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Apartment 3-G, 8/2/10

At last, someone is showing some initiative around here! Naturally it’s Margo, but the low level of rebellion on display is really pretty pathetic. Oh no, they’re going to leave their hotel room and order dinner! Really, Margo, we expected Kat and Kitty’s severed heads to be displayed on pikes as a warning to others by this point. Why exactly is reckless restaurant-going forbidden, anyway? Is the show broadcast live, in real time? Are they depriving Americans of their chance to watch three badly dressed women mope around in a hotel room? Surely the entertainment value there ended when Lu Ann and Margo drained the minibar.

Judge Parker, 8/2/10

Meanwhile, the transformation of Jules from “predatory European sexual threat to Sam’s American sense of morality” to “sad, abused doormat” is pretty much complete. The best part of this scene is the way he’s proffering up that shoe, like it’s some kind of excuse. “But, your father and I … we’ve been working … look at this shoe! It has a decorative buckle-thing! And it’s been weight-tested! Please love me!”

Jumble, 8/2/10

As always, I cheerfully admit that I don’t have the brainpower to actually solve the Jumble, so I have to make my guess on what’s going on from the visual. Obviously curly mustaches and furrowed brows are only found on evil characters in comics, so I’m guessing the boss is going to give Sam a raise for cooking the books and hiding millions of dollars in offshore shell corporations. You just wear that visor and sheepish expression on the witness stand, kid, and we’ll do great, trust me.

Popeye, 8/2/10

Once again, I’ve become briefly intrigued by the new Popeye storyline, though I’ll quickly lose interest once it devolves into the boring kind of insanity. At the moment, though, I’m intrigued by what Popeye and the Professor have cooked up. Looks like genocide! Scientific genocide.

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Dick Tracy, 7/28/10

I have to admit that I enjoy Dick’s second panel dialogue: “His movies can be viewed in 3-D without glasses — thus his riches.” Part of it is that I of course wish that someone would use “thus his riches” to end a sentence outlining one of my achievements (“He created the #1 Mary Worth fan site on the Internet — thus his riches”). But I also just like the rhythm of it. I’d call it poetry, but poetry and the decadent so-called “artists” who produce it are loathed by Dick with a righteous passion.

I am a little disappointed by panel three, though; traditionally the strip never misses a chance to translate police jargon like “lifted” for the civilians in the audience.

Judge Parker, 7/28/10

At last we learn why Sam is so fond of Jules, despite his previous outrage over the young man having the sex relations with his adult daughter: he recognizes in him a kindred spirit, an artiste crushed by parental disapproval! The fact that Sam was forced into law when his true passion lay elsewhere might explains his overall emotional numbness and inability to love. He pushed his musical past down so deeply into his soul that this is apparently the first his own wife has heard about it, and he’s apparently required two beers just to work up the nerve to broach the subject.

Luann, 7/28/10

Oh, look, Brad and Toni are going to a restaurant called Something Stone, or perhaps the Stone Somethingry, so named because the building that houses it is of stone construction. See, these are the things you focus on, to avoid thinking about the sex banter. Maybe all the food on the menu is made of stones! Ha ha! Then they’ll eat them and die, and the banter will stop.

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Judge Parker, 7/4/10

So it turns out that Neddy’s lunch date “Mark” was not her ex of “tongue thing” fame; that was “Bob,” proving that, for whatever his faults, Jules has at least helped break Ned’s addiction to guys with bland, WASPy names. Anyway, Mark, despite apparently being of collegiate age, has since parting with Ned gotten married and then divorced. I have to actually speak up in favor of the dialog in this strip: while soap strips are usually filled with awkward, unnatural speech, this installment is actually marked by the realistically awkward speech you’d hear when two exes with unresolved feelings get together. Mark’s final line is a nice touch. “Ned, uh, even though we discussed getting together in the near future, which would involve one of us calling the other, do I have permission to call you? Just making sure! I think about your body all the time! Uh, I mean, say hi to Jules for me!”

Funky Winkerbean, 7/4/10

OK OK WE HAVE RESOLVED THE FORM OF TIME TRAVEL UNDER QUESTION HERE, which is that Funky’s fiftysomething body has been propelled back to his high school days. This raises another question, though. Tom Batuik has said that the chronological question raised by the strip’s time-jumping — that is, whether the recent jump shoved the cast into 2017 or what — doesn’t interest him, an attitude I have sympathy with! However, if that’s not a question the strip wants to grapple with, then adding a time-travel plot isn’t the way to avoid it. How old is Funky supposed to be, anyway? I said “fiftysomething” above because that’s how he looks to me, but all Westview inhabitants are prematurely aged by grief, so I’m not actually sure at this point. If he’s supposed to be, say, 45, then he’s back somewhere around 1980, I suppose. And I’m sorry, but this crowd is looking insufficiently outrageous for the tail end of the disco era.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 7/4/10

I enjoy the vaguely simian but still contemplative look Leroy is giving that poster here. “‘Dracula,’ eh? He looks scary enough, I suppose, but he’s no The Blob.”