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Apartment 3-G, 10/9/07

No, Margo! Don’t trust him! Eric Mills is not what he seems! Her suspicions shouldn’t necessarily be raised by his expressing passing concern for the well-being of another female human when he should be attempting to seduce and/or marry Margo; I’m sure his curiosity about Lu Ann’s health is essentially mercenary, and can be summed up as “Will she still be capable of churning out mediocre fern prints that I can unload on the condo and hotel lobby market at a healthy profit?” No, the real clues of nefariousness are those glasses, which are totally inappropriate for serving cognac. That means Eric’s not a real millionaire, and Margo’s been wasting her time and sexual energy on him; she needs to move on post haste. Does she really want to be tied to someone whose financial future lies in Lu Ann’s artistic abilities?

Archie, 10/9/07

One might have written off a single reference to Betty’s blog as a sad and desperate bid to remain relevant to the kids today; but her Web journal’s reappearance as a plot point here indicates that, in a bid for cross-media corporate synergy, the Archie newspaper strip is pimping Betty’s actual blog (or, well, “Betty’s” “actual” blog), which I suppose I’ll serve as a tool of Archie Comics Publications Inc. and direct your attention to. The many content providers for this sprawling media empire haven’t coordinated their efforts well enough to actually have date details up that might make Veronica beverage-dumping mad, but Riverdale’s cheeriest blonde does wish her Canadian friends a happy Thanksgiving, which is more than FBOFW has managed to do (unless the secret message of this week’s plot is “Be thankful you haven’t had multiple strokes”).

Mary Worth, 10/9/07

Ah, see, this is how we know that Drew was right to choose Vera over Dawn; Charterstone’s go-gettingist clerk-typist doesn’t resort to tears and incredibly bland quotes when confronted with an ambiguous offering from a two-timing ex; rather, she thought-balloons a clever little bon mot that includes a “drew” pun and prepares to move on with her life. Perhaps she’ll find happiness with a new man — like that handsome deliveryman! His russet hair is rakishly long, but not drug dealer long.

Popeye, 10/9/07

The current loopy, meandering Popeye plot involves “spincoal”, a superpowerful form of compressed spinach that serves both as a miracle food and a miracle fuel. It hasn’t been all that exciting, but I am intrigued by the promise of energy industry skullduggery to come. I’m pretty sure that Popeye strips are actually reruns from the 1990s, so I’m assuming that the figure in the second panel is then-Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney.

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Mary Worth and Judge Parker, 10/8/07

“Sure, why not” vs. “You think?”: The sassy young ladies of the soap opera strips come up with the closest things to snappy comebacks allowed in this genre. Dawn has bizarrely chosen to encapsulate her sass as some kind of bit of quoted wisdom. My question: is this some flip statement that Drew made once, long ago, that Dawn memorized like every other sentence he uttered in her presence? Or is it just another in the long line of Mary Worth things-presented-as-quotes-that-aren’t-actually-quotes? A trip through the archives would answer this question, but I don’t have the spiritual strength for it this afternoon. I will say this, though: Dawn’s tremulous tear in panel one is actually better drawn than the single droplet usually seen on the faces of the various girls in Apartment 3-G.

Meanwhile, Judger Parker’s Sophie has come up with the only appropriate response to Rusty’s increasingly desperate bids to bend Sam to her legal will. Unable or unwilling to recognize her old classmate’s total disinterest in her assets, she’ll be humping the place settings before she’s through. Sophie’s droll reaction indicates that she knows well enough why Sam and Abbey expanded their family by adopting a pair of homeless millionaire adolescents rather than via the more conventional route.

By the way, does anyone know how old exactly Sophie is supposed to be? Is she ten, or forty and suffering from some kind of glandular condition? Her little lilac pantsuit is kind of freaking me out.

Dick Tracy, 10/8/07

Calling the heads in Dick Tracy “enormous and terrifying” isn’t exactly breaking new ground, but — God damn, those heads in panel two are enormous and terrifying. They sort of remind me of characters from video games in the mid-90s — two-dimensional drawings wrapped freakishly around some overly simplistic polyhedron. Anyway, the face on the front of the slightly smaller and less terrifying head in panel two looks glum, and why shouldn’t it? Dopey Dmitri and now-exploded Gretchen get all the credit in Dick’s exposition, but what about him? Doesn’t he at least rate an unimaginative and stereotypical name, like “Ivan” or “Hans”?

Gil Thorp, 10/8/07

Huh, so Cully Vale is a murderer. I’m assuming Gil already knows this — he always seems to be one step ahead of his cretinous students (a talent that sadly doesn’t seem to translate to his coaching, but never mind that for the moment). Since Gil seemed pretty blasé about having his baseball team coached by a fraud, it should come as no surprise that he’s let a cold-blooded killer into his locker room; I would have thought that the strip would have worked up to this with maybe a little light drug dealing first, but heck, why not just go for the gusto right away. I can’t wait for the cops to come question Coach Thorp about all the bodies only to have him reply with a resounding “Eh.”

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Hey everyone, it’s Sunday night, and you know what that means … it means the COMMENT OF THE WEEK!

Curtis: “So how is Diane going to tell Stacey’s mom (who obviously doesn’t have it going on) about this? ‘Oh, by the way, my son was masturbating to a tape of your daughters tits’?” –Krohmdohm

And it also means the very funny runners-up, obviously.

“You know, I would think a place with the name ‘Bum Boat’ would show up in Gil Thorp long before it would in Mary Worth. It’s only natural: every Gil Thorp strip seems like the lead-up to the hardcore scenes in gay porn, whereas every Mary Worth strip seems like the lead-up to solving the mystery in Murder She Wrote. I guess that’s where they’re similar: they both try to string the reader along with a promise of something exciting around the corner but constantly deliver inadvertently humorous situations without giving the reader the goods they expect.” –Forthillrox

“Dick Tracy, it begins to dawn on me, is Wagner for the comics page. The vast dilation of time … the protracted sequential repetition … the ambiguous, perplexing perspectives (so very like the disorienting harmonic confusion of, e.g., Tristan) … the omnipresent fire and death … yeah. It all fits. Today, witness the return of the ‘My Gretchen’ leitmotif, subtly transformed to seem smaller, fainter, more querulous, as if borne through the most poignant tragedy. (‘Poignant’ here is used in the sense of ‘having a considerable splatter radius.’)” –Keg of Curd

“I’m pretty sure this is the first time in recorded history that the phrase ‘the Wall Street Journal’ has concluded with an exclamation point.” –dbp

“The only thing Dick Tracy renders more lovingly than the excruciating torment of criminals is chins. Dick Tracy loves chins. Today we have the beautiful trifecta of Dick’s utterly rectangular chin, the Baron’s respectable jowls, and the elongated majesty of … whoever that is.” –Reynard Noir.

“If this strip has somehow put a subliminal image of death into my head, and that goddamn butler shows up when my time comes, I swear I will come back and sue Batiuk and his heirs from beyond the grave.” –Quäsenbo Pan

“I’ll just add that I’ve never seen a worse waiter than the one in Archie. Two glasses, and he looks like he’s about to topple over. Has Betty’s pantslessness given him a giant erection? Is he slipping on the mess on the floor caused by Betty and Archie’s lovemaking? What I love most is his look of grim determination, as if Betty and Archie have been screwing on the same spot every day for the last month, and Mr. Waiter has up until this moment always avoided their love-jasm. Not today, however. ‘Today,’ thinks the waiter, ‘Today I’m just going to walk through it. Screw them and their love juices. I have a goddamn job to do, and today I’m going to do it, and not by some scenic route, either.’ His customer waits with all the anxious expectation of a sports fan, or just a fan of watching people fall violently backwards.” –RaJ

Mary Worth: “Can we please stop seeing three-hair combover dad pawing his daughter? It’s surpassing creepy and moving into … what comes after creepy? Crawly?” –chumley

“For this Spider-Man arc to generate any real suspense, they need to tell us just what TV show they’re trying to fly back home in time to catch. What are the stakes? Are we even talking new episode here?” –BlinkAndItsOver

“I’ve come to the conclusion that there is only one tear in this strip; it just moves around from character to character, sort of like a virus. Except for Margo, of course: she is immune.” –Piper Grey

“Spider-Man impresses me with its ability to be completely uninteresting. At least the Phantom usually has someone holding a gun or a knife or sharp pencil or whatever; this is just one strip away from being Spiderman’ll Do It Every Time: ‘Webbo has all these amazing powers fromma spider but whoooaaa he can’t deal with the crazy airport security when hez gotta make a plane!'” –RoboMax

“So is today’s lesson about thriftiness? Because cans of shaving cream are way more expensive than disposable razors. A true plugger would lather up with soap stolen from the men’s room in the gas station.” –Jym

“Oh, the second panel [of Gil Thorp] warms the heart, seeing the teamwork between our heroes — one able to read numbers, the other words: together they are unstoppable literacy machine!” –SecretMargo

“Niki just got back from 1985, judging by that boombox.” –Tweeks_Coffee

And hey, did someone say “Curmudgeon fan meetup?” A note from faithful reader The Specatcular Spider-Brick:

Here are some pictures of the Madison ‘Mudgeon Meetup 2007 (a.k.a. MMMMMVII). We gathered for dinner Friday at Ella’s Deli, an eclectic spot with some odd decor that reminded us of the comics. We saw a Popeye straddling a rather Freudian rocket and soaring across the ceiling on a wire; a table filled with model trains à la John Patterson; and a Mark Trail lookalike with an evil twin mustache trying to hook an angry muskie (though the way he was bending over, it may well have been Rex Morgan in hip waders).

Here’s the whole gang assembled, and toasting the memory of Funky Winkerbean’s Lisa Moore. From left: The Spectacular Spider-Brick, Crooked Soricidae, Jamus the Bartender, Gadge Cubic Mole Preener, and Dingo.

And here’s another. Again, quoth The SSB: “Here, Dingo, at right, displays a treasure Jamus found in a used bookstore — a compilation of TDIET made back when it was still timely! Or did the panels from those days refer to situations in the Roaring ’20s? I think at least one had something to do with waiting for the stagecoach. Meanwhile, Gadge Cubic wonders when the TDIET he sent in will be printed.”

More pics are available at Gadge Cubic, Mole Preener’s Flickr site.

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