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Apartment 3-G, 6/13/08

My God, everyone who identified Alan’s cylindrical “crack pipe” as a Pixy Stick was right!

Dick Tracy, 6/13/08

Yes, there’s certainly nothing that says “the inner city” like one of those curvy Sherlock Holmes-style pipes.

Family Circus, 6/13/08

I guess we should all be thankful that Jeffy’s strict religious upbringing has kept the word “nipple” out of his vocabulary.

Mary Worth, 6/13/08

“And I wasn’t attractive, I was radiant.”

Momma, 6/13/08

Francis + Momma + “I’d have that box filled every day” = NOOOOOOOOOOOOO

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Apartment 3-G, 6/12/08

And with “Sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to kill your buzz,” the Incredible True Adventures Of Two Intensely Dorky Crackheads In Love (With Crack) officially becomes my favorite non-Margo Apartment 3-G storyline ever. I’m also particularly fond of “Slow down, Haley. I’m too high to think right now.” It’s the periods that really give the dialog the crazed urgency of the drug fiend so addled that he can barely construct a coherent sentence.

Dick Tracy, 6/12/08

The current Dick Tracy storyline is so moronic even by this strip’s standards that I refuse to expend precious energy typing out a summary, but I do want to draw your attention to the “Police Pod Squad” narration box or sign or whatever in the first panel. If all of the cops in Dick Tracy were secretly alien replicants spawned from enormous green space pods that plummeted to Earth from beyond the moon, it would actually explain a lot.

Marmaduke, 6/12/08

Ha ha, they gave Marmaduke a lunch box! It’s as if he’s heading off to his day job as a huge, barking, drooling, nuisance who everybody hates.

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Dennis the Menace, 5/9/08

Dennis, you little devil! See, Dennis gave milk to Hot Dog without asking his parents, and it got splashed all over the carpet, and it’ll be impossible to get it out, and once it spoils, the living room is going to REEK! Ha ha! SO MENACING!

OK, no, there’s no way to get any menace out of this. Seriously, he’s making an adorable statement about a purring kitty-cat. At this point, he’s out-Jeffying Jeffy.

Family Circus, 5/9/08

Case in point. At least this panel has taken the crowd-pleasing step of showing us Jeffy being grievously injured.

Apartment 3-G, 5/9/08

What is Alan smoking? I mean this question quite literally. “Pipe” plus “rock” equals “crack,” obviously, but the lingo has been inconsistent enough that I’m still holding out for heroin, which you can in fact smoke from a pipe if you’re a-scared of needles. I’m not sure why I’m rooting for the horse; maybe it’s an act of local pride (Baltimore being something of a heroin town), or maybe because being a junkie has a bit more old-school charm than being a crackhead. I’m certainly hoping that all this fuss isn’t over marijuana (OH MY GOD AN ARTIST SMOKES POT WHO WOULD HAVE EVER THOUGHT?).

I do like the mournful, baffled way in which Alan is regarding his toothbrush in panel two. “Wait, is this my pipe? Oh, God, I’m so [APPROPRIATE SLANG TERM] on [DRUG]!”

Herb and Jamaal, 5/9/08

Jamaal and Yolanda have carried mutual but unrequited torches for each other for pretty much the whole time I’ve been reading this strip. They’re like the Mulder and Scully of mediocre comic strips that nobody really reads. That’s the context for the first panel, which must surely count as the most awkward attempt to shift gears from friendship to romance in the history of human interaction. Of course, it quickly descends into madness, with Yolanda replying in a manner that no human being would, ever, just to set up a deeply lame joke, but I still can’t get past Jamaal’s super-smooth technique. What if she had taken it more positively? What would his next move had been? “How do you feel about friends kissing with tongues? How do you feel about one friend’s penis kissing another friend’s vagina?”

Dick Tracy, 5/9/08

“Yeah, you know, they do something really mundane, like rescue the police force’s two top officers with a 900-year-old weapon while an entire SWAT team is held at bay, and then stand around all needy, like they want a medal or something. Get a life, loser!”

In other news: Comic Sans has been banished! Huzzah!