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Apartment 3-G, 10/9/07

No, Margo! Don’t trust him! Eric Mills is not what he seems! Her suspicions shouldn’t necessarily be raised by his expressing passing concern for the well-being of another female human when he should be attempting to seduce and/or marry Margo; I’m sure his curiosity about Lu Ann’s health is essentially mercenary, and can be summed up as “Will she still be capable of churning out mediocre fern prints that I can unload on the condo and hotel lobby market at a healthy profit?” No, the real clues of nefariousness are those glasses, which are totally inappropriate for serving cognac. That means Eric’s not a real millionaire, and Margo’s been wasting her time and sexual energy on him; she needs to move on post haste. Does she really want to be tied to someone whose financial future lies in Lu Ann’s artistic abilities?

Archie, 10/9/07

One might have written off a single reference to Betty’s blog as a sad and desperate bid to remain relevant to the kids today; but her Web journal’s reappearance as a plot point here indicates that, in a bid for cross-media corporate synergy, the Archie newspaper strip is pimping Betty’s actual blog (or, well, “Betty’s” “actual” blog), which I suppose I’ll serve as a tool of Archie Comics Publications Inc. and direct your attention to. The many content providers for this sprawling media empire haven’t coordinated their efforts well enough to actually have date details up that might make Veronica beverage-dumping mad, but Riverdale’s cheeriest blonde does wish her Canadian friends a happy Thanksgiving, which is more than FBOFW has managed to do (unless the secret message of this week’s plot is “Be thankful you haven’t had multiple strokes”).

Mary Worth, 10/9/07

Ah, see, this is how we know that Drew was right to choose Vera over Dawn; Charterstone’s go-gettingist clerk-typist doesn’t resort to tears and incredibly bland quotes when confronted with an ambiguous offering from a two-timing ex; rather, she thought-balloons a clever little bon mot that includes a “drew” pun and prepares to move on with her life. Perhaps she’ll find happiness with a new man — like that handsome deliveryman! His russet hair is rakishly long, but not drug dealer long.

Popeye, 10/9/07

The current loopy, meandering Popeye plot involves “spincoal”, a superpowerful form of compressed spinach that serves both as a miracle food and a miracle fuel. It hasn’t been all that exciting, but I am intrigued by the promise of energy industry skullduggery to come. I’m pretty sure that Popeye strips are actually reruns from the 1990s, so I’m assuming that the figure in the second panel is then-Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney.

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Mary Worth and Judge Parker, 10/8/07

“Sure, why not” vs. “You think?”: The sassy young ladies of the soap opera strips come up with the closest things to snappy comebacks allowed in this genre. Dawn has bizarrely chosen to encapsulate her sass as some kind of bit of quoted wisdom. My question: is this some flip statement that Drew made once, long ago, that Dawn memorized like every other sentence he uttered in her presence? Or is it just another in the long line of Mary Worth things-presented-as-quotes-that-aren’t-actually-quotes? A trip through the archives would answer this question, but I don’t have the spiritual strength for it this afternoon. I will say this, though: Dawn’s tremulous tear in panel one is actually better drawn than the single droplet usually seen on the faces of the various girls in Apartment 3-G.

Meanwhile, Judger Parker’s Sophie has come up with the only appropriate response to Rusty’s increasingly desperate bids to bend Sam to her legal will. Unable or unwilling to recognize her old classmate’s total disinterest in her assets, she’ll be humping the place settings before she’s through. Sophie’s droll reaction indicates that she knows well enough why Sam and Abbey expanded their family by adopting a pair of homeless millionaire adolescents rather than via the more conventional route.

By the way, does anyone know how old exactly Sophie is supposed to be? Is she ten, or forty and suffering from some kind of glandular condition? Her little lilac pantsuit is kind of freaking me out.

Dick Tracy, 10/8/07

Calling the heads in Dick Tracy “enormous and terrifying” isn’t exactly breaking new ground, but — God damn, those heads in panel two are enormous and terrifying. They sort of remind me of characters from video games in the mid-90s — two-dimensional drawings wrapped freakishly around some overly simplistic polyhedron. Anyway, the face on the front of the slightly smaller and less terrifying head in panel two looks glum, and why shouldn’t it? Dopey Dmitri and now-exploded Gretchen get all the credit in Dick’s exposition, but what about him? Doesn’t he at least rate an unimaginative and stereotypical name, like “Ivan” or “Hans”?

