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Apartment 3-G, 1/30/14

Oh, man, I have to say I’m seriously disappointed that Margo has been tricked so easily into allowing a literal wild animal to roam free inside their apartment, defecating freely and infecting roommates and visitors with Lyme disease willy-nilly. Margo is not the sort who enjoys the act of breaking rules for its own sake; she merely disregards those rules that she deems inconvenient, while ruthlessly enforcing the ones that serve her interests. In fact, one would assume that Margo helped write the rules about ruminants living in their apartment building, since she and the other Apartment 3-G gals (and maybe everyone else who lives there, who knows) own the building, according to this strip from 2004 where Margo angrily imposed some worksite safety guidelines. The building’s ownership situation has literally never come up since then, but I don’t think they’ve sold it or anything?

Anyway, the only way this makes any kind of sense is if Margo is one of the very few owners of the building, and she’s going to use this deer thing as a way to establish that rules are things she imposes on other people, not things she has to obey. “Oh, hello, Mrs. Jones,” Margo says to a tenant whose beloved but lease-violating cat she had seized by animal control the previous week. “Terrible weather we’ve been having, isn’t it?” The baby deer pees on the hallway carpet right in front of them, but Margo never breaks eye contact.

Judge Parker, 1/30/14

Huh, I was really pretty sure that April’s last name was “Bowers” and her dad’s compound was in the Yucatan, but Judge Parker plots are incredibly slow, so who can even remember these things? The Atlantic/Pacific question can at least be chalked up to the slow tectonic shifts that have taken place over this storyline’s millions of years.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/30/14

Haha, Jughaid, while it is just like a woman to violate the expressly stated rules of her Creator and then browbeat her hapless man into joining her in her monstrous act of sin, I think you’ve misunderstood the parson’s question! He’s not asking about the first commandment, but rather the furst commandment — in other words, the command of the Fürst, the Germanic princeling under whose sovereignty Hootin’ Holler lies, due to quirks of feudal law. Sorry, Jughead, his Serene Highness has declared his dominions to be at war with the Count Palatine of the Rhine. To arms! Say farewell to your family and prepare for combat!

Phantom, 1/30/14

As you may or may not have been able to tell from that last bit, before I got into the go-go world of online content creation, I made an abortive attempt at an academic career, although my speciality was not early modern Germany but rather late antiquity. So, is the Phantom (the strip) attempting to catch the interest of America’s #1 comics blogger by having a plot point about manuscripts and artifacts from the early middle ages? Maybe! Unfortunately the Phantom (the character) is singularly failing to catch the interest of our snoopy reporter lady, if her facial expression in panel two is any indication. Maybe instead of erasing her mind with “Bandar medicine,” he’s just planning to bore her into a coma.

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Archie, 1/19/14

Today’s Archie is a fascinating look at the ways in which our lives are structured by the financial and emotional transactions we conduct with one another. Archie and Veronica both recognize the significance of his offer to perform unpaid labor on her behalf — even though, in her case, the only people who are being helped in practice by his gallantry are the Lodge family retainers, who presumably draw their salary no matter how much work they do on any given day. And yet generous and specific gestures aren’t the only components of an intimate life; there’s also the intangible qualities of just spending time together, as Reggie understands, to his benefit. In fact, this scenario immediately made me curious: does Reggie have the upper hand in reading this situation because he, like Veronica, is part of Riverdale’s leisured class? A quick search on Google proved that I wasn’t the only one wondering:

According to Comic Vine, Reggie is “medium rich,” a formulation that I find refreshingly frank. Reggie’s family probably refers to themselves as “upper middle class.” Let’s all support Comic Vine in its quest to establish a new, more honest vocabulary for America’s economic structure!

Judge Parker, 1/19/14

Speaking of rich people, here’s Judge Parker Senior fooling around with a deadly boa constrictor. “Ha ha, I’m a best-selling author, pillar of the community, and multimillionaire! This snake wouldn’t dare strangle me!”

Funky Winkerbean, 1/19/14

I can’t remember the details at the moment, but that park bench has Special Significance to Les and Dead Lisa — I think he proposed there, or she told him she had cancer there, or all of the above? It’s depressing, whatever it is, obviously. The question: is the bench Les’s permanent phone background wallpaper, which would explain why Cayla looks so emotionally numb in panel four, or does it just appear when Summer calls, which would explain why she’s so full of rage and frustration that she can’t fully explain?

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Hello, faithful readers! Your Comics Curmudgeon is back, and will keep on doing that thing he does in 2014, seeing as, against all odds, the print newspaper universe and its ancillary industries, like syndicated comics and bridge columns, have not shut up shop! Let us take this first of the year to give thinks for this triumph of hope over experience and/or analysis of various balance sheets, and to review the comics of the last couple of weeks.

Panel from Apartment 3-G, 12/23/13

As expected, Lu Ann’s inexplicable crush object Cole left for an upstate brain hospital, never to be seen again. Margo is trying to teach her how to use her facial expressions to mask ordinary emotions like sadness and longing, because those mark you out as weak. “Really? That’s the best you can do?” she asks, as she twists her own face into an inhuman horror-rictus.

Panel from Judge Parker, 12/23/13

You probably aren’t surprised to learn that the ultra-pampered mega-rich Parkers live in such a ennui-haze of instant gratification that the only way they can experience even a glimmer of excitement is to be in terrible mortal danger.

Mark Trail, 12/24/13

In Mark Trail, the story of the World’s Stupidest Currently Active Indian Artifact Thieves proceeds apace! It sure was dumb of Mark to turn his back on Jeff. But Jeff just knocking Mark unconscious and leaving him alive in this cabin was probably … infinitely dumber?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/24/13

On to Rex Morgan, where young Sarah found her babysitter making out with her boyfriend Niki (who also happens to be Rex’s former “fishing” “buddy”). What did you ask Santa for this Christmas? Was it Sarah Morgan acting like a creepy adult-child, only this time about sex? Well, you got it, by God.

Panel from Spider-Man, 12/25/13

Or maybe you wanted some Mark I Iron Man armor? Newspaper Spider-Man’s narration box seems to think that this is a festive thing, for some reason!

Gil Thorp, 12/25/13

Or maybe you just wanted some Christmas greetings from Coach and Mrs. Coach Thorp. Remember when the annual Thorp Christmas card featured their beloved children? Well, those kids are gone now, never mentioned, presumably removed from the timestream altogether thanks to advanced chrono-science or maybe just sold to a glove factory somewhere, which gives Gil and Mimi lots more free time for drunken Christmas partner-swapping with Coach Kaz and Kelly. Wait, is Coach Kaz’s girlfriend actually named Kelly? Whatever, I’m not bothering to look that up. The point is, they’re all going to swing.

Panel from Luann, 12/25/13

I’m quite sure nobody wanted to see Brad and Toni giving each other “sexy” Christmas gifts, and yet here we are. Why would anyone give or wear a t-shirt that says “this stud taken” on it? Is there … is there supposed to be wordplay involved, somehow?

Mark Trail, 12/25/13

OK, fine, maybe Jeff failed to kill Mark and left him to his own devices, but at least he left him permanently disabled, because he tied him up with rope! There’s no way he can escape from … oh. Oh.

Panel from Mary Worth, 12/26/13

Mary Worth continues to writhe in ecstasy due to her continued exposure to high levels of Ken Kensington’s erotic aura. “How could such a silver-haired fox still be single?” she hisses, bug-eyed, as she crams an entire cracker into her mouth without chewing. “Is it a trap?”

Mary Worth, 12/27/13

Yes, Mary, it is! Ken Kensington is a soothsaying wizard like Nostradamus of old! Flee from him now before he brings you to his witch’s coven, to be sacrificed!

Curtis, 12/30/13

You may have noticed that there have been exactly zero strips from Curtis’s insane hallucinatory Kwanzaa storyline in this post. Well, there’s no easy way to tell you this, so I’m just going to come out and say it: Curtis-Kwanzaa (Curwanzaa?) is cancelled this year. Instead, the Wilkins parents are going out on a New Year’s date and Curtis and Barry will be babysat by the most religious woman in th’ world, who will presumably tell them that there’s no mention of any so-called Kwanzaa in the bible and they’ll have to go through an emergency exorcism for even mentioning it.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/30/13

Funky’s son Cory is back from Afghanistan, with his army buddy/fellow comic book aficionado Rocky, with whom he may or may not be romantically involved. When did your dad get so charming, Cory? Probably when he decided he wanted to fuck your girlfriend!

Gil Thorp, 12/30/13

Speaking of unwanted sexual advances, everyone wants to have sex with Wynn Wiley’s sister, who is a very good dancer! That appears to be literally the entire basketball season plot. Should be a fun next couple months!

Mark Trail, 12/31/13

“Mr. Trail, I’m tempted to kill you! I was tempted earlier, during the many, many opportunities I’ve had to do so! Almost as if it would make my life easier, somehow!”

Mark Trail, 1/1/14

But, nope, he’s just going to make Mark carry his canoe for him instead. Say, is that a beehive? We all know about Mark’s special relationship with eusocial insects. Nice knowing you, Jeff!

Apartment 3-G, 1/1/14

What? What could be better? A marriage to an Italian man? A fling with an Italian girl? An explanation as to how the Professor lost fifty pounds and de-aged thirty years? Whatever it is, we’ll all discover it in 2014, together!