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Apartment 3-G, 7/26/07

I know you’re not supposed to think about Apartment 3-G too much, but I can’t help it; it’s what I do. So I’ve been thinking, and I’ve got some questions. Here are the starters: Did Lu Ann and Alan rekindle their love on the adjustable bed in her shared hospital room? Does Lu Ann not realize that Alan’s the one who set her up with the poorly ventilated studio in the first place? Did Alan do it deliberately because he likes his girlfriends dumb, and somehow pre-carbon-monoxide-poisoning Lu Ann wasn’t dumb enough? Was Ghost Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose phantasmagorical svengalisms we had to endure for months and months, entirely a product or Lu Ann’s oxygen-starved brain cells? Are we going to have to endure some kind of carbon-monoxide-poisoning-awareness storyline for months and months? Will there be a telethon? Will Margo plan the telethon? Is “Yay, you may or may not have permanent brain damage” the most gruesome theme for a party ever? Is that why Margo looks so chipper in panel one?

Speaking of Margo (and God yes let’s speak of Margo instead of Lu Ann “Cascade of Noble Tears” Powers), in panel one you can sort of see around Lu Ann’s addled head that our favorite bun-headed brunette is being sized up by cousin Blaze. In a storyline from several years ago, back when she was pretending to be a publicity agent in an attempt to meet a rich man instead of pretending to be an event planner in an attempt to meet a rich man, Margo was supposed to be doing publicity for an off-off-Broadway play Blaze wrote or was directing or producing or something (yes, he’s not just a moron who wanders around wearing ludicrous cowboy clothes, he’s also involved in the legitimate theater!). Only Margo got distracted by something — I don’t remember what, it was probably a rich man or a shiny object or her reflection in the mirror — and she completely forgot to do any publicity at all, and the play flopped. Naturally Blaze was somewhat peeved. Presumably Margo has now completely forgotten who Blaze is, but I’m hoping he’s is sitting there in a state of cat-like readiness, awaiting the perfect moment to lunge and strangle her. And then the noble tears will really start flowing.

B.C., 7/26/07

I don’t believe that fruitcake actually exists. I suppose there are still physical fruitcakes here and there, but I think those real-world manifestations of this traditional holiday treat are hugely outnumbered by jokes about their inedibility, told by and laughed at by an audience that for the most part has never seen one. I accept that ritualized jokes like these, ones everyone gets even though they’re several steps removed from the thing being joked about, are part of the landscape of humor, but in this case part of the ritual is that you make the joke at Christmas time, not in the last week of fucking July.

See, this is why zombie B.C. pisses me off much, much more now than it did when Johnny Hart was writing it and reminding me that I was going to hell. At least then I could say, “Oh, it’s the idiosyncratic output of a somewhat deranged old man who’s been doing this so long he’s in his own little world.” Whereas now I have to imagine the current team saying, “They’ll run this crap for decades no matter how nonsensical the jokes. Ka-ching! Tee time, everybody!”

For Better Or For Worse, 7/26/07

Helpful tip to MCs everywhere: if you have to explicitly tell everyone that the event you’re MCing is great, it’s probably not actually great. (This does not apply to hip-hop MCs, since boasting of one’s own greatness is an well-established convention of the genre.)

Given the strip’s recent unsettling obsession with bathroom matters, I’m a little anxious about the “#2” on the wall in the third panel. Hopefully Gerald has not just interrupted April in the telethon’s poopatorium.

Gil Thorp, 7/26/07

Coach Kaz is going to jump at the chance to switch careers; after all, he’s a coach at a public school, and they have all these liberal namby-pamby rules now that say you’re not allowed punch your students in the face. Since he’s being hired for a delicate and sensitive position based entirely on his proven ability to hand out savage beatdowns, I look forward to the shocking climax of this storyline, in which “Thorpstock” becomes synonymous with “Altamont.”