Gil Thorp, 10/8/07

Huh, so Cully Vale is a murderer. I’m assuming Gil already knows this — he always seems to be one step ahead of his cretinous students (a talent that sadly doesn’t seem to translate to his coaching, but never mind that for the moment). Since Gil seemed pretty blasé about having his baseball team coached by a fraud, it should come as no surprise that he’s let a cold-blooded killer into his locker room; I would have thought that the strip would have worked up to this with maybe a little light drug dealing first, but heck, why not just go for the gusto right away. I can’t wait for the cops to come question Coach Thorp about all the bodies only to have him reply with a resounding “Eh.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/7/07

More often than not, when I mention to people that I’m a fan of Rex Morgan, M.D., and similar strips, it completely boggles their mind. “But how can you force yourself to read that boring crap day after day?” is generally the sort of thing they ask me. Days like today are the payoffs that keep me going. Sure, the final panel, with Rex going into such paroxysms of shock and horror that his face is about to collapse in on itself, would be hilarious even without context, but you really need to backstory to appreciate all the other psychodrama going on here — everyone’s sneering at Rex’s mothball-scented bid to match his father’s rugged outdoorsmanship, and Niki blowing the whole thing to bits with his city-kid need for creature comforts.

In a conventional narrative, Rex and Niki’s initial antagonism on the trip would eventually soften into mutual compromise — Rex would wow Niki with his fly-casting skills, and Niki would teach Rex hip youth-culture lingo like “radical” and “extreme”; and maybe Niki would help Rex understand why the good doctr needs his dead father’s approval so badly, and that a situation where one is waist-deep in water and short on food isn’t necessarily a Katrina survivor’s idea of fun. But this is Rex Morgan, M.D., a strip whose hero never even tries to grow as a person or engage in a single moment of self-reflection. Niki will be made to hate fishing every bit as much as young Rex did, only to try to force it on his own son years later for reasons he can only dimly grasp. Thank God Sarah Morgan was born a girl, and is thus forever safe from Rex’s relentless Pygmalionesque schemes.

Mary Worth, 10/7/07

And sometimes the hoary old soaps can deliver perfect moments of emo pathos. I have to admit that, while the grinding gears of Mary Worth plot changes are generally audible from miles away, I’m not sure whether this is meant to be a capstone on l’affaire Drew or a setup for more heartstring-pulling to come. Either way, though, I’m going to enjoy imagining these roses sitting on Dawn’s dresser, withering more and more each day, but staying in their vase until they’re reduced to a skeletal mess, and Dawn seeming to draw more and more strength from their death until she’s more powerful than Drew could possibly imagine.

One Big Happy, 10/7/07

Ha ha, this is some of the most dick-tastic dad action in the funnies since — well, since Rex Morgan. One could argue that the point of a school-assigned spelling lists is to teach children how to spell, not how to memorize arbitrary lists of words just long enough to pass a test, and that we should be impressed that Joe has actually managed to get his little pea brain around the concept of homonyms. But then we wouldn’t have gotten to see Joe squirm about in his usual learning-avoiding contortions. Dad’s shown himself to be more of a math guy, anyway.

Spider-Man, 10/7/07

This strip is notable solely for panel five, which contains a passable likeness of Leonardo DiCaprio that apparently absorbed all of the artist’s celebrity-drawing abilities, as nobody else at this “Hollywood costume party” is even remotely recognizable as someone famous. But while I’m here, I might as well point out that this is yet another example of the most irritating weapon in Spider-Man’s narrative arsenal: the dilemma that solves itself in a day or two with no intervention from the protagonist whatsoever (see here for a particularly egregious example from a couple of years ago). In this light, it’s probably impossible to believe that the typically dramatic NEXT! box will live up to its promise. “You can’t go home again — or can you? Oh, wait, actually, I was right the first time. It turns out that you can. Never mind!”