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Apartment 3-G, 7/21/07

Love, Apartment 3-G-style: You’ve been waiting for months to make a move on your pretty, bland underling, so what better opportunity than her roommate’s possible brain damage? Just hand her the business card with your private number on it (the one that says “stud” instead of “brain doctor”), lean in close so she can get a good look at your bland, sandy good looks and your leer, and order her to call you by your first name. She may be leaning away from you at the exact angle that you’re leaning in, but you know she wants you.

Mary Worth, 7/21/07

Love, Mary Worth-style: You’ve never actually seen the Big Sleep, of course, but you’ve heard that in it 21-year-old Lauren Bacall seduced 47-year-old Humphrey Bogart in a restaurant with sexy horse talk, so try to babble artlessly about the noble equines in as blunt a matter as possible so that he knows you’re talking about screwing. Be sure to use inappropriate quotation marks (if we’re really talking about horses, doesn’t she long to actually, literally, get back into the saddle again?) that nobody can see, anyway. If that doesn’t work, hint darkly at your troubled past and push your hands together and pray for pity sex — since that’s the only kind of sex you feel that you deserve, what with the self-loathing.

Gil Thorp, 7/21/07

Love, Gil Thorp-style: Teach a one-legged guy how to box. I know, it’s not romantic, but its nothing short of a gesture of true love to the readers. It’s like Gil and Coach Kaz are in some kind of competition to see who can have the most bizarre summer. Hopefully it will all end in mid-August in some kind of transcendent hallucinatory explosion of joy at Thorpstock, with braids and prostheses and punching, lots of punching.

Pluggers, 7/21/07

Everyone, with the possible exception of Marie Antoinette, is a plugger.

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The Lockhorns, 7/20/07

Normally, when the Lockhorns turns away from its wonderfully refined set of canonical jokes and attempts to inject an (almost always lame) reference to some aspect of contemporary pop culture, I’m strongly opposed. However, today’s gag has so many layers of perversion that I have to admit to being kind of charmed by it. I suppose it’s possible that Leroy simply sees adoption by a wealthy movie star as his ticket out of his failed marriage and soul-crushing job, and an opportunity to live in a huge mansion without having to work for it; it is a long shot, as Loretta notes, but he does appear to be about three feet tall, so maybe there’s a chance that he’ll be mistaken for a impoverished Belarusan orphan boy whose freakish, hairless appearance is a result of his parents living downwind from Chernobyl.

But since Angelina Jolie is generally summoned up in conventional discourse as a totemic sex goddess, and Leroy is sporting that crinkly smile that he usually gets when drunkenly flirting with statuesque blondes twice his height at parties, one has to assume there’s something more going on here. Does Leroy believe that Jolie’s “adoptions” are mere covers for her sexual appetites? Does he harbor some sort of infantilism fetish? More disturbing that the potential answers to either of these questions is the affectless way Loretta conveys this information to her dumbfounded friend. She’s so used to the bottomless well of numbness that is her marriage that it never occurs to her to leave or anything; the prospect that Leroy might take off for better prospects seems to fill her with neither joy nor despair. It’s just another thing that might happen.

Anyway, no other comics came close to this level of depraviy today, but a few tried.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/20/07

Dear God, please let “bedbugs” not be code for some intimate part of the human anatomy.

Mary Worth, 7/20/07

In a desperate attempt to avoid thinking about this dialog as anything other than a transparent but incredibly awkward lead-in to a proposition, I’m focusing on Dawn’s fork. Her tiny, tiny fork. Maybe she’s on a new diet plan that works on the theory that if you eat with miniscule utensils, you won’t be able to shovel as much food in your mouth. Dawn’s determined to look good naked when she “tries something new.” Damn it, that didn’t work.

Marmaduke, 7/20/07

He’s not so much “listening” as “figuring out the most efficient way to kill and eat you.” But whatever makes you feel better, lady.

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Crankshaft, 7/18/07

Ha ha! Crankshaft’s prostate is grotesquely swollen, making every waking moment a torture for him! Ha ha! Oh, the hilarity!

Adding to the funny, of course, is the revelation that the dickery that the ’Shaft displays pretty much every day is part of a majestic chain of misanthropy that spans the generations. At least Crankshaft Senior has some actual annoyance to overreact to, since presumably one didn’t send children off to stadium restrooms on their own, even in the sepia-toned days of yore. Since our hero does not require assistance to toddle off to the john in the present day, I guess Crankshaft III just wants to make him feel bad about being old and decrepit.

Actually, now that I think about it, I guess that’s supposed to be Crankshaft’s son-in-law, not son, since he’s the one with the unspeakably hateful Ukrainian mother. Pretty much everyone in this strip is a loathsome human being, is what I’m saying.

(Hey, isn’t the ’Shaft supposed to be a WWII vet? If he’s 70, that would have him going through his basic training at the ripe old age of 7. Of course, it’s possible that the ’Shaft-in-law just uses “70” as his synonym for “I no longer bother to keep track of how old you actually are, fossil.”)

UPDATE: As several of you who are clearly smarter than I am pointed out, the little tot in the sepia-toned first panel is a girl child, which means that the horrible, horrible adult human being next to her is the ’Shaft himself. Let this be a lesson to you about not altering the facts to fit your grandiose “cycle of hate” thesis. Presumably said pigtailed tot is in fact the wife of the non-’Shaft dude in panel two, and thus he’s dishing out a little payback on her behalf.

Apartment 3-G, 7/18/07

“Yes, Nora, in my experience, there’s nothing an impoverished Oriental peasant respects more than a white man in an electric blue suit waving hard currency around and offering him the chance to choose between selling centuries-old pieces of his cultural patrimony and starving to death. The little buggers adore me.”

Something is seriously awry with Nora’s shirt in panel three. “God damn it, if I show him my left boob, will he stop nattering on about my dead husband and the filthy foreigners he forsook me for?”

They’ll Do It Every Time, 7/18/07

Curmudgeon dominance of TDIET proceeds apace: today’s entry is from faithful reader Damian Penny, who sent this entry straight out of m************ Newfoundland, before he up and moved to Halifax. It may be the first TDIET to end in a twisted pile of steel and flesh — but not the last, I’m hoping.

HONK-A is an amusing but not outrageous variation, but I dare you to find a horn that can produce a sound like HONK-K. On the other hand, I really like the way the trucker’s wordless curse symbols are all tiny-like and entirely contained within the cab.

Mary Worth, 7/18/07

You get the feeling that Drew starts a lot of his sentences with “I love talking about my”.

Sally Forth, 7/18/07

So, long story short, that’s why everyone at Splash Land died of cholera.

Finally, I offer the latest in an extremely occasional series of potential LiveJournal icons from the comics, this one from today’s Crock:

It should correspond to “Mood: Incontinent”.