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Apartment 3-G, 5/5/07

Oh, poor Lu Ann. We all knew you were boring, but did they really have to rub your face in it with this pathetic display as your boring, boring life flashed before your eyes? For the record, here are the last faces Lu Ann will see before she casts off this mortal coil and is swept up into Albert Pinkham Ryder’s celestial art sweatshop:

• Margo, who has repeatedly failed to check up on Lu Ann when prompted due to laziness and/or self-absorption.
• Tommie, who has repeatedly failed to check up on Lu Ann when prompted due to crippling self-loathing-induced agoraphobia and/or bad cell phone reception.
• Professor Papagoras, who has repeatedly failed to check up on Lu Ann when prompted due to the fact all his time is now taken up screwing a 22-year-old.
• Lu Ann’s cousin Blaze, who hasn’t been sidetracked from checking up on Lu Ann because it never occurred to him to do so in the first place, and who also wears a stupid cowboy hat at all times.
• Lu Ann’s ex-boyfriend Alan, who had a cruel, immature freakout when he learned that Lu Ann had been engaged before he had met her, and who then gave her the keys to the evil haunted studio, and who has repeatedly failed to check up on Lu Ann when prompted due to peripatetic self-hatred. Lu Ann will miss him most of all, echoing Dorothy’s parting words to the brainless Scarecrow.

Figures not pictured in Lu Ann’s death fugue include:

• Her parents.
• Any other family members, including supposedly beloved cousin or niece or whatever Mim.
• Her beloved now deceased husband, Mr. Powers, a fighter pilot shot down over Vietnam years ago.
• Her former fiancé, what’s-his-name the billionaire janitor who went on to marry Margo’s rich client.
• FBI Pete, the boyfriend she stole from Margo, the one with the dyslexic daughter she loved so much.

In fact, Lu Ann’s dying moments have proven a remarkable ability to elide out her former relationships. I guess it will make things simpler when they all aren’t waiting for her in Dumb Girl Heaven.

Momma, 5/5/07

Good lord, but the youth of today irritate me with their twee, retro sensibilities. As if obsessing over vinyl records weren’t bad enough, now they’re all going in for antique cell phones from the mid-1980s, each one the size of a brick and sporting an eight-inch antenna. Damn kids!

Also, note to everybody: STOP THRUSTING YOUR PELVIS AT MARK TRAIL. HE DOES NOT ENJOY SEXUAL RELATIONS. HE WILL NOT RESPOND TO YOUR ADVANCES.

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B.C., 2/27/07

B.C.’s love of the interrobang should come as no surprise to regular readers of the strip. But since it’s not a love shared by the population at large, it probably wouldn’t have hurt to actually, you know, show one (if your browser can display it, you should see one here: ‽). Since most readers probably never even heard of this useless punctuation mark even during its 1960s heyday, that first panel might as well have read “Who can tell me what a ‘shootupsuspect’ is?”

B.C.’s use of the accidental (or “accidental”) death of someone in police custody as joke fodder should also come as no surprise to regular readers of the strip.

Speaking of odd typography, what exactly is that symbol between the 2 and the 4 on the blackboard in the third panel? It looks like a backwards “R” — like the one used in the title of that Amerika miniseries in the 1980s, where the Soviets take over and then put all registered gun owners into concentration camps. Hmm, I’m seeing a pattern here.

Judge Parker, 2/27/07

You watch out, Angela! Cedric is going to point the hell out of at you! Look at that blast of energy — he points with the pointing power of a thousand temp butlers!

Lord only knows what sort of outfit Cedric favors when he’s not on duty, but panel two is proof that it’s physically impossible to look menacing and bad-ass when you’re wearing a bow tie.

Apartment 3-G, 2/27/07

Yeah, see, this is what I’m talking about: Margo, baby, Margo! Just as Lu Ann’s art studio adventure is a cautionary tale on the dangers of huffing paint, so Margo’s drama illustrates how cocaine use can ravage your relationship with others. In panel one, our girl Magee is a tightly coiled spring of rage, ready to punch the next person who crosses her — or even looks at her funny — right in the teeth. In panel two, she’s so happy to see Eric that she looks like she’s going to lunge at him and tear off his clothes, or possibly his face. I hope that the “someone special” that Eric wants her to meet is wearing a catcher’s mask, for his or her sake.

Dennis the Menace, 2/27/07

Ruff also doesn’t have to go to school, and gets to urinate outside and roll around in his own filth. On the other hand, there’s the whole castration angle to consider.

Momma, 2/27/07

If you have to repeat the same phrase twice — once to mishear, once to clarify — in consecutive panels, then your miscommunication-themed joke has gone off the rails. On the other hand, I appreciate the mace-like object that Tina is holding in the final panel. Apparently she feels that Mother Hobbes deserves to be bludgeoned to death.

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Slylock Fox, Blondie, and Rex Morgan, M.D. 12/6/06

Ye cats, it’s a panoply of intertextuality in the funnies! Slylock Fox gets in on the Blondie 75th anniversary a year and a half late and simultaneously shows us all too vividly what Dagwood’s freakish, apple-shaped skull is really like; a little girl walks by and looks on with the appropriate degree of horror. Meanwhile, back at chez Bumstead, Alexander is living out his fantasies of being a tattooed, mulletted meth-dealing bad-ass. The real Elvis and his tough but still thoughtful and compassionate crime boss refuse to acknowledge this winking series of in-jokes, as befits the serious nature of this strip.

What does not befit the serious nature of this strip, however, is the name “Eightball.” Eightball. It’s the most hilarious thing that’s happened to me this week, and I shall savor it like a fine wine. I hope that, after Rex, June, and Abby the Wonderdog inevitably take the troubled and now orphaned Niki under their collective wing, Elvis and Eightball manage to escape the long arm of the law together and get their own spin-off strip, or, even better, a TV show on Fox. “He keeps a level head when things go bad … and knows how to get out when the getting’s good! He’s got a short fuse … and isn’t afraid to smack a kid in the face! Together, they’re … Elvis and Eightball!” They could put it on right after Prison Break.

Momma, 12/6/06

When someone mashes together an e-mail address and a URL like this, you sort of get the impression that they’ve never actually seen a computer, but have had one described to them.

Mary Worth, 12/6/06

The Mr. Dent vs. Ella drama has ground on even more slowly than is typical for Mary Worth, but there’s always a payoff in this feature eventually. In this case, it arrives today, as we’re shown exactly what it would look like if Thomas Dewey were angered by a 92-year-old prostitute and paid her especially contemptuously.

Plugger, 12/6/06

Since nobody’s actually used one since 1998, I’m pretty sure that a plugger beeper is actually a beeper.