Mary Worth, 7/26/07

For a brief moment, Wilbur demonstrates that he’s well aware of the thick, choking layer of anguish that is the atmosphere of Planet Weston. But he’s so used to life at the bottom of the well of despair that he sees even the tiniest flicker of happiness as a threat that must be brought to light and then destroyed.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/26/07

Ha ha! Snuffy Smith got mauled by a bear! Good times.

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Beetle Bailey, 7/25/07

All day, people have been commenting in varying degrees of arousal about the hot, hot Miss Buxley action in today’s Beetle Bailey. All I can say is: why? The Walker oeurvre is one of the funny pages’ more stylized, and there are few less detailed or realistic looking “sexy” women in comics than General Halftrack’s oft-harassed secretary. Seriously, if this was all it took to get me worked up, I’d just draw a stick figure and slap some boobs on it and WHAM! Instant porn. Even the theoretically sexy frilly unmentionables are terribly botched, with Buxley’s brassiere seemingly wrapped around her robe, implying that either that the artist has little grasp of spatial relations and/or undergarment topography, or that she’s dressing quickly because she’s aware of the series of hidden cameras the general has stashed all over her apartment and wired up to the phone somehow.

The less said about whatever’s in her robe pocket, the better. Is it a hot glue gun? Or something more untoward There’s something about its crap-brown color that unsettles me.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/25/07

Now, Heather Avery — that’s a cartoon character whose sex appeal I can endorse. I don’t even care about those little droopy devil horn things on the front of her head, which indicate that she’s probably a succubus in addition to being a gold-digging nanny and stock-manipulating white-collar co-conspirator.

This whole encounter is more than a little porntastic. “Hugh … what is it? I’m getting dressed — and since I’m already in the process of removing my robe, surely it’s unrealistic to expect me to close it again now that it’s half-way open, since I’ll just be taking it off completely in a few minutes. Can’t it wait? The robe-closing, I mean.” Of course, since there’s no blood relation between the two of them and they’ve only met the previous day, there’s nothing untoward or incestuous about the prospect of them falling into each other’s arms for comfort in the wake of their great loss — or at least there wouldn’t be if they didn’t essentially look exactly alike. Even Von and Vera, Mary Worth’s creepy Flowers in the Attic pair, didn’t share this much of a resemblance. Of course, this has less bearing on any potential Heather-Hugh match-up and much more bearing on Milton’s now-revealed-to-be-deeply-disturbing attraction to Heather.

Dennis the Menace, 7/25/07

Lucky for Ruff the Mitchell’s floor is covered with a healthy layer of rotting organic matter! Of course, we can’t blame Alice for the unhygienic state of the house: Henry forces her to wear those killer stilettos at all times, so she can barely walk; I don’t know how you expect her to operate a vacuum cleaner.

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I probably won’t get to new comics until late-ish tonigh, so to tide you over, here are some fab photos from the Land of the Rising Sun! Faithful reader CrabbyGenes, who is a resident of Japan, recently met up with a visitor:

I met SecretMargo in Tokyo today, and we had a great time eating lunch, coffee-shop hopping, buying a book or two, and talking about anything and everything under the sun — including Comics Curmudgeon, of course!

We couldn’t find anything really famous or recognizable in the part of Tokyo we were in to use as a background for the photo. So we just found something that looked Japanese-y. We asked the guy who was handing out the free fans we are holding to take two of the pictures for us. The background and fans are “manga”-ish, but I think they’re just the advertising gimmick for the pachinko parlour we’re posing in front of — the name of which is “Green Peas Pachislo Tower.” You can see it printed in English on the carpet in one of the photos. (Great name!)

SecretMargo is of course sporting his Molly the Bear shirt. Such surrealist shirt slogan/logo combos are of course par for the course in Japanese fashion, so presumably he didn’t raise any eyebrows with it. However, if this photo from the always-amusing Engrish.com is any indication, Japan is already on the ironic comics t-shirt bandwagon:

(Thanks to faithful reader Dan the Wis for the tip!)