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Apartment 3-G, 1/16/15

This is kind of a delicate subject, but: I feel like there’s been a marked decline in the quality of the Apartment 3-G art over the past year or so; artist Frank Bolle will be turning 91 this year and I wonder how much longer he’ll be up for doing the strip. Today Tommie has wandered so far off-model that it seems that even the syndicate colorists have failed to recognize her and given her the wrong hair color. Honestly, the strip could use the infusion of new energy from a younger artist like the ones who took over Judge Parker and Gil Thorp in the past decade. It would’ve been particularly nice to have someone new in place in time for the steamy shower lesbian three-way Apartment 3-G fans have been waiting for literally since the day the strip launched in 1961.

Mary Worth, 1/16/15

I honestly did not think I was going to see anything in today’s comics funnier than Hanna in panel two of today’s Mary Worth, her flute at the ready and her face demonstrating her grim determination to make beautiful music with it.

Spider-Man, 1/16/15

But then I saw panel three of today’s Spider-Man, in which Peter shows his steely resolve to not have sex with his wife like he wanted but instead show up for some publicity photos for her lucrative job that pays his bills, presumably sulking visibly the entire time.

Herb and Jamaal, 1/16/15

Hey, are you wondering what Herb’s mother-in-law is doing on this fine Friday? Well, she’s just sitting in an armchair, silently contemplating her own inevitable death!

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Pluggers, 1/15/15

Philosophical question: are there young pluggers? Probably not. But: are new pluggers being formed as pluggerism-susceptible youth age into a plugger-appropriate range? Even this seems unlikely, as pluggerism seems founded not just on old age and cantankerousness but on a fairly specific nexus of cultural consumption. What I’m trying to get at here is that pluggers are dying, going extinct, never to be replaced. And those surviving pluggers are going to become more and more acutely aware of their thinning numbers, and eventually will eventually spend every waking minute haunted by the grim specter of their own death. The next decade or so of Pluggers will be amazing, in other words.

Crock, 1/15/15

If I had to guess, I’d say this was an awkward attempt to graft the hip and in-the-news term “hack” onto a strip that never depicts characters using computers and that indeed takes place in some ill-defined but definitely early-to-mid-20th-century past. But still, by giving the title character the sinister power to access and alter his men’s very minds, this “joke” has made Crock more terrifying than he’s been for years.

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Slylock Fox, 1/14/15

I’ve spent literally years contemplating the strange, animal-dominated world of Slylock Fox, wondering about the terrible, transformative Event that separates it from ours. The lens I’ve seen things through has usually been scientific, but what if I should be thinking theologically instead? In the Genesis flood narrative, God famously promises Noah that He won’t destroy the world with a flood again, which is pretty specific and seems to leave some loopholes. The spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep” famously warns “God gave Noah the rainbow sign/ no more water/ the fire next time,” but God’s ways aren’t necessarily what we would expect. What if God chose to cleanse Earth of awful humanity by simply moving his favor down a rung to the animals, transforming them into beings capable of both moral reasoning and displacing us? If that was the goal — if Slylock Fox’s anthropomorphic beasts were an attempt at resetting the clock and creating a new Eden — then today’s strip reminds us that the fatal flaw, the indelible link between knowledge and sin, was baked into the design from the beginning.

Dick Tracy, 1/14/15

Aw, it’s funny because patriarchy dictates that detective prowess, like names, can only be transmitted down the male line! And also because none of these clowns are going to be the world’s greatest detective. Batman is the world’s greatest detective. Seriously, wouldn’t it be funny if they did a Batman movie where Batman was dressed up in a rubber bat suit but instead of punching bad guys and driving around in a tank-car he just looked for clues with a magnifying glass? It’d be a lot more entertaining than whatever they’ve got planned for Ben Affleck, that’s for sure.

Heathcliff, 1/14/15

Sure, you could look at this as Heathcliff just reusing the exact same joke twice in six days. But I choose to imagine that Heathcliff has been clawing viciously at the bars of the bird’s cage for nearly a week now, while his owner-family does nothing, leaving the bird to crazed with terror but still clinging to the household etiquette rules.

Apartment 3-G, 1/14/15

“Meanwhile, at two in the morning, after having been exiled from their home by Margo’s drug-powered mania, the girls wander the streets of Manhattan (?), talking to each other vaguely.”