Post Content

In the last full week of August, attention spans and expectations are low. Time for a week-long ‘theme’ series to fill up the queue without too much annoying work.

Apartment 3-G, 8/26/14

Oh hey it’s Tommie’s cavalcade of boyfriends, going back to 2007! Sure, Lu Ann and Margo get all the attention, but it’s boring old Tommie who gets all the action. Here’s the Swain o’ the Day:

Apartment 3-G (panel), 2/4/07

This is Neil Flynn, a small-time community-theatre lothario who played a one-shot role in 2007, mostly to humiliate IT Security Studmuffin Gary, shown in silent lamentation there on the right.

Neil kissed Tommie once, and was never her “boyfriend” in any reasonable sense of the word. So “arrogant, cruel, and a cheater” is apparently Tommiespeak for “I totally let him kiss me — and no proposal, not one! Can you believe it? I would be a grandmother today if not for that bastard — the nerve of the man!”

Crankshaft, 8/26/14

All week long, bitter old Ed Crankshaft daydreams about delivering his incoherent petty spite globally, at industrial scale. But in a run of bad luck, his bus is beset by gremlins, hijacked by convicts, overrun with snakes, and crashlands on a mysterious tropical island somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean.

Judge Parker, 8/26/14

Dude, if you’re gonna do the waxed moustaches, use the little grey cells, too: “Hi, Sam” just won’t cut it. Repeat après moi: “Ah, M’sieur Drivair! I ‘ear zat M’selle Nedday, she ‘as retourned, wiz zee radiant skeen, and zee fairm, rounded … ‘ow you say … accoutrements. M’sieur Drivair iz M’selle Nedday’s step-fazzair of course, but none of zees is creepaiy, n’est-ce pas? Non! We are Franch, zat iz why!”

Mary Worth, 8/26/14

Mary Worth wraps up the “Bad Doctor” loose end. Say, have you noticed that all Mary ever does at the hospital is peer at blank sheets of paper and eavesdrop on gossip? It’s almost as though patient care somehow isn’t her top priority. Go figure.

And wouldn’t you just love to see Nurse Bluehair on your medical team? Sure, it’s all grins watching her try to work out the relationship between “the ones you don’t suspect” and “the ones you don’t bother to keep an eye on” until you see her standing at the foot of your bed with a catheter, an I.V., an oxygen cannula, and a baffled look on her face.

Baby Blues, 8/26/14

Any parent ever born just switches the plates. Any parent ever.

–Uncle Lumpy

Post Content

Mary Worth, 8/21/14

Boy, I’ve really been dropping the ball on this Mary Worth storyline for the past few weeks, haven’t I? The short version is that Olive’s medical procedure went well and that pesky cyst was successfully removed from her torso! Today, we learn that she’s been carrying it around in a little purse ever since.

Dennis the Menace, 8/21/14

“Dad’s inability or unwillingness to really be present for me during these fleeting, precious moments is kinda ruining my childhood for me. Hope you don’t stay up all night despairing over what a terrible job you guys are doing as parents!” Menacing factor: strong.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/21/14

Les is super excited about the fact that the movie adaptation of his book (for which he’s already been paid handsomely) has now completely unravelled. The failure of the project will almost certainly damage the careers and finances of any number of people and companies who believed in it. Les is excited about this because he’s an asshole.

Judge Parker, 8/21/14

Hmm, in addition having her work as legal secretary at what he thought was a thriving practice, Sam also tasked Gloria with managing his daughter’s finances! NOPE NO IDEA WHY SHE’D WANT TO QUIT THIS JOB, NONE AT ALL

Wizard of Id, 8/21/14

You know, considering how often the Wizard of Id uses actual torture as a punchline, I’m kind of surprised that it would be the strip that really manages to boil Orwell’s ideas about how dictatorships control thought through control of language into a single, effective panel.

Spider-Man, 8/21/14

Spider-Man is going to use his superpowers to more effectively photograph one of his main antagonists successfully fighting crime, so he can sell those photographs at poverty-level freelance print journalist prices! I know there’s no TV watching involved, but we may have hit Peak Newspaper Spider-Man, guys.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 8/13/14

It’s mid-August and the summer Gil Thorp storyline finally comes into focus! It’s about how True Standish doesn’t want to go to some football factory in gross south Florida; he wants to go to one of the public Ivies, which looks like a college from an old movie! One of my cousins and her husband both went to Miami of Ohio, and they loved it; from my visits, I can confirm that it does have a classic look, largely as a result of rigorously enforced building codes that require that all buildings aesthetically match the original early 19th century structures. This uniformity has does have some weird results, particularly in huge new buildings that couldn’t actually be built from brick and mortar construction despite the appearance of their facades. At Cornell, where I went to college, buildings are supposed to look very contemporary to when they’re built, which results in an interesting aesthetic mishmosh that gives you something of an architectural historical tour as you walk around campus, even though some of the individual buildings from questionable periods end up kind of hideous (lookin’ at you, Uris Hall). Nevertheless, Miami of Ohio’s regime of strict architectural nostalgia-kitsch has managed to impress a star prospect for their 75th-ranked football program, so who am I to judge?

Judge Parker, 8/13/14

NOOOO … THE LEGAL PRACTICE THAT SAM SPENT HIS LIFE BUILDING … with the legal secretary … and the lawyer he hired, like, I’m not even going to bother looking up when but it was definitely in the last five years of real life so like three months ago strip-time … disintegrating … all he has to console him is his extremely active job of running legal interference for Judge Parker Senior and also his millions and millions of dollars … MY GOD MY GOD WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN SAM

Momma, 8/13/14

Haha, highlighting the tinges of pseudo(?)-sexual jealousy in Momma and Francis’s relationship really adds to the laff factor in this strip, doesn’t it! This is a joke that’s appeared in the strip before, and I’m glad to see that, if Momma really is transitioning into some kind of greatest hits mode, the definition of “greatest hits” is “most perverse and unpleasant.”