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Far be it from this blog to neglect one of its core missions: monitoring the glacial progress of legacy soap strips, so you don’t have to. Because believe me, you don’t want to! Let’s dive right in:

Apartment 3-G, 4/15/09

In Apartment 3-G, aimless maniac Doc Joe rushes to rekidnap his children after leaving them in Tommie’s care. But Doc Joe is confused: Tommie‘s not the dope — that’s LuAnn! Tommie is the pushover. You’d think somebody who looks like everybody else would see the differences — hell, they’re color-coded for you! At least nobody mixes up Margo. Not more than once, anyway.

As for Tommie’s logic in panels two and three: “Joe will be pleased I’ve surrendered his children to the vicious harpy who calls him a rat and warns me to lock the door. Oh, listen — here he is now!” Ha ha — what a dope!

Mary Worth, 4/15/09

But has there ever been a dope like Adrian? In the space of a few days, she learns some guy she met on a Santa Royale Fan Site:

1. claims to be a victim of identity theft
2. claims to have been bilked by a crooked partner
3. can’t make good on his ostentatious promise to her father
4. claims to have been laid off from his long-time flashy job
5. claims to have a sister in hock to the Mob
6. presses her to wire fifty large to said sister
7. never really had that flashy job anyway.

“B – b – but he calls me ‘Queenie'”!

Judge Parker, 4/15/09

In Judge Parker, we’re spending the week buffing the reputations of Rocky Ledge and Godiva Danube: it’s only Wednesday, and already the couple could elbow aside Venerable John Henry Newman in the canonization line. Good lookers, green energy entrepreneurs, economic saviors of Parkerville, with geeky names, six adopted children, and success in their chosen careers — plus supporters of the troops and plain ol’ rural folk to boot! Farmin’ folk! Boy Howdy!

“Wussat, Bru? Another Nobel Prize? Sheee-it! Whut’s thiss’n for? Litrichur? Bodacious! Cain’t even spell it, and now I are one! Throw it on the dang pile with Peace and Economics, and pop me anuther cold one, woncha darlin’ — NASCAR‘s on!”

Drăguţ vreme, everybody!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Apartment 3-G, 4/9/09

This, combined with this, makes me think that we should add “outfits that people wear while cleaning” to “drug paraphernalia” and “men who don’t look like the two or three dudes that every dude in Apartment 3-G looks like” on the list of things for which the Apartment 3-G team could use some reference photos. My alarm bells are pinging, of course, as to why Ruby might be in desperate and immediate need of some industrial-grade solvent. “Hey, look at that lady over there in that vacant lot! It sure looks like she’s burying someone in a shallow grave and then using some sort of potent cleanser to accelerate the corpse’s decay, doesn’t it? But that can’t be right — nobody dressed like a Colonial Williamsburg re-enactor could possibly be involved in anything shady!”

Family Circus, 4/9/09

I’m all for Billy rotting his mind with comic books, as he’ll clearly never amount to anything anyway, but can’t we expect him to pay attention to the details? As far as I know, Peter Parker doesn’t even have a mother; he was merely created spontaneously when Aunt May and Uncle Ben came down with nephewism, a common affliction in fictional characters. But maybe I’m being too hard on Billy; his larger point — that it would be amusing to see one of Peter’s loved ones beat him to death with a shoe or a rolled-up newspaper — is one that I can heartily endorse.

Mary Worth, 4/9/09

Oh, look, I guess I was wrong: it seems that Ted really is a scammer, and now we’re going to get to watch the Spanish Prisoner con in action, for certain limited definitions of “action.” Meanwhile, I’d just like to offer this bit of advice to noir-aspirant villains everywhere: though it is important to keep your victim in your sexual thrall in order to prevent her from thinking too much about the details of your fraudulent scheme, creepily drawing her onto your lap in public and gently caressing her cheek, all the while telling her how much she reminds you of your sister, is not the best way to go about doing that.

Shoe, 4/9/09

There is exactly one character in Shoe at whose antics I laugh in a non-ironic fashion, and that is Buzz, the elderly dyspeptic bird. Today, he’s spent hours wandering around aimlessly, angry and confused, because he’s old and losing his mind! Ha ha! Oh, I’m going to hell.

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Mary Worth, 4/4/09

I suppose this strip is supposed to be interesting because it contains one of Dr. Jeff’s occasional and doomed attempts to become a Man Of Action, but to be honest I’m much more interested in his trademark green jacket. Presumably he bought it years ago from a Masters Tournament winner in desperate need of cash (John Daly?), and now wears it at all formal events to show his contempt for bourgeois notions that clothes should be “attractive to look at” or “match.” Still, look at the way he’s carrying it around Mary’s apartment at arm’s length. It’s almost as if he finds wearing it any longer to be an exhausting prospect, but its totemic power is such that he’s afraid to set it down or turn his back on it. He particularly needs to be wary of laying it on Mary’s mustard-colored sofa, because the resulting color clash could rip a hole in the fabric of space-time itself.

(UPDATE: As faithful reader willethompson pointed out, John Daly never won the Masters; I blame confusingly worded Wikipedia infoboxes. For a non-golf-fan, the appeal of a cheap “drunk and desperate John Daly” joke was too strong to resist.)

Archie, 4/4/09

These three panels of Archie contain all the power of a Greek tragedy. A blind (or, in this case, bespectacled) sage notes the rot that is destroying his culture from the inside out, but is powerless to do anything but comment. Then, like poor doomed Pentheus, he is torn to bits by a mob of crazed women.

Family Circus, 4/4/09

Normally, when the Keane Kids mangle the English language and/or basic common sense to make one of the subpuns or moronic bits of wordplay that are this beloved feature’s stock in trade, they just stare ahead with blank, dumb expressions while doing so, as the gags’ accidental nature is supposedly part of their charm. In this panel, though, Billy and Jeffy seem to be amused by the former’s wisecrack. This could herald a dangerous new phase, in which the melonheads, having somehow become aware of the fact that they are being cut out of the newspaper and hung on the refrigerators of nice old ladies everywhere, ramp up their cloying cuteness to unbearable levels. On the other hand, it’s possible that they’re just amused by the prospect of eating their grandmother’s head.

Curtis, 4/4/09

One of this strip’s most common running gags involves Curtis asking his father for a cell phone, and his father informing him that cell phones are too expensive. Thus, I must conclude that the strip’s creator has no idea what text messages are. Perhaps he thinks they somehow involve a tennis racket.