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Apartment 3-G, 6/27/10

Oh my goodness, are Kat and Kitty the mother-daughter hosts of I Dressed In The Dark, the awesomely named reality TV show that Tommie sort of tried out for last year and which we haven’t heard about since? This would be fantastic for any number of reasons, but here are my top two:

• It would mean that Tommie’s big success in off-Broadway musicianship has apparently been a scam orchestrated to get her into this theater so she can be humiliated on national television, and has had nothing to do with her singing talents, which are presumably negligible; and
• She’s about to be lectured on couture by Kat, who appears to be wearing the same kind of ultra-starched white dress shirt, buttoned all the way to the very top, to which Tommie is partial, and by Kitty, who is sporting a hideous black v-neck/suspenders combo.

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/27/10

Am I a terrible urban elitist because I giggled at the thought of poor Rusty and Mark referring to the rather mundane sight of birds flying overhead as a “great experience?” I mean, if you don’t have the Internet, or television, or books, or humans outside of your household to entertain you, then, sure, yeah, I guess you need to go out and look at the sky for entertainment. I still mock, though.

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Gil Thorp, 6/26/10

Ought I apologize to you for keeping you criminally out of the loop on happenings in Gil Thorp? Perhaps! (I’m not going to say that I yearn for the day when a lack of basic knowledge of the current Gil Thorp storyline is an offense punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment, but I’m not going to say I don’t yearn for it either.) Anyway, long story short, Milford sports teams continue to play in the final week of June, long after virtually every school in the country has knocked off for summer vacation, and alt-country sensation/fiery pitcher Slim Chance has made a video for his band, which he’s uploaded to YouTube. And now, in a moment that will change both Slim’s life and the face of popular music forever, some chinbearded dude in Chicago is presumably forwarding said amateur YouTube video to some other dude named “Geoff,” because that, apparently, is how the music industry works, in 2010, chinbearded dudes in hipster glasses just stone cold forwarding YouTube clips to each other, all day, every day.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/26/10

Herb desperately hopes for some unimportant daily minutia to distract his friend from his own thoughts, because those thoughts, as is customary for characters in this strip, inevitably turn to death.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/26/10

You know, I can get away with running gags like “Marmaduke is a demon-beast who eats children and torments his supposed ‘owner,’ who is Hitler,” because I can be pretty sure that, no matter how close the subtext is to the surface, the strip will never actually show a child sliding down the dog’s gullet, or depict Phil giving a rousing speech exhorting the invasion of Poland. But trying to make up exaggerated versions of Funky Winkerbean’s next ultra-gloomy plot twist is a more dangerous game. I swear to you that my Friday proposal that Funky is dead and doesn’t know it was meant entirely in jest, but now … I’m not so sure. Either he really is already a specter, or, as the now-classic YouTube montage “No Signal” teaches us, he’s about to be murdered by an ax-wielding maniac.

Oh, and have we been a little short on Rusty-horror lately?

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/26/10

Rusty does not weep saline tears as the humans do; instead, when sad or overjoyed, he cries tears of melting flesh.

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The Lockhorns, 6/25/10

I’m deeply intrigued by the looks Leroy and the gentleman half of the rapidly departing couple are flashing at each other. That sheepish, crumpled smile is Leroy’s usual expression when he does something shamefully enjoyable, often while drunk (generally this is flirting with a statuesque blonde three times his height). The easy answer is, of course, that this guy is Leroy’s gay lover, but in fact I think the situation is sadder and more poignant: Leroy has finally made his first-ever friend. He was so excited at experiencing a brief moment of human contact that wasn’t steeped in passive-aggressive bile that he invited the man over to visit without asking or even telling his wife. “Sorry, new friend!” Leroy is thinking as he waves. “We’ll do this again sometime!” “That Leroy’s a nice guy,” the other fellow thinks, “But just being around him and his wife for 45 seconds has almost sapped my will to live. We’re never coming back here again.”

Funky Winkerbean, 6/24/10

Oh, darn, Funky survived after all, and now he has something else to be pissy and self-righteous about. Unless … that inky black panel really was his death, and now he’s a dead-and-doesn’t-know-it ghost, à la Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense. Seeing how much everyone resents his angry dickishness and fails to mourn him would be a suitable punishment for his various crimes.