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Apartment 3-G, 8/15/15

Wow, after weeks and weeks of virtually no forward movement or anything of interest in Apartment 3-G, we have something that … might be interesting? Lately, Margo’s taken to wandering around Manhattan in a fog of confusion, occasionally hassled by people on the street who claim to know her but whom she keeps pushing away. But now we learn that her mysterious stalkers are named … Tim and Eric? If these names ring a bell, it’s because Eric Mills was Margo’s grill-loving almost-fiance who died in an avalanche (supposedly) smuggling his brother Tim and the Pachen Lama out of Tibet. But maybe Eric survived, or, weirder, maybe he died but has been reincarnated/called forth out of the spirit world by powerful Himalayan magic, to join forces with his brother to … irritate Margo, for some reason? The other possibility is that this whole thing is some sort of prank perpetrated by discomfort-causing alt comedians Tim and Eric, which honestly seems equally likely.

Shoe, 8/15/15

Whoa there, Shoe: priests don’t turn water into wine or vice versa. A priest could help facilitate a little transubstantiation, but unfortunately the accidents of the wine are not transformed in that process, and thus it will still taste terrible.

Pluggers, 8/15/15

Pluggers don’t use CREDIT CARDS issued by BANKS controlled by the ILLUMINATI CABAL who want to DESTROY AMERICA and establish a NEW WORLD ORDER so YES they WILL be paying with LIBERTY SCRIP backed by the INTRINSIC VALUE OF THE MINERAL RIGHTS INHERENT TO THEIR ALLODIAL PROPERTY on which they DON’T PAY TAXES because they’re SOVEREIGN CITIZENS and if you won’t take that but you will take BIG GOVERNMENT’S FIAT MONEY then you my friend are very much PART OF THE PROBLEM and I’ll be posting about this on FACEBOOK, believe you me

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Blondie, 8/12/15

The structure of the joke in this strip is straightforward enough: Dagwood feels good about himself, a state of affairs that will soon be undone by his abusive rage-monster of a boss. But something about the way that everyone around him keeps shouting “Dag swag!” at him seems profoundly off. Are we to view the entire strip as a dream sequence, in which Dagwood’s exaggerated sense of importance and centrality will soon be inverted into persecution at the hands of a cruel father figure? Or is this catchphrase intended to establish the name of a line of Blondie-branded menswear, in a second and hopefully less disastrous attempt to cash in on the strip’s intellectual property?

Pluggers, 8/12/15

You’re a plugger if you’re a hideous man-beast who, despite walking upright and wearing clothes and owning property, still has the unshakable urge to establish dominance within your kin-group by aggressively urinating in your offspring’s newly established territory.

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Mary Worth, 8/4/15

I’ve gone through a lot of fads and obsessions over the eleven (!) years I’ve been writing this blog, but Mary Worth is, and always has been, my lodestar. A quick peek at my stats shows that fully a quarter of the posts I’ve ever written discuss this strip. And you know what? It deserves all the attention. Today’s strip, in two efficient panels, encapsulates everything great about it: the overblown narration box, the crazy dutch angles in panel one as Ian pulls his hair out in consternation, and Toby’s twisted rage-face making her look like she’s planning on slitting Ian’s throat with that X-Acto knife. All this drama, of course, is turning on a relatively minor dispute, which could be resolved in one of several wholly acceptable ways — Ian could apologize and reschedule, Ian could cook something simple himself, Ian could explain his own error and ask the University Director what kind of takeout he’d like. But no, the Camerons have mutually and angrily decided to spin a terrible web of lies, in which Toby will attempt to pass off restaurant takeout food as her own, for literally no good reason at all. We can only hope this all unravels terribly and violently over dinner and Ian’s quest for academic advancement is ruined, ruined, but no matter what I am salivating to see what comes next, just as Ian probably is at the thought of takeout food.

Judge Parker, 8/4/15

Judge Parker’s joys are more subtle, but still worth savoring. Obviously when Sam’s close personal new friend (with whom he will never interact again, not once) gave him a skeet gun as a gift, it was a $20,000 Italian skeet gun. Unlike Sophie, I have no desire to Google anything about skeet gun models or their cost or nation of manufacture, so I’m just going to enjoy Sam’s rapid change of heart between panels one and two. “Hey, Sophie, this’ll be a chance for us to bond, and … wait, it cost how much? Yeah, keep your grubby hands off my high-quality, luxurious gun.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/4/15

Speaking of class war, I too like my whiskey neat, and one of my go-to jokes about that is to say “in a glass” when people ask me how I like it — a joke I will now immediately stop making after seeing an addled British aristocrat say it in a soap opera comic strip. I’m pretty sure our put-upon servant is wearing gloves so that he doesn’t leave prints when he eventually throttles Avery.

Hi and Lois, 8/4/15

Having Lois’s head stick appear in front of the bottom of Dot’s word balloon is an interesting visual choice, but the fact that said word balloon covers up the house shutters makes it look like Lois is sticking her head right through that window. Anyway, I’m focusing on this minutia because I don’t want to deal with the fact that Hi and Lois’s long marriage is riddled with lies and deception.

Pluggers, 8/4/15

GOD DAMN IT PLUGGERS I’M NOT A HUGE FAN OF THE BIG BANG THEORY OR ANYTHING BUT IT’S BEEN ONE OF THE HIGHEST-RATED SHOWS ON TV FOR EIGHT YEARS. THERE’S NO WAY IT CAN BE DESCRIBED AS “THE LATEST” ANYTHING. EIGHT GODDAMN YEAAAAARRRRRSSSS