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Mary Worth and Apartment 3-G, 10/20/07

OH SNAP DR. DREW GOT SERVED AGAIN BY HIS OTHER GIRLFRIEND! See, this is the advantage of dating an older woman: instead of violently lashing out when she’s wronged, she just slips some stilleto-sharp barb right between your emotional ribs. Drew, Vera’s tough because she’s had to endure things you can’t even imagine. Did you know she used to be rich and now she’s not? And then she had to get a job? Clearly she’s not to be trifled with.

On an unrelated note, I’m a little unsettled by Vera’s throw pillows being the exact same awful orange color as he sofa. They’re supposed to complement the piece of furniture, not blend in as if they’re hiding from predators.

The contrast between Vera’s steely, several-weeks-post-breakup resolve and Margo’s floundering hostility is instructive. Obviously our still conspicuously non-engaged gal Magee is not holding things together as well as she’d like us to believe, and Ruby’s little smile shows she knows who has the upper hand in this confrontation. Still, now that Margo has arbitrarily decided that Ruby is her enemy, she can’t back down, so this should be a gloriously amusing conflict. Perhaps she’ll lasso a heartbroken Gina into some sort of Axis of Insensitive Brunette Evil.

Gil Thorp, 10/20/07

Faithful reader Virginia deserves credit for noting the resemblance between this obviously bad news dude (torn-off sleeves? torn-off sleeves?) and Mary Worth’s legendary Tommy the Tweaker. Whether or not he’s an incompetent meth dealer, I’m going to guess that ponytail guy is going to lead poor, vulnerable, prone-to-violence Cully down the wrong path (I mean, torn-off sleeves? Seriously?). In the end, we’ll learn a valuable lesson, which will either be that youthful offenders need to be integrated back into society as quickly as possible to avoid recidivism, or that there is no hope whatsoever for youthful offenders and they need to be put into a dark hole from which they’ll never be able to get out.

I appreciate Cully’s perfectly triangular sandwich in panel one. Does he get his lunch from OCD Deli?

Dick Tracy, 10/20/07

I don’t want to cast aspersions on the intelligence level of the average American, but I’m willing to bet that more people in this country know the name of Britney Spears’ ex-husband than the name of the current governor of the state they live in; therefore, any town in which Dick Tracy and the governor are “celebrities” has got to be either the best educated municipality in America or the most boring (probably both, actually). Still, the managers of this bizarre charity event are right to think that getting the trigger-happy Detective Tracy involved will attract media attention. The banner headline in the local paper the next morning will no doubt read something like “DETECTIVE MISTAKES GOVERNOR FOR GHOST, SHOOTS HIM 148 TIMES”.

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Family Circus, 10/10/07

It was only now, when it couldn’t be postponed any further, that her family explained the concept of “death” to her. Thus began her transformation into “Dolly Keane, the littlest goth”.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/10/07

“Old” here is actually polite euphemism. The word Niki is really thinking of is “stupid.”

Ziggy, 10/10/07

Dear comics artists everywhere: Jokes about “Girls Gone Wild” ceased to be cutting-edge and relevant in 2001, and ceased to be amusing in 2003. Now they are only off-putting and disturbing. Please cut it out. Thank you.

Dick Tracy, 10/10/07

DEAR GOD WHERE DID THAT CHIP COME FROM AND HOW DID IT GET INTO DICK’S HAND

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Mary Worth and Judge Parker, 10/8/07

“Sure, why not” vs. “You think?”: The sassy young ladies of the soap opera strips come up with the closest things to snappy comebacks allowed in this genre. Dawn has bizarrely chosen to encapsulate her sass as some kind of bit of quoted wisdom. My question: is this some flip statement that Drew made once, long ago, that Dawn memorized like every other sentence he uttered in her presence? Or is it just another in the long line of Mary Worth things-presented-as-quotes-that-aren’t-actually-quotes? A trip through the archives would answer this question, but I don’t have the spiritual strength for it this afternoon. I will say this, though: Dawn’s tremulous tear in panel one is actually better drawn than the single droplet usually seen on the faces of the various girls in Apartment 3-G.

Meanwhile, Judger Parker’s Sophie has come up with the only appropriate response to Rusty’s increasingly desperate bids to bend Sam to her legal will. Unable or unwilling to recognize her old classmate’s total disinterest in her assets, she’ll be humping the place settings before she’s through. Sophie’s droll reaction indicates that she knows well enough why Sam and Abbey expanded their family by adopting a pair of homeless millionaire adolescents rather than via the more conventional route.

By the way, does anyone know how old exactly Sophie is supposed to be? Is she ten, or forty and suffering from some kind of glandular condition? Her little lilac pantsuit is kind of freaking me out.

Dick Tracy, 10/8/07

Calling the heads in Dick Tracy “enormous and terrifying” isn’t exactly breaking new ground, but — God damn, those heads in panel two are enormous and terrifying. They sort of remind me of characters from video games in the mid-90s — two-dimensional drawings wrapped freakishly around some overly simplistic polyhedron. Anyway, the face on the front of the slightly smaller and less terrifying head in panel two looks glum, and why shouldn’t it? Dopey Dmitri and now-exploded Gretchen get all the credit in Dick’s exposition, but what about him? Doesn’t he at least rate an unimaginative and stereotypical name, like “Ivan” or “Hans”?

Gil Thorp, 10/8/07

Huh, so Cully Vale is a murderer. I’m assuming Gil already knows this — he always seems to be one step ahead of his cretinous students (a talent that sadly doesn’t seem to translate to his coaching, but never mind that for the moment). Since Gil seemed pretty blasé about having his baseball team coached by a fraud, it should come as no surprise that he’s let a cold-blooded killer into his locker room; I would have thought that the strip would have worked up to this with maybe a little light drug dealing first, but heck, why not just go for the gusto right away. I can’t wait for the cops to come question Coach Thorp about all the bodies only to have him reply with a resounding “Eh.”