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Blondie, 4/5/07

True story: On recycling day in our neighborhood, the big trucks from the sanitation department drive around at walking speed; one guy’s in the cabin driving the truck, and another one is walking along the sidewalk, picking up the bags of cans and throwing them in the back. One day last fall as I was walking towards my house, I saw the recycling truck stopped at the corner, with the driver hanging out the window and laughing. When I got a little closer, I could see his partner, an enormous dude in a jumpsuit, hopping his way through a recently chalked hopscotch board, with a huge grin on his face. Anyway, no snark here, just wanted to note that today’s Blondie reminded me of that, and stave off complaints that nobody has actually drawn a hopscotch board on the sidewalk since 1962.

Apartment 3-G, 4/5/07

Oh ho, it’s a meeting of the minor-characters-one-generation-older-than-the-protagonists minds as Margo’s hilariously stereotypical immigrant mother ambushes Professor “Big Papa” Papagoras. The Professor has clearly guessed nothing of the sort about Margo, as he’s surely spent too much time in his love nest with Gina to be keeping track of his neighbors’ sex lives, but he seems surprised that anyone would be planning to propose marriage to someone incapable of what humans call “love.”

Baldo, 4/5/07

Hey, remember last week, when I said something nice about Baldo? Well, since then, Tia Carmen has been explaining to El Mustache del Sexy, in harrowing detail, how she came to arrive in America. It seems that Baldo and Gracie’s mother was killed by a drunk driver in a horrible accident years ago with Baldo and Gracie in the car; their father, overwhelmed by the prospect of raising two kids by himself, called his Tia Carmen to come help raise them. Today, she speculates on the divine purpose behind such horror. That’s right, Baldo and Gracie: God killed your mom so your Tia Carmen could get laid. Sorry ‘bout that, but they don’t call ’em “mysterious ways” for nothing.

Oh, also, on Sunday this strip’s “hilarious” April Fools “joke” featured heavily armed INS agents bursting down the door to the Bermudez home and dragging Tia Carmen away screaming into a paddy wagon while the children wept. I feel less bad about this now that I’ve seen today’s installment.

Pluggers, 4/5/07

Oh, for … that’s a whole lot of unnecessary verbiage in that caption. Here you go: “A puppy is a plugger personal trainer.” GOD DAMN IT PLUGGERS, DO I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING AROUND HERE? Sheesh.

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Apartment 3-G, 3/9/07

You know, I’ve made fun of Apartment 3-G for being sexless, but I may have to revise that assessment; today’s strip contains a fairly blatant invitation for a quick pre-business-trip Chinese-food-and-screwing session. I’m glad to see that Eric is still attracted to Margo after she’s revealed her hideously mutated claw-hand in panel three.

Archie, 3/9/07

Uh oh! It looks like the Archie-Joke-Generating-Laugh-Unit 3000 is malfunctioning! I’m assuming that “secret” in the first panel is some kind of typo (writo?) for “great”, since it doesn’t make sense in context, and the third panel is clearly supposed to repeat the line from the first. There’s always a few bugs in the system!

Blondie, 3/9/07

Hey, do you know what the least appropriate day would be on which to run a comic that revolves around it being “a brand-new week”? That’s right, Friday!

Hey, do you know what day it is today?

Mary Worth, 3/9/07

Man, you sure don’t have to say much to make Mary Worth feel good about herself. Look at her facial expression and body language in the second panel; it’s like an apotheosis of smugness. “Why … I did! I saved Jeff’s life! I’m a hero! I’m the greatest hero in American history!”

Dennis the Menace, 3/9/07

THAT’S RIGHT, MR. WILSON, YOU TELL ‘EM! BLACK POWER! BLACK POWER!

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Cathy, 2/26/07

So. Um. Here goes:

I actually … sort of … found Cathy funny today.

I mean … not hilarious or anything, but … I actually laughed. Well, “laughed” is a strong word. Strictly speaking, I exhaled out my nose a little harder than usual. Still and all, I need help. I know it.

Apartment 3-G, 2/26/05

I didn’t cover Sunday’s Apartment 3-G, mostly because I don’t think it’s particularly cool when comics encourage kids to do drugs. But now that I’ve seen Monday’s strip, I have to say that it’s one of the more egregious instances of content recycling in recent memory:

Apartment 3-G, 2/25/07

I know that the soap opera strips have to spend Monday recapping Sunday because not everyone gets to see the Sunday strip, but this week Apartment 3-G seems to have mainly tweaked the dialogue and taken out the Margo panels. And is removing Margo from an installment of Apartment 3-G ever a good idea? No, no it is not. You could show three panels of Margo reading the newspaper and sneering at no one in particular and it would be more gripping than anything that ever happened to Tommie.

Blondie, 2/26/07

There are so many layers of insanity to this strip that I barely know how to approach it. Do the police ever ticket drivers for excessive musical volume? Does Dagwood labor under the assumption that the theme from Bondanza can never be played too loudly? Was he sitting at a stoplight, his subwoofers causing all the cars around him to vibrate, only instead of blaring Master P as God intended, he instead treated the world to that all-too-familiar “dun da duh dun da duh dun da duh dun da DAHH DAHHHH”? Still, what disturbs me the most is that somewhere out there in Blondie land, there’s a radio station dedicated to classic TV theme songs. I’ve been telling people for years that the 517 different channels available on satellite radio will eventually destroy all that’s decent about our society; maybe someone will finally listen to me now.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 2/26/07

“How it is dept.: Libertariana and Rando are sick of their taxes being used to fund city schools and parks for poor people, so they move into a condo complex that keeps the proles out. But howzat? Homeowners Associations can also force you to pay for improvements for the common good? OH YEAH!!!” I’m surprised the acknowledgment line didn’t read “Anita and Sol, Unnamed Heavily Armed Encampment, Somewhere in Montana.”