Eager readers simply will not let the question of Apartment 3-G‘s swapped panels die. Alert reader Dalton has swapped the art, but not the text, of the second and third panels of Thursday’s Apartment 3-G to reproduce the original author’s intended effect. It’s like the special edition of the original Star Wars trilogy, only significantly less crappy.
“Behold my l33t p40t0s40p ski11z,” says Dalton.
Boy, do I have prompt and responsive readers! For those of you who have been on tenterhooks about the career paths of the Apartment 3-G girls, but too lazy to read the comments, my plea to the public has been answered. A reader who goes only by the gender-ambiguous name of “Robin” says: “Tommie is a nurse. Margo is in PR or marketing or something like that. I *think* Lu Ann is a teacher.” That all sounds right to me (as Robin says, “Isn’t that all just painfully obvious, when you think about it?”), and if I had even the vaguest desire to do fact checking, I wouldn’t have posted the question to begin with, so I’m declaring Robin the winner, with the prize of getting his/her name published in the blog. You go, Robin!
Robin also points out that Lu Ann and Margo’s facial expressions would make much more sense if the art (but not the dialog) for the second and third panel were switched. If you look at the strip with this in mind, it’s so striking that I have to believe that somehow the panels got swapped during production. It’s just more proof that comics ought to be drawn, written, and composited in unionized facilities right here in the good old U.S. of A., rather than in poorly-ventilated third-world comics sweatshops.
There were also alternative suggestions as to what’s in Lu Ann’s cereal box, but they’re far too vile to report here. Have you people no decency?
When I started this blog I promised myself that I would keep metaposts like this one (that is, posts about the blog itself rather than about the comics) to a minimum, but I do want make a couple of comments. (All metaposts will be marked as such in the title, so you can easily skip them and move on to the ones where I make fun the shape of little kids’ heads in the Family Circus and whatnot.) Because it’s much more fun than doing work, I’ve been using my nifty (and free!) referrer logs to relentlessly track everyone out there who’s linked to my humble offering here. I’ve noticed that I have attracted the attention of some readers on rec.arts.comics.strips, which I am very grateful for. This is obviously exactly the place where I should have posted links to the blog myself, and I would have had I not sworn years ago, in a desperate attempt to save my academic and social lives, to stop hanging around on Usenet.
A couple of people in that forum compared this blog to a similar but now-defunct feature called Funny Paper (of which I was wholly unaware) only with “none of the nastiness.” The last bit sort of surprises me, since I have in my first week impugned the racial authenticity of Stephen Bentley and compared Mary Worth to a train wreck. I guess the Funny Paper people were pretty unpleasant. Hopefully I won’t turn anyone off with my own personal vendettas, but for what it’s worth, I promise not to call for the death of any currently working professional cartoonist (at least not in this forum). It’s also been noted that Funny Paper‘s motto was “We read the comics so you don’t have to.” I swear that I did not rip my site’s title off of this. In fact, I ripped it off from “Dog Bites,” a column by Laurel Wellman that ran in the San Francisco Weekly in the late 1990s. Wellman used to tease/mock San Francisco Chronice columnist Jon Carroll by offering one-sentence summaries of his work under the heading “We read Jon Carroll so you don’t have to.”
Finally, a link back to a North of the Border linker, ronniecat. ronniecat shudders at the thought of mad “props,” so I offer big “ups” and a “shout” out instead.
OK, metapost over. Tune in tomorrow as I call for the death of whoever it is who draws Marmaduke, and possibly for the death of Marmaduke himself.