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Gasoline Alley, 8/22/05

Gasoline Alley is at it again with the realistically-drawn characters dropped into a highly cartoonish milieu without explanation. Check out the extreme close-up in panel two. I swear the artist is working off of a photograph here. Who is she? What is her relationship to the strip’s creators? And does she object to her portrayal as a Vegas cocktail bunny serving drinks in what appears to be a bathing suit?

This current Gasoline Alley plot deserves pretty much the same amount of attention as the last five or six, which is to say none, but I admit that I like the little halo floating over Lil’s head in panel three as she attempts to cute-old-lady her way out of a serious beating from the casino’s security staff.

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Apartment 3-G, 8/21/05

Time-and-space-warpingly dull the current storyline of Apartment 3-G may be, but Sunday’s whacked-out installment reminds us why we love it. Flailing limbs, radiating bobble-head motion lines, near catfights over secondhand clothing — ah, pure bliss. I think Margo’s look of panic in the second panel of the middle row as her precious, precious hideous yellow jacket is yanked away may be her best ever. Still, Lu Ann shouldn’t be so smug about the number she just pulled on her brunette roommate — with the many close relationships Margo formed in the sweatshop sector, she can probably get those twenty shirts to Lu Ann for less than eight cents a shirt.

By the way, a little Googling doesn’t bring anything up for “Granger” as a designer or brand name for clothing. Are the strip’s writers so lazy that they just used the first WASPy name that popped into their heads instead of doing thirty seconds of research to come up with a real label? Or is the fashion world united in its refusal to be associated with this deeply unhip comic?

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Garfield, 8/20/05

My personal curmudgeonly opinion is that the less said about the 75th anniversary Blondie mutual wank-a-thon, the better, but I feel compelled to drag Saturday’s Garfield out to help illustrate why comics characters drawn by different artists shouldn’t be put in close proximity to one another. Because I’ve been reading Garfield pretty much since I achieved rudimentary literacy, but it wasn’t until I saw Jon next to Dagwood that I realized that OH MY GOD HE HAS NO NOSE! I MEAN, LOOK AT HIM! HIS ENORMOUS, BULBOUS EYES ARE JUST SITTING DIRECTLY ABOVE HIS UPPER LIP! SWEET JESUS CHRIST THAT’S CREEPY! I’m sure the architects of this huge crossoverfest were looking to instill a sense of “warm and fuzzy” in their readers; for me, anyway, they got “aesthetically unsettled” instead.