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Garfield and For Better Or For Worse, 7/28/06

I know I haven’t really said anything about it, but Garfield has had a real actual storyline going on for, like, two weeks or something now, and there are non-Garfield/Jon/Odie characters, and backgrounds other than the featureless void of Jon’s house, and dynamic tension and Jon even kisses a girl! The reason I haven’t said anything about this is that despite what appears to be some sort of real effort to inject some energy into the strip, it’s still excruciatingly lame and not funny. There, I said it. Sorry, Paws, Inc., toilers, but my reaction to this plotline has been a sort of tepid “Huh, that’s weird,” for about three seconds each day, promptly forgotten until the next day’s strip persists with the weirdness.

Meanwhile, much as so many of us love to hate For Better Or For Worse, it still undeniably drives passions. I have to admit rather shamefully that I’ve been totally involved in this week’s horrifying Liz-Anthony meet-cute at the car dealership, and I said a little cheer at Lizardbreath’s thought balloon which I hope — oh dear God of Canada PLEASE — means that she’s afraid of leading him on because she doesn’t want to break his heart again. Let him down easy now, Liz! For his good! For your good! FOR OUR GOOD!

Apartment 3-G, 7/28/06

“Hello! I’m Eric Mills. You know, I’m not the most attractive man in the world, I’m not really much of a dresser, and, let’s be honest, I frankly don’t have a personality that makes up for either of those factors. And yet I get more action than Don Juan and Casanova put together. I bet you’re wondering how I do it! Well, to find out all my secrets, you’ll need to subscribe to my once-a-month series of cassette tapes, Eric Mills Tells You How To Succeed With The Ladies. But let me give you an example of one of my sure-fire techniques now. Let’s say you’re at a party. What you do is, you find a halfway good-looking girl at the bar, and you check out how much she drinks. Does she drink a lot? Is she by herself? You’re in like flynn! The next thing you do is invite her out for lunch — an early lunch, if you can swing it — and get her good and drunk on whatever second-rate hard liquor she seems to like. I’ll tell you, gents, boozy floozies love it when you can remember their drug of choice; if you have to choose between keeping track of their mother’s name or whether they prefer Smirnoff or Absolut, go with the vodka. Anyway, by the end of the lunch, she’ll be way too drunk to go back to work, and as a gentleman you’ll have to walk her back to her apartment, and so … well, if you can’t take it from there, you need more help than I can give you!

“Oh, one more thing. Did I ever mention I’m a hat man? I love me a drunk girl in a hat. Yowza!”

Marvin, 7/28/06

So is this supposed to mean that Ming Ming has taken such a profoundly satisfying dump that she briefly transcended her individual consciousness and glimpsed a higher plane of reality? Or just that she’s pushed a certain amount of excrement “out” of her “body”? Either way, Marvin makes us long for last week, when it was just being racist.

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Dennis the Menace, 7/27/06

I’m not sure if that’s Mr. the Menace in the background with the surfboard, but Dennis clearly is learning at the beach that his dad’s no paragon of hunkery. In this twisted act of marital warfare, he shows that he’s taking his menacing out of the world of mere mischief and into the dark realm of psychological destruction.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/27/06

Yeah, because it was so much more naughty back when it was up … on her … thigh? My guess is that in the original joke, the tattoo was somewhere a bit below something a lot naughtier (on her stomach?) and then the powers at be forced the poor strip back into the Herb and Jamaal Prison of Blandness and Inoffensiveness. (It’s not the first time it’s happened, either.)

Pluggers, 7/27/06

OK, even when I hate Pluggers, I generally get Pluggers, but this is just baffling. Do non-Pluggers hold their dogs in such contempt that they just say things that excite them, not caring about the emotional roller-coaster ride it puts them on? Do non-Pluggers just have extremely stupid dogs? Or maybe it’s that Pluggers are themselves quasi-beasts, and so their language is close enough to that of the true dogs that interspecies communication is almost possible? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s stupid and doesn’t make any sense and DAMN YOU PLUGGERS FOR MAKING ME THINK ABOUT THIS DAMN YOU STRAIGHT TO HELL.

Anyway, if you’d like a little Pluggers spoofery from the fellow who brought you that TDIET takeoff the other day, click here.

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So, I’ll probably do more comics later today, but I felt it was important to get right to work this morning on this … this … this.

Apartment 3-G, 7/27/06

Hat man? Hat man? Mark your calendars, folks, as this is the day that Margo went completely insane. I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that our finger-quotin’ beauty has gone bananas for this balding old grump, so now I’m just enjoying her deranged thought processes. “Sexy, cleavage-revealing dress? Check! Chunky necklace that further draws attention to the decolletage? Check! Loopy, Curtis-church-lady-style hat? You better believe that’s a check!”

Frankly, I’m surprised that Google didn’t have the answers that Margo sought. More information on hat men can be found on the Internet.

Update: Margo’s face in panel three has been naggingly familiar to me, and I finally figured out who she looks like: Jack Lemmon. Specifically, Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot. This has forced me to reconsider a lot of things about my life.