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Apartment 3-G, 1/9/07

Apartment 3-G ought by right to serve at least a little bit as an anthropological survey of life and mores of various types in New York City. 99 percent of the time it’s laughably off-target, but every once in a while it hits the mark. Margo is exactly the sort of yuppie wannabe who would make this sort of snarky, dismissive comment about New York’s superabundance of artist wannabes, and has exactly the sort of defective empathy gene to make it in front of her roommate and supposed friend, an aspiring artist.

Lu Ann, meanwhile, has one of the thinnest books of art history I’ve ever seen. Presumably that’s all the information her little brain can hold. I guess that helpful, horny librarian ended up taking her to the children’s section, which may explain why that relationship went nowhere.

Gil Thorp, 1/9/07

Note to Gil Thorp and Comics Curmudgeon readers: Please, please stop making fun of the art in this strip, because you’ll only goad the artists into perpetrating more unsettling attempts at photorealism like panel three here. I guess the point is supposed to be that Helen is making this daring investigative phone call in the dark because that’s, you know, more dramatic.

Rick Bozich is right, by the way: nobody cares about no-bid contracts, especially when the contracts involved are for IT services to a no-account exurban school district, as they are here. Presumably the Man and/or lack of public interest will force the Star to kill Helen’s exposé, and she’ll have to resort to the ultimate indignity: turning to the world of blogs. Her spiritual brother, that crusading journalist known only as HALIBURTON $UCKS, was forced down the same path.

Dennis the Menace, 1/8/09

I think that about fifteen years from now, we’ll find out [INNUENDO-LADEN JOKE ABOUT A “MARGARET SANDWICH” REDACTED DUE TO EXTREMELY POOR TASTE] hey, is Dennis drinking Metamucil?

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Mary Worth, 1/8/07

MARY’S GOING TO VIETNAM! MARY’S GOING TO VIETNAM! MARY’S GOING TO VIETNAM!

“In person” even! This is too important to take care of via teleconferencing or astral projection!

For some reason I keep thinking of the song “Old Hippie” by the Bellamy Brothers, which my mom loved when I was a kid. It contains the following line:

“Then they sent him off to Vietnam on his senior trip.”

Mary’s sort of doing the same, although her senior status means that she’ll be shouting at locals both because she thinks they’ll understand English if she does and because she’s going deaf.

There are so many awesome possibilities to this plotline that I’m practically overbrimming with joy at them, even though I know that this is Mary Worth and thus only the most boring ones will actually occur. But still, it’s fun to imagine: Will Mary end up lost in a jungle and have to feed herself by hunting and fishing? Will she be kidnapped and forced to work in a Nike sweatshop? Will become a committed Marxist and come home determined to spread Communist revolution in her condo complex?

Better, and actually somewhat plausible: Will she discover that Dr. Jeff is living comfortably in a foreign medical staff compound, is totally startled to see Mary, and when she starts describing how she was brought there by a powerful dream, begins backing away in wide-eyed terror?

In other news, I think it would be funny if Toby were serious about her New Year’s resolution. It’s a little-known fact that last year she helped negotiate an end to Nepal’s Maoist insurgency; this year she has her sights set on just settlements in Sri Lanka and Nagorno-Karabakh. But Mary doesn’t care about that kind of do-gooding nonsense, as she’s made clear in the past; she just needs a damn date to the damn Bum Boat.

B.C., 1/8/07

Johnny, diarrhea jokes make Baby Jesus cry.

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The Family Cirus, 1/7/07

I had thought that the whole “childhood obesity epidemic” was something of an overblown moral panic. But that was before I saw the Family Circus clan celebrating their holiday weight gain. Kids! Competitive eating isn’t cool! Just because that freakishly thin Japanese guy can eat 78 hot dogs in an hour or whatever doesn’t mean you should try it at home.

Crock, 1/7/06

At first I thought the saddest thing about this Crock was that “WHUMP THUMP THUMP BUMP” was supposed to be music of some kind, probably rap music. Then I thought it was that the artist might actually believe that a boom box is a featureless grey box with a single button on the side. Then I thought it was that the whole “boom box” thing was a desperate stab at relevance at some kind for the “kids today.” Then I realized that trying to work out the saddest thing about this cartoon was in itself a deeply depressing exercize.

Judge Parker, 1/7/07

Oh man, Abbey’s misguided attempts to be a “cool parent” in Paris are going to be aweseome. She’s already getting Neddy drunk and they haven’t even landed yet. I can’t wait until Ned picks out the cutest boy, and Abbey has to go seal the deal. “My daughter, she is lovely, yes? You would like to make sweet Franco-American love to her, yes? I can make that happen.”

Mark Trail, 1/7/07

For those of you who can’t make out the type in the yellow box at the lower right that I’ve circled for you, it reads as follows:

Thanks to the Smithsonian Magazine, whose articles have been a useful resource for information used in Mark Trail.

Allow me to translate:

“Aw, CRAP! Deadline! CRAP! Uh … Sunday strip. Uh. What do we have lying around here? Hmm … Us Magazine … wow, Owen Wilson and Kate Hudson … NO! FOCUS! Wait, what’s this? Smithsonian? Hmm, polar bears … melting ice caps … oh yeah, they’ll eat that crap up. That’s gold, baby!”