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Apartment 3-G, 7/31/05

Oh, they’re joined somewhere, Tommie, but it’s not at the hip.

Ahem. OK, got that one out of the way early. My non-double-entendre comment here is that this may be the lamest use of the large-scale Sunday format in Apartment 3-G to date. Of course, there’s nothing more visually interesting than two people sitting and talking in a car, so it’s best to show that from every possible angle, with loving attention paid to the relative level of tension Tommie and the Professor are putting on their seatbelts in various poses. And we really wouldn’t be able to properly appreciate all this sitting-in-car action if the conversation were scintillating, so thank goodness these two clowns are doing their best to demonstrate why they’re consistently not featured in Apartment 3-G storylines. If the Professor’s vague prattling about the agony and the ecstasy of European travel does not turn out to be a vital plot point, I will lose my remaining respect for him, his academic status and weak heart be damned.

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Family Circus, 7/29-30/05

Jeffy, Jeffy, Jeffy Keane: always the observer in the cavalcade of family dysfunction. Check out the little tyke’s blank, uncomprehending expression in these two panels. In the first, he doesn’t seem to pick up on the significance of the Cathy-style sweatballs flying off of Billy’s head as the elder brother faces maternal wrath for some unidentified and arbitrary slight. Will his literal-minded interpretation of Mom’s cruel threat save Billy from the threatened punishment — or make it that much worse, when the time comes? We’re left to wonder. In the second panel, Billy looks on passively as Dolly uses his presence as an excuse to cruelly remind Grandma of her washed-up, pre-technological, ice-floe-ready status. All this ambient hate and rage doesn’t register on the surface, of course, but you just know the seeds of deep subconscious trauma have been planted. Both these panels have the feel of someone looking back and saying, “Oh, yeah, so that’s why I am the way I am.”

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Mary Worth, 7/28/05

Ah, the glory and pageantry that is a Charterstone pool party! Where tongs daintily drop ice cubes one at a time into tall, frosty glasses of what have you, and where the gentlemen artfully hide their middle-age spread by tucking their polo shirts into their electric-blue slacks. Today Mary, sporting her favorite paisley magenta sweater, is learning a valuable lesson about the world: you can be sucker who gets her treasured swans broken by an ungrateful houseguest, or you can be a self-important, intolerant ass like beardo here. What thoughts are whirling behind those guarded eyes in panel two? Is she thinking, “I just have more compassion than you, Ian, and can see the good in even the most self-pitying of drunkards?” Or is she thinking, “My God, he’s right — what was I thinking, turning my nice apartment into some kind of flophouse for boozehounds?” Mary’s face is inscrutable. And by “inscrutable,” I mean “poorly drawn.”