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FoxTrot, 8/2/05

Look at panel four! I believe that what we’re looking at here is the first visually confirmed case of cooties on record. Long rumored to be the result of contact between prepubescent boys and girls but dismissed as a fantasy by the medical establishment, we now know that cooties do exist — and, more alarmingly, can be spread electronically.

OK, seriously though, can anyone tell me what the deal is with Jason’s face? ‘Cause if it’s not cooties, I got nothing.

One of the problems of kids in comics who don’t age (which I suppose is every comics child outside of For Better Or For Worse) is that behaviors that are no doubt charming or at least vaguely tolerable for the year or so they last in real life become deeply irritating as they go on in eternal comics time. Jason’s anxious avoision to girls in general and his obvious soul mate Eileen in particular