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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, 6/8/07

Dum dee dum, oh look, it’s Gil Thorp, where the characters are always an oddly drawn band of quasi-humans. Yes, there they are, strangely shaped, but I’m totally used to that by now … I’ll just move on to the final panel and see YEEEARRRGGGHHHH!!!!

Man, I guess Brynna Antenna got sick of being called “Brynna Antenna,” but was unable to conceive of any other hairstyle, and so just decided to go for the Lt. Ilia look. Now that her antennae are gone, all her psychic powers are just radiating out from her shiny bald pate.

The Milford Lady Mudlarks softball team is now officially the jumpiest-to-conclusionist bunch in the comics pages. First they assume that Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp has cancer because of a half-overheard phone conversation, then Brynna Baldie shaves her head in premature solidarity — before finding out whether or not her coach will have to undergo chemo, or even whether the other girls on the team are on board. Of course, since she’s Tyler’s girlfriend, it should come as no surprise that she lurches into ill-advised schemes. Hopefully they’ll get to room together at the mental hospital.

Oh, yeah, speaking of Tyler … the long delayed Self-Clubbing Tyler winner will be announced … MONDAY! So you’ll have all weekend to let your anticipatory excitement BUILD!

Mark Trail, 6/8/07

The wide-eyed, terrified, badly banged Sam Hill we see in panel two is perhaps one of the most wonderful images in recent Mark Trail history, even when the high bar established by the savage duck attack in panel one is taken into consideration. I particularly like the fact that for some reason the space in her open mouth has been left gleaming white. It’s as if she’s simultaneously shouting in terror and gritting her teeth in grim determination.

Her ludicrous facial expression might be best explained not by the swarm of highly trained attack ducks, but by the fact that her cravat is obviously too tight, cutting off blood flow to the head.

Apartment 3-G, 6/8/07

It took long enough, but Apartment 3-G has finally figured out how to make this “Lu Ann Is Hospitalized At Tommie’s Hospital” storyline interesting. Lu An having seizures? BORING! Tommie in her professional environment? BORING! Margo disheveled in a nightie? Now we’re talking. Hopefully we’ll get to see her bathroom preparations (yes, Lu Ann’s in the hospital, but Margo does not just roll out of bed and leave the apartment) so we can see what sort of shampoo she uses to maintain that Mary Tyler Moore/Marilyn Quayle hair flip all night.

Archie, 6/8/07

I thought I’d share with you a little of the code from the algorithm that powers the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000:

if
  assessLameness(joke.this) > Unspeakable
then
  insertDrawing(BettysAssCrack)

Shoe, 6/8/07

Ha ha! It’s funny because Roz’s boyfriend is an alcoholic!

Wait, Roz has a boyfriend?

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Crock 6/5/07

I never thought I’d see the day when I’d say something nice about the art in Crock, but, well, when you get to 1,100+ posts on your damn comics blog, you end up in places you could never have imagined.

I kind of like the empty thought balloon over Grossie’s head in the second panel. (Yes, her name really is “Grossie,” and yes, she’s married to “Maggot.”) The execution is sub-par, but conceptually, I like it as an indicator that the thought balloonist is thinking something important for the narrative, but not something that you the reader is allowed to be privy to just yet. However, in this panel I am distracted from my brief feeling of artistic appreciation by the horror show that is Grossie’s mouth. It’s bad enough that it’s usually depicted as an black lipsticked bow that floats disconcertingly on the outside of her niqab; here it yawns open hideously, with the right corner stretching halfway down her chest to create an image out of a Dali-esque nightmare.

Hmm, so I guess I ended up not being very nice here after all.

Mark Trail, 6/5/07

Sure, we all love it when Mark Trail punches the fake beard off some ne’er-do-well, or when a badger the size of an Abrams tank appears with a word balloon coming out of its rectum, but I think we need to appreciate the lower-key installments of this strip as well. Today’s episode gives any Trailhead so many reasons to keep coming back. There’s Buzzard’s dialog, which ranges from the impossibly stilted (“I think this is the place I should be”) to the frankly ungrammatical (“It can’t be good, but as long as they pay me!”), and Buzzard’s tiny, Ted Forth-like hands, which seem so at odds with his bulky body (which is just poured into those overalls, by the way). Then in panel three, we’ve got Sam Hill, with her sexy eye makeup and sexy bangs and sexy cravat, practically throwing herself at poor, oblivious Mark as they head over to OPERATIONS WEATHER. Bliss, I tell you, pure bliss.

Shoe, 5/6/07

I’m kind of surprised the newspaper is bothering to review Roz’s diner. If I’m remembering correctly (and I might not be — despite appearances, I do try to minimize the time I spend thinking about Shoe), Roz’s is the only place you ever see the characters in this strip eating outside of their homes, and thus might be the only restaurant in Treetops. The review should just read “Roz’s: If you give them money, they will prepare food for you to eat.”