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Apartment 3-G, 11/8/06

Panel two of today’s Apartment 3-G is a thrill for Margo lovers everywhere (which, I think it goes without saying, is ALL OF YOU, if you know what’s good for you). She’s moving in for the kill, and looks like she’s either going to ravage Eric Mills’ hapless assistant with red-hot Margo-style smooches or bite off her face. The girl’s facial expression, which is one of terror mingled with excitement, matches this dramatic ambiguity.

Margo’s near-victim bears a striking resemblance to Alan’s barely legal paramour from that infamous party. Did anyone leave that event not tangled up in this boring blue-suited billionaire’s life one way or another?

Margo’s lonely “Oh.” in panel three demonstrates a great use of word balloon punctuation and white space.

For Better Or For Worse, 11/8/06

I imagine a crisis meeting over at Foob Central: “Dammit, people, we’re getting murdered by Funky Winkerbean in the depressing realism department! We need to bring out the big guns!” How else to explain this harrowing plot twist, in which Grandpa Jim’s fully functioning mind is trapped in a shattered shell of a body, unable to communicate and prevent his unbearable and continuous humiliation? I’m going to imagine him remembering the morse code he learned in his days in the Royal Canadian Air Force, desperately tapping out “KILL ME” on his portable tray with a spoon, hoping that Iris will stop smothering him emotionally and start smothering him with a pillow, while Metallica’s “One” blares on the soundtrack.

FW is really going to have to raise its game here. Wally’s gonna have to accidentally blow up a busload of Iraqi orphans and puppies, then shoot himself, if they want to keep up.

Curtis, 11/8/06

I’d like to ignore the usual tomfoolery with Derrick and “Onion” (something that’s all too easy to do) and focus on Curtis’ alarming laughing fit in panel three. I wonder if the word balloon had been predrawn to accommodate some much longer bit of exposition, and the iterative, punctuationless laughter was stuck in there in a fit of horror vacui, or if we are really meant to understand that Curtis mechanically repeated the word “Ha” 25 times.

In a move that further undermines this pair’s fearsome reputation, “Onion” (or maybe it’s Derrick, I don’t know) appears to be taking fashion tips from Dennis the Menace’s Joey.

Mark Trail, 11/8/06

By having Ranger Rick utter the phrase “hold up,” Mark Trail has now successfully deployed more street lingo than Curtis has in its entire run. No, really, take a look at the Curtis strip above. The part where Curtis says, “Oh, I’ll be!”

Spider-Man, 11/8/06

“Or didja ever see Hitler having dinner with a Romulan?” Jesus, this strip is weird.

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Spider-Man, 11/2/06

This is just one more reason to oppose out-of-control corporate media consolidation.

Crankshaft, 11/2/06

Not soon enough, you evil old man, not soon enough.

Gil Thorp, 11/2/06

“A tie, do you hear me, a tie! We’re monsters! What have we done? A tie!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/2/06

Man, I think June played the race card kind of early in this dispute.

One Big Happy, 11/2/06

Hates boys? Sounds like she likes boys … a little too much.

…

OK, that … that was probably over the line.

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Spider-Man, 10/25/06

In a total violation of everything this strip stands for, Spider-Man has forced its dozens of readers to endure nineteen grueling days of exciting superhero-vs.-supervillain hand-to-hand combat. Fortunately, a good portion of this period was taken up by J. Jonah Jameson’s failed attempt to remove a camera lens cap. Today, at last, our long national nightmare is over, and we can get back to the feature’s bread and butter: toothless media satire, lame LA spoofery, and zany, vaguely homoerotic reaction shots from ol’ Flattop Hitler.

For Better Or For Worse, 10/25/06

Meanwhile, the Foobs return to the least harrowing of their ongoing storylines, as 4Evah and Eva try to simultaneously make their mark in the unforgiving novelty single market and demonstrate their total commitment to expunging the d sound from the end of and in Canadian English by the year 2020. While I commend Gerald’s passion, I question his marketing savvy, as he seems to believe that a 21st century Halloween song needs to be approached with the sort of deadly earnestness normally associated with Norwegian death metal, when clearly some kind of ironic distance is in order. Still, he doesn’t really deserve the tongue-lashing he gets in panel four. I can’t decide whether Eva is such a mega-diva that she can’t conceive of not speaking into her microphone so as to be heard by her many fans, or if she’s just trying to blow Gerald’s eardrums out completely so he’ll flee to an audiologist and leave the rest of them alone.