoun’s muscle mass, but wait ’til mid-season when he pulls out the Wing-T or 5-wide or some nonsense and everybody mutters, “Sure, Coach.” Right now, though, it’s the first day of school, and Gil has other things on his mind – that enormous stein of coffee isn’t going to drink itself, you know.

Gasoline Alley, 8/28/14

The team at Gasoline Alley wishes to remind its readers that while “real life” may be where you live, it is most definitely not where they live.

And while we’re on the topic of gasoline: you can just see it on the poor guy’s face — “How, oh how can I possibly afford all this costly fuel?”

Faithful Comics Curmudgeon readers can think of a way!

— Uncle Lumpy

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In the last full week of August, attention spans and expectations are low. Time for a week-long ‘theme’ series to fill up the queue without too much annoying work.

Apartment 3-G, 8/26/14

Oh hey it’s Tommie’s cavalcade of boyfriends, going back to 2007! Sure, Lu Ann and Margo get all the attention, but it’s boring old Tommie who gets all the action. Here’s the Swain o’ the Day:

Apartment 3-G (panel), 2/4/07

This is Neil Flynn, a small-time community-theatre lothario who played a one-shot role in 2007, mostly to humiliate IT Security Studmuffin Gary, shown in silent lamentation there on the right.

Neil kissed Tommie once, and was never her “boyfriend” in any reasonable sense of the word. So “arrogant, cruel, and a cheater” is apparently Tommiespeak for “I totally let him kiss me — and no proposal, not one! Can you believe it? I would be a grandmother today if not for that bastard — the nerve of the man!”

Crankshaft, 8/26/14

All week long, bitter old Ed Crankshaft daydreams about delivering his incoherent petty spite globally, at industrial scale. But in a run of bad luck, his bus is beset by gremlins, hijacked by convicts, overrun with snakes, and crashlands on a mysterious tropical island somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean.

Judge Parker, 8/26/14

Dude, if you’re gonna do the waxed moustaches, use the little grey cells, too: “Hi, Sam” just won’t cut it. Repeat après moi: “Ah, M’sieur Drivair! I ‘ear zat M’selle Nedday, she ‘as retourned, wiz zee radiant skeen, and zee fairm, rounded … ‘ow you say … accoutrements. M’sieur Drivair iz M’selle Nedday’s step-fazzair of course, but none of zees is creepaiy, n’est-ce pas? Non! We are Franch, zat iz why!”

Mary Worth, 8/26/14

Mary Worth wraps up the “Bad Doctor” loose end. Say, have you noticed that all Mary ever does at the hospital is peer at blank sheets of paper and eavesdrop on gossip? It’s almost as though patient care somehow isn’t her top priority. Go figure.

And wouldn’t you just love to see Nurse Bluehair on your medical team? Sure, it’s all grins watching her try to work out the relationship between “the ones you don’t suspect” and “the ones you don’t bother to keep an eye on” until you see her standing at the foot of your bed with a catheter, an I.V., an oxygen cannula, and a baffled look on her face.

Baby Blues, 8/26/14

Any parent ever born just switches the plates. Any parent ever.

–Uncle Lumpy