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Mark Trail, 9/17/10

We’ve learned from Apartment 3-G that the world of soap opera strips is sometimes haunted by mysterious, ghostly blue figures. These shades can watch and murmur inaudibly, but never speak or interact with our heroes. Today’s Mark Trail, though, contains the first ever sighting of mysterious blue bottles. Is this why our evil cage-hunter is so bitter and angry? He drinks the ghost-booze, constantly, and yet he never gets a buzz, because this beverage primarily exists in the spirit realm.

Beetle Bailey, 9/16/10

Ha ha, yes, the lady in the GPS computer, she tells you to order a pizza even when you have a pizza already in your lap! Beetle Bailey’s Sarge: portrait of a paranoid schizophrenic compulsive eater.

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Jumble, 9/9/10

Faithful Jumble readers know that the seemingly innocent scrambled word game is slowly transforming into some kind of social-realist tract on the seedy underbelly of modern society, with routine depictions of sleaze and vice. Today’s panel continues this trend, depicting a baffled and hungover young man (wearing a wizard hat?) being taunted by the hard-faced barfly he gave it up to the previous night in a drunken haze. The can in her hand is a nice touch (presumably she’s already getting started on the day’s drinking), as is the wastebasket right next to the bed (for used condoms, or mid-intercourse booze-induced vomiting, or both). Is our protagonist wearing a t-shirt that just says “Pot,” of the sort popularized by the beloved Weedmaster P character in the delightful Overcompensating Web comic? Maybe, and maybe if he had stuck with that substance, he wouldn’t be in his current predicament.

Apartment 3-G, 9/9/10

Oh … oh dear. It appears the makeover has hit its first major disaster, as the syndicate colorists have completely lost track of who this Lu Ann person is and just arbitrarily given her red hair. Apparently they work by hairstyle only, which is bad news for a strip that’s trying to change the hairstyles of its characters. You can see why they might make this mistake, though; with the curls and the off-one-shoulder toga-like thing, Lu Ann looks like she might be playing Venus in a high-school play.

Beetle Bailey, 9/9/10

I’ve been mostly ignoring the Beetle Bailey 60th anniversary wank-a-thon, but I did enjoy this 1965 strip, in which “wacky rebel” Rocky attempts to assassinate a general officer. He’d rather go to Leavenworth than go to ’Nam, man!

Funky Winkerbean, 9/9/10

Aww, isn’t this cute! Holly saved the message she got telling her that Funky was in a car wreck. Presumably it’s so she can relive over and over again that brief, magical moment when she thought the nasty old hatesack might be dead.

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Beetle Bailey, 8/26/10

Since I’m prone to cruelly mock the comics colorists when they fail to acknowledge even the most obvious of in-strip cues, I feel obliged to praise them for their service and dedication when I see evidence of it. Take today’s Beetle Bailey, for instance. In panel one, Dr. Mustache (I have no idea what this ancillary character’s name is, but since this is Beetle Bailey, it may well actually be “Dr. Mustache”) has clearly been drawn wearing a scoop-necked sweater vest over what, based on the tie, we must presume to be a dress shirt of some kind. The colorists left the shirt white, which makes sense, and colored the vest a sort of teal, which is aesthetically questionable but not outside the realm of possibility.

Then! Panel two! The artist decided to draw Dr. Mustache writing angrily on a clipboard, and then realized that doing so would place the doctor’s hand and pen right in front of the vest’s neckline area, and then decided that drawing in the details behind the hand would just be too hard, and so the doctor is now suddenly wearing some kind of undifferentiated torso-covering garment. But our brave colorist remembers! He or she cannot just forget about the sweater vest from the previous panel, and so heroically draws in a neckline, even doing a bit of detail work on the doctor’s left, all without predrawn lines to serve as a guide. The tie appears to be beyond his or her capabilities, but we must salute the brave attempt to pick up the slack left by the actual strip artist, who, we cannot emphasize enough, is paid good money to draw a strip that will appear in virtually every newspaper in America until the newspaper industry goes out of business completely. So kudos to you, anonymous colorist! Too bad you couldn’t do anything about the incomprehensible punchline.

Apartment 3-G, 8/26/10

Poor Lu Ann, so dim she can’t even recognize the old game of Good Makeover Reality Show Host, Bad Makeover Reality Show Host. Kitty will have her sporting a goth-black brush cut in no time!