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Apartment 3-G, 1/21/13

Sorry everybody, I know I’ve been falling down on the job a bit when it comes to reading Apartment 3-G so you don’t have to. So, after Margo got really blotto, Greg gently dumped her into bed. But wait! Remember Evan, all dressed up in his Druid robe? He left his giant package in Margo’s closet (note: not a euphemism)! And it was apparently a pink-smoke emitting incendiary bomb? Is … is Evan secretly a villain from the Adam West Batman TV show?

Funky Winkerbean, 1/21/13

In other keeping-you-updated news, despite my initial interpretation of last Tuesday’s strip, there’s nothing wrong with Darrin’s mother, except that she’s emotionally devastated after Darrin’s father suffered a stroke. How is it that you can know your whole life that someday you’ll be gutted by something terrible that will inevitably happen to you or someone you dearly love, and yet you still aren’t prepared for it? That’s just how you manage to live your life in an universe of cruel and unending trauma, I guess!

Hagar the Horrible, 1/21/13

Oh, that Hagar, what a jokester! Obviously he doesn’t “buy” houses; he just starts living in them, after his bloodthirsty band of Viking warriors murder the owners.

Heathcliff, 1/21/13

I’m pretty sure that if I churned out a series of paintings of sexy cats sitting on piles of filth, I could get a gallery show in one of Brooklyn’s hipper neighborhoods.

Slylock Fox, 1/21/13

The solution to this puzzle, if you don’t feel like turning your head/monitor upside down, is that we know Wanda is lying because thunder doesn’t cause lightning. You know what else doesn’t cause lightning? Witches.

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Crock, 1/20/13

I continue to be puzzled and irritated by the continuing existence of Crock, which, after publicly insulting me, decided to waltz off into the sunset. The official line was that new Crocks would cease on May 20, 2012, and King Features would supply “Classic Crocks” to newspapers for the next three years. Except the post-May 20 strips have looked not like classics (which I perhaps optimistically assumed meant installments from the early years of the feature) but instead pretty much like the last few years worth of strips, except not repeats, so I have no idea what their story is. Anyway, I bring this up not to harp on it endlessly, but only to suggest that maybe it’s only in this weird, ambiguous afterlife that the strip finally feels free to make a searing indictment of the practices of modern capitalism.

Family Circus, 1/20/13

I’m pretty pleased by the sight of little Jeffy stooped over under the weight of his own sadness, and since his parents always seem to hold their little redheaded son in a fair amount of contempt, I’m a little surprised they aren’t as tickled as I am by it. I’m at least assuming that their shared glance is less “What can we do to cheer him up” and more “Are you fucking kidding me?”

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Mark Trail, 1/19/13

Here’s a free tip from a semi-professional writer person (and yes, the novel is coming along, everybody!): if anyone in your story says “As you know,” you’ve failed! You’re trying to wedge in some backstory in a “natural” way, but in the real world, people don’t go around telling each other things that they both already know. Try maybe introducing this information by having a character who doesn’t know it learn about it? Or even just have it conveyed by the omniscient authorial voice — there’s no shame in that, if you do it deftly!

Usually, of course, this clumsy technique is meant to introduce some information specific to the narrative at hand, but using it for a sweeping statement like “Most fishermen are good people” takes it to another level. I actually had never even considered that fishermen were more or less likely to be good than members of the population at large until ol’ Bluegill felt like he needed to make such a big deal about it; now I’m troubled by how little we really know about these sinister boot-wearing fish-murderers. Sure, they say their flies are made of fur, feather, thread, or other such material, but do we know for sure they aren’t made from human skin? It would be irresponsible not to speculate. If we went into Bluegill’s basement, would we find horrific kill-chamber? Almost certainly!

Slylock Fox, 1/19/13

Meanwhile, Slylock Fox continues to be the sleaziest comic in the newspaper. I don’t know if spraying a consenting partner with liquid out of your nose technically falls under the sexual category of “water sports,” but the satisfied, tongue-lolling expression on this duck makes it clear that this is no innocent bath.

Gil Thorp, 1/19/13

Speaking of bird perversions, you might think based on Scott’s thrilled expression in panel three that “the peacock” is what the kids are calling penises these days. Sadly, his girlfriend is just referring to an actual, albeit maybe magical, peacock.