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Apartment 3-G, 6/27/10

Oh my goodness, are Kat and Kitty the mother-daughter hosts of I Dressed In The Dark, the awesomely named reality TV show that Tommie sort of tried out for last year and which we haven’t heard about since? This would be fantastic for any number of reasons, but here are my top two:

• It would mean that Tommie’s big success in off-Broadway musicianship has apparently been a scam orchestrated to get her into this theater so she can be humiliated on national television, and has had nothing to do with her singing talents, which are presumably negligible; and
• She’s about to be lectured on couture by Kat, who appears to be wearing the same kind of ultra-starched white dress shirt, buttoned all the way to the very top, to which Tommie is partial, and by Kitty, who is sporting a hideous black v-neck/suspenders combo.

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/27/10

Am I a terrible urban elitist because I giggled at the thought of poor Rusty and Mark referring to the rather mundane sight of birds flying overhead as a “great experience?” I mean, if you don’t have the Internet, or television, or books, or humans outside of your household to entertain you, then, sure, yeah, I guess you need to go out and look at the sky for entertainment. I still mock, though.

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Gil Thorp, 6/26/10

Ought I apologize to you for keeping you criminally out of the loop on happenings in Gil Thorp? Perhaps! (I’m not going to say that I yearn for the day when a lack of basic knowledge of the current Gil Thorp storyline is an offense punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment, but I’m not going to say I don’t yearn for it either.) Anyway, long story short, Milford sports teams continue to play in the final week of June, long after virtually every school in the country has knocked off for summer vacation, and alt-country sensation/fiery pitcher Slim Chance has made a video for his band, which he’s uploaded to YouTube. And now, in a moment that will change both Slim’s life and the face of popular music forever, some chinbearded dude in Chicago is presumably forwarding said amateur YouTube video to some other dude named “Geoff,” because that, apparently, is how the music industry works, in 2010, chinbearded dudes in hipster glasses just stone cold forwarding YouTube clips to each other, all day, every day.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/26/10

Herb desperately hopes for some unimportant daily minutia to distract his friend from his own thoughts, because those thoughts, as is customary for characters in this strip, inevitably turn to death.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/26/10

You know, I can get away with running gags like “Marmaduke is a demon-beast who eats children and torments his supposed ‘owner,’ who is Hitler,” because I can be pretty sure that, no matter how close the subtext is to the surface, the strip will never actually show a child sliding down the dog’s gullet, or depict Phil giving a rousing speech exhorting the invasion of Poland. But trying to make up exaggerated versions of Funky Winkerbean’s next ultra-gloomy plot twist is a more dangerous game. I swear to you that my Friday proposal that Funky is dead and doesn’t know it was meant entirely in jest, but now … I’m not so sure. Either he really is already a specter, or, as the now-classic YouTube montage “No Signal” teaches us, he’s about to be murdered by an ax-wielding maniac.

Oh, and have we been a little short on Rusty-horror lately?

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/26/10

Rusty does not weep saline tears as the humans do; instead, when sad or overjoyed, he cries tears of melting flesh.

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Luann, 6/22/10

Hi, everybody! Sorry it’s taken me so long to get to the comics today, as I’ve been literally lying on the floor gibbering with rage and disgust about today’s Luann. Never have I been so sad to have been proven right in my prediction that more Tales of Ribaldry await us. In fact, I would argue that “accidental” nudity is at the heart of any Tale of Ribaldry. This strip is Tale of Ribaldrastic. It contains the exact combination of humiliation and arousal that puts the teeth of any right-thinking person on edge. John Irving can get away with this stuff, sometimes. Luann is not John Irving.

Still, let it never be said that even predicted outcomes don’t hold some surprises! For instance, panel three’s drawing of Luann, who, despite being appalled just moments earlier, is now thrusting out her chest and offering the reader a come-hither stare, is pretty much exactly what I might have expected. But I didn’t anticipate the loving attention that has been lavished on Gunther’s sexy legs in panel one.

Mark Trail, 6/22/10

This Mark Trail plot is a love letter to print publishing. Ol’ Sally, who doesn’t subscribe to a paper and gets all her news from Twitter, hasn’t heard about this big dog reward story; but everyone who’s still tuned into the lamestream media has been kept in the loop on this important info! It would be hilarious if dozens of newspaper aficionados descend on Sally’s filthy kennel, each determined to earn that money — hilarious until the whole thing ends up like the death of Chinese warlord Xiang Yu, with the reward being split five ways.

I have to say that I’d much rather contemplate the loving attention lavished on Gunther’s thighs than contemplate the loving attention lavished on villain-lady’s weird protruding disk-like chin. Is it artificial? Has she gotten a chin implant? Are artificial chins a thing now? Why am I always the last to know?