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Apartment 3-G, 1/30/14

Oh, man, I have to say I’m seriously disappointed that Margo has been tricked so easily into allowing a literal wild animal to roam free inside their apartment, defecating freely and infecting roommates and visitors with Lyme disease willy-nilly. Margo is not the sort who enjoys the act of breaking rules for its own sake; she merely disregards those rules that she deems inconvenient, while ruthlessly enforcing the ones that serve her interests. In fact, one would assume that Margo helped write the rules about ruminants living in their apartment building, since she and the other Apartment 3-G gals (and maybe everyone else who lives there, who knows) own the building, according to this strip from 2004 where Margo angrily imposed some worksite safety guidelines. The building’s ownership situation has literally never come up since then, but I don’t think they’ve sold it or anything?

Anyway, the only way this makes any kind of sense is if Margo is one of the very few owners of the building, and she’s going to use this deer thing as a way to establish that rules are things she imposes on other people, not things she has to obey. “Oh, hello, Mrs. Jones,” Margo says to a tenant whose beloved but lease-violating cat she had seized by animal control the previous week. “Terrible weather we’ve been having, isn’t it?” The baby deer pees on the hallway carpet right in front of them, but Margo never breaks eye contact.

Judge Parker, 1/30/14

Huh, I was really pretty sure that April’s last name was “Bowers” and her dad’s compound was in the Yucatan, but Judge Parker plots are incredibly slow, so who can even remember these things? The Atlantic/Pacific question can at least be chalked up to the slow tectonic shifts that have taken place over this storyline’s millions of years.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/30/14

Haha, Jughaid, while it is just like a woman to violate the expressly stated rules of her Creator and then browbeat her hapless man into joining her in her monstrous act of sin, I think you’ve misunderstood the parson’s question! He’s not asking about the first commandment, but rather the furst commandment — in other words, the command of the Fürst, the Germanic princeling under whose sovereignty Hootin’ Holler lies, due to quirks of feudal law. Sorry, Jughead, his Serene Highness has declared his dominions to be at war with the Count Palatine of the Rhine. To arms! Say farewell to your family and prepare for combat!

Phantom, 1/30/14

As you may or may not have been able to tell from that last bit, before I got into the go-go world of online content creation, I made an abortive attempt at an academic career, although my speciality was not early modern Germany but rather late antiquity. So, is the Phantom (the strip) attempting to catch the interest of America’s #1 comics blogger by having a plot point about manuscripts and artifacts from the early middle ages? Maybe! Unfortunately the Phantom (the character) is singularly failing to catch the interest of our snoopy reporter lady, if her facial expression in panel two is any indication. Maybe instead of erasing her mind with “Bandar medicine,” he’s just planning to bore her into a coma.

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Mary Worth, 1/29/14

Whoa, Mary is wasting no time after her return from her New York idyl and is determined to prove to Santa Royale that, despite her period of absence, she is still its undisputed meddle-empress. Having only returned moments ago from her latest sex cruise with Dr. Jeff, Mary hasn’t even finished eating dinner before settling on the next victims of her unrelentingly sensible advice: this lady and her daughter, who are about to have their lives destroyed by the horrors of divorce. Did you know that sometimes married people realize that they no longer love each other, or perhaps even actively dislike each other, and decided to stop being married, thus undermining the social order? Well, not with Mary on the case they won’t! “You there, young woman, cease with this divorce talk! Your feelings are ruining everything! Push those tears back into your eyes with your hands! Yes, that’s the spirit!”

Mark Trail, 1/29/14

I really do wonder about the editorial direction of Woods and Wildlife Magazine, based on some of the (presumably paid?) assignments Mark’s gotten from them. Do they have any kind of social media strategy at all? I could see a slideshow of an attractive young woman nursing pelicans back to health generating some pageviews, but I have to question Mark’s belief that Jessica’s boyfriend “sounds interesting,” considering that all we know about him is that he’s a taxidermist. I pity the editor who has to write the headline that jazzes that one up. “People Keep Bringing This Man Dead Fish. What He Does To Them Will Shock You — And Delight You.”

Crankshaft, 1/29/14

Crankshaft’s co-worker Rocky is heavily invested in using performance-enhancing drugs, is what I’m getting out of this.

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Archie, 1/28/14

The setup for today’s Archie is a bit contrived — why is Dilton, a fairly marginal member of the Archie gang, hanging around reading the newspaper in whatever venue is providing this private snuggle couch for Archie and Veronica? — but turns into an effective character piece. Of course poor socially awkward Dilton would immediately latch onto this dubious teleportation article — it combines his two loves, science and the idea of getting as far away from Riverdale and everyone in it as quickly as the laws of physics will allows. Meanwhile, Archie, in the midst of a love haze that he hopes will never end, is vaguely aware that his life is peaking at this precise moment and adulthood and the outside world hold nothing for him but disappointment. And yet it’s Dilton who looks at the happy couple with sadness all over his face: no matter how much he knows intellectually that his future is bright, emotionally he feels like high school will last forever, and the prospect of escape seems like the most unlikely science fiction.

(In other news: having an extra joke in the first panel was definitely a thing in these late ’90s/early ’00s Archie reruns; usually the gags are pretty execrable, but I deem Archie’s “I bet they’re beaming!” a solid pun.)

Gil Thorp, 1/28/14

Meanwhile, this plot where everyone wants to have sex with Wynn Wiley’s sister … is still happening, I guess! In today’s action, Wynn gets mad about it and punches someone in the face in the middle of the basketball game. Wait, did I say “action”? I meant “action that took place off-panel but was helpfully described for us,” more specifically. I understand the artistic choices being made here: Why show us a shocking act of violence in the middle of a high school basketball game when we could look at this referee with a weird little beard instead? That beard is what you get when you think, “I want to have a little mustache right under my nose, but it’s still ‘too soon’ because of Hitler or whatever! But what if … I moved that mustache … below my mouth? Hitler didn’t have a mustache on his chin, did he? Ref, you’re a genius!”