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Gil Thorp, 9/1/08

Hey everyone! The incredibly long long boring long non-exciting long story of Elmer appears to have finally ended, with Elmer getting to stay in America because he has a new job doing bilingual outreach for the Kalamazoo Kings, even though it was repeatedly established that Elmer is entirely monolingual. But whatever! Don’t question it, or they’ll drag him back and try to explain away his happy ending some more.

Anyway, it’s September, which means it’s football season, which means that we get to see Matt Rogers and Jeff Ponczak head off to Central City to get a “football physical”, for some reason. Matt and Jeff (which sounds just like Mutt and Jeff — one’s short and one’s tall, get it) are a couple of nattily dressed buds who are no doubt destined to be this strip’s most lovable pair of totally platonic dude friends since Bill Ritter and Stormy Hicks. I’m sure there will be delightful antics, with more hilarious malapropisms from the Widow Ponczak, the batty Bratislavan!

Apartment 3-G and Blondie, 9/1/08

Since the harrowing real-life effects of drug abuse — the violence, the terrible mood swings, the neglect for hygiene and the resulting oozing open sores — are considered too intense to depict on the comics page, there’s only one way left to depict Alan as the desperate addict we all know he is: by establishing via a narration box and dialog that he was asleep in the middle of the afternoon! Damn you, demon dope! (Of course, we can’t actually show him sleeping, as that would be simply too shocking.)

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that I think Dagwood has been a junkie for quite a while now.

Gasoline Alley, 9/1/08

I was going to make fun of Gasoline Alley for taking a day off, but then I realized that the chain link fence depicted here has had more work put into it than a week’s worth of this strip’s usual hillbilly antics.

Pluggers, 9/1/08

You know, if you’ve gotta repeat a joke every four months or so, pluggers ain’t gonna hold it against you or nothin’.

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Apartment 3-G, 8/26/08

Wait a minute — who is this mousy, bespectacled woman, and what have they done with Sam? Damn it, I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that Margo is such an awful, terrifying, and desperately sexy boss that she leaves a trail of emotionally shattered personal assistants in her wake, but I at least would have liked to see the quitting scene, full of recrimination and tears and cold, cruel laughter.

I apparently didn’t feature her in any of the strips in my archives, but this woman actually looks an awful lot like one of the cowed servants of the sinister Mr. Eldon, who held Margo captive in his sweatshop in the famous “More zippers, mule!” storyline. I’d like to think that, once she had a few years to get over that whole enslavement thing, she and Eldon got together for a productive talk about management techniques.

Blondie, 8/26/08

Hey, everybody! Did you enjoy the past two weeks of Dagwood sitting in front of the TV and making lame, nonspecific jokes about the Olympics that were obviously written weeks in advance? Then you’re going to love the next two weeks of Dagwood sitting in front of the TV and making lame, nonspecific jokes about the political conventions that were obviously written weeks in advance!

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Apartment 3-G, 8/21/08

Wow, I had always assumed that the Professor was a Professor of some squishy liberal arts discipline, but apparently it turns out that he’s a psychologist or something? And, naturally, now that he’s seeing patients again, it’s important that he cut that beard back to a goatee and bust out the Just For Men, because the last thing you need is a therapist who’s a shaggy old greyhair.

In panel two, the part of Ruby will be played by the severed head of Bette Davis.

Blondie, 8/21/08

“Hey, Dad, wanna hear another crazy idea? Maybe we should move the TV closer to the sofa so I don’t have to watch the Olympics sitting on the God-damned ottoman.”

Gil Thorp, 8/21/08

So, as near as I can tell, the lesson to this Gil Thorp storyline is going to be: “Minor league baseball, with its need for bus rides and farm-seeing, is all well and good if your only other choice is being deported to (gasp!) Mexico, but white kids should totally go to college instead.”

Herb and Jamaal, 8/21/08

Um … did Herb’s wife turn off the kinky as soon as they go hitched? That’s about the only interpretation of this I can come up with. That or she stopped supplying him with heroin.