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Apartment 3-G, 7/14/07

“I found the legendary Marg-Po idol in a monastery high in the mountains of Qinghai province, just like the old man at the museum said. The monks said that its mystical power was the only thing that could defeat Margo. It seems crazy, but I think it’s our only chance.”

Mary Worth, 7/14/07

Welcome to phone sex, Mary Worth-style. That means it’ll take a year and a half, will take place at impossible angles on hideously colored sheets, and everyone will lose interest about a quarter of the way into it.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/14/07

Man, I could just watch hungover Hugh stand absolutely still and blink very gingerly all day. It’s kind of hypnotic. The next three weeks of this strip could just be Hugh blinking as the storyline is advanced by word bubbles coming from off-panel. They could call it The Angriest Hungover Brit in the World.

Shoe, 7/14/07

Possibly the most depressing Shoe ever. I think they’re finally figuring out that if they’re going to have Roz responding to punchlines with huge-eyed horror, they need to make those punchlines truly horrifying.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 7/14/07

Wow, Hekkie held one set of attitudes as a child, but decades later as an adult holds a different set of attitudes entirely on a number of subjects!

That … that is something they’ll do every time, actually.

Boring technical update: Apologies to everyone whose comments were eaten by the new spam filter over the past few days. I know it’s really frustrating, but believe me when I say it’s also been really frustrating for me to try to figure out how and why it’s happening and how to fix it. I switched back the other filter program; hopefully it won’t cause the site to grind to a halt again or start eating comments like it was doing last week. (For those of you who are computer nerds: I had switched from Spam Karma 2 to Akismet and now back to SK2. If you have any words of advice, I will appreciate them.)

On thing that will definitely increase your chances of getting caught in any kind of spam filter is adding a bunch of links to your post. So, I’d advise you not to do that.

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Gil Thorp, 7/11/07

Ha ha! Oh, man, the Gil Thorp summer hijinks are getting started even more quickly than I could have hoped! I’m totally in love with Gail Martin, the “rock and roll Carole King,” as she was called yesterday; truly, nothing shouts “rock and roll” like a collared shirt and a long braid that you clutch dramatically to your chest while you belt out your non-hits and your banjo player grooves behind you. This looks exactly like the kind of scene where a brawl would break out, and I look forward to tomorrow’s weirdly proportioned and strangely angled fisticuffs. Since Kelly has a troubled past with guys with rage issues, this should provide excellent fuel for one of the eleven rapidly crosscut dramas that will be entertaining us until football practice starts up again.

Apartment 3-G, 7/11/07

Ruby’s dialogue says “funny Texan with more realistic ideals of beauty than these supposedly sophisticated New York City girls,” but her solemn expression in panel three, along with Tommie and Margo’s panicked exchange of glances, says “violent feederism.” In two weeks, look for the two of them to be tied to their chairs, their faces smeared with tangy barbecue sauce, begging for mercy, as Ruby says, “Nuh-uh, Maggie, you still only got one chin!”

Ziggy, 7/11/07

If you thought that the sight of a desperate, insane, bald dwarf with no pants jabbering about the dishonesty of inanimate objects while thrusting a fifteen-year-old household appliance at bemused service worker wouldn’t be funny, well, today’s Ziggy is here to be prove you wrong. I actually laughed aloud at this. Ziggy may continue to exist, as far as I’m concerned.

As I look at it more, I’m sort of hypnotized by the text in Ziggy’s word balloon. The symmetry between the sentence-initial “i” (lowercase, in defiance of all known typographical conventions) and the final exclamation mark, makes it look like he’s actually shouting “T lies!” in Spanish. Which, for my money, is even funnier.

Luann, 7/11/07

I’m only marginally less sick of Brad-Toni than I am of Curtis-Michelle, but this sequence is growing on me. If Toni ends up running off with uberskeeze TJ because of his cooking (or “cooking”) skills, I will be willing to forgive a lot that’s happened in the last few years.

Dick Tracy, 7/11/07

It just wouldn’t be Dick Tracy if the payoff didn’t include somebody writhing around in pain. This isn’t the optimistic fantasy land of Mark Trail; those eyes aren’t growing back.

Family Circus, 7/11/07

Hmm, what’s the most alarming part of this? Yeah, I’m going to have to say that it’s Big Daddy Keane’s little smile.

Gasoline Alley, 7/11/07

Gasoline Alley: the one comic strip that isn’t afraid to show you how the system is stacked against the white man.

Spider-Man, 7/11/07

In a strip that brought us such epic battles as Dr. Octopus vs. his television, Spidey vs. a bowl-hatted butler, Spidey vs. his own outdated ideas of economics and gender, and, of course Spidey vs. a brick, today’s struggle between J. Jonah Jameson and Larry King may represent a dramatic zenith.

And, finally, I’m sure sexy toast-eating is somebody’s fetish, so:

Panel from Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/11/07

Go to town, perverts!

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Apartment 3-G, 7/7/07

Spider-Man? For all his web-slinging and super-strength and relative [fill in the blank] of a spider, we know him to be a self-absorbed, useless mope. The Phantom? A guy who openly admits that his main “power” is messing with his opponents’ heads. No, today we learn that Ruby Wright has the most incredible superpower in the funny pages: the power to shut Margo up. Admittedly each panel is just a frozen instant in time, but that vision of Margo, her mouth a perfect O of surprise, stunned into silence, is one that no ordinary human could bring about. Still, no matter how powerful Ruby is, Margo will counterattack; the Professor, who a moment ago was eager to get back to his own apartment to continue servicing Gina, now looks eager to stick around and watch the fireworks.

(By the way, Lu Ann’s maiden name is “Wright”; “Powers” is the name of her husband, a fighter pilot who was shot down over Vietnam, which incident has presumably been retconned to Grenada Libya Iraq Somalia Kosovo Afghanistan Iraq stay tuned!)

Gil Thorp, 7/7/07

The first panel of today’s Gil Thorp, in which the Milford baseball team lets loose a mighty, fist-pumping cheer in salute to willful ignorance, may be one of the most simultaneously sad and delightful things this strip has ever presented — and it’s presented a long list of simultaneously sad and delightful things.

Now that we know that Otha earned the “Clambake” nickname during his Navy days, I really, really don’t want to know the origin story. Really.

Mark Trail, 7/7/07

There’s been plenty of wacky animal action in Mark Trail this week, including yesterday’s memorable talking moose, but none pegged my disturb-o-meter like today’s strip. The idly munching cow seems innocuous enough, despite the fact that its horns are the exact same color of milky brown as the rest of its coat. But then you see Sam’s suddenly enormously dilated pupils in the next panel. Her eyes have the exact same numb, soulless look as the brutish bovine’s. And then you realize that something very, very bad happened on that plane.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/7/07

I’m going to ignore the subtext here and just focus on the flat-out ludicrous text. Look at Rex in panel three, with his fist clenched and and that look of steely determination in his eyes. “As God as my witness, Niki, we will! If it’s the last thing we do!” They’re going to hang out by a river and catch a damn fish or maybe not, not climb Everest or cure cancer. There’s no point in being … so … oh, hell, who am I kidding. TROUSER TROUT TROUSER TROUT TROUSER TROUT TROUSER TROUT TROUSER TROUT