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Some quick one-panel entries from the Sunday funnies to begin your week!

Panel from Apartment 3-G, 6/13/10

In classic A3G Sunday style, today’s strip rehashed the last week’s worth of story and then gave us exactly five additional seconds of action — in this case confirming my guess form yesterday that this returnee was Gina. I’m feeling more than a little validated by this, because I am a sad and pathetic little man!

Panel from Curtis, 6/13/10

Today’s Curtis features the title character, who has been rockin’ exactly the same fly style since he first appeared on the comics page in 1988, offering a sneering discursis of the admittedly fairly goofy droopy-pants fashion epidemic that has been gripping America’s inner cities for the better part of the decade. Anyway, I just wanted to say that I found this throwaway panel, in which our hero was dwarfed by a boxer-shorted ass looming menacingly in the foreground, fairly delightful.

Panel from the Lockhorns, 6/13/10

One of my favorite Lockhorns tropes is when the titular pair manages to lure some other poor couple over for some kind of no doubt hellish double date. These people never appear in the strip more than once, since presumably a single evening spent with the Leroy and Loretta’s psychodrama is more than sufficient for an entire human lifetime; by the time we actually see them in the strip, the poor victims are generally sitting on the couch staring numbly ahead, waiting for the horror to be over. Today, though, the female half of the non-Lockhorns couple seems intrigued by Loretta’s fiery feminist talk. “Right on, sister!” she says, with her barely perceptible smile.

Panel from Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/13/10

I know I’ve been terribly neglectful in following the Rex Morgan drama of late, right when it’s gotten vaguely interesting (no doubt a manifestation of my recurring Rex Morgan Problem). Still, I felt it was important to update you all on the following fact: nobody calls Brook a bimbo and lives. Have any of you been calling Brook a bimbo, in the comments here, or just to your friends and family members, or even in what you assumed was the safety of your minds? Better make your peace with your God now, my friends.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/27/10

Oh my gosh, have I really not commented on Rex Morgan for more than a month? Well, a lot happened in that time! Toots told June that all of Brook’s crazy stories about her drunken abusive mother were true, and then the nail salon lady gave Brook the day’s receipts to take to the bank, and Brook said she got robbed, and the cop didn’t seem to believe her but June showed up and did her Icy Death Glare thing at him and he scurried off. This really is a lot, for a soap opera comic strip!

Anyway, I will say this for Rex Morgan, M.D., and the other Woody Wilson-penned strip, Judge Parker: Generally speaking their plot outcomes are not painfully obvious a week into the storyline, the way they are in, say, Mary Worth or Mark Trail. We were discussing the current RMMD plot at this past weekend’s get-together, and I tentatively guessed that Brook was running some scam; I now tentatively believe she’s telling the truth, and am overjoyed to find that she will be vindicated by one of RMMD’s trademarked wacky walk-on characters: J. Elhew Bisbee, Hobo Detective! I’m only seeing about sixty percent of this dude’s face and I’m already in love with him. See those glasses? He won them from some irritating hipster, in a knife fight.

Pluggers, 5/27/10

Here are my three interpretations of this dynamic, in order of decreasing charity:

• Pluggers have crippling social anxiety and don’t want to interact with strangers unless they absolutely have to.
• Pluggers’ bodies are so bloated and creaky that getting out of a car seat is a painful exercise, so why bother doing it if there isn’t cheap food as a reward for the effort?
• Pluggers like making their wives do irritating little errands for them, as it is the only moment of power they feel over the course of their sad, pathetic day.

Mary Worth, 5/27/10

Say what you will about Mary, but she’s willing to see her meddle-missions through to the end, even at great personal cost to herself. Here, for instance, she pauses to do important meddling follow-up with Bonnie, despite the fact that she’s just been stabbed in the neck.

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The Phantom, 4/18/10

A mere 15 months after Bernie Madoff’s arrest — and a mere six or so months after the launch of innovator Judge Parker’s take on the scandal — the Sunday Phantom is launching a White Collar Investment Scam plotline of its very own! While Judge Parker’s version ended with a notoriously dull flood of exposition, the always-saucy Phantom narration box promises us that the Ghost-Who-Doesn’t-Understand-The-World-Wide-Web will solve the crisis in world financial markets with his fists and his pistol, as is his wont.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/18/10

So, it looks like the Morgans’ plans to forcibly drag their ne’er-do-well houseguests into bourgeois respectability are finally bearing fruit. It turns out that Brooke just needed the satisfaction of a job well done to coax out a smile that would break through her sullen shell! And Toots — or, sorry, “Tony” — is doing as he’s told, plus bringing just an extremely mild dose of countercultural wackiness (uh, what are the young radical kids into? the environment? yeah, put some whales and shit up there, that’s the ticket) to brighten up Rex and June’s just-a-little-too-staid suburban life. Yep, it looks like everything’s going to be fine, just fine, right up until Toots and Brook sneak off in the dead of night with all of the Morgans’ valuables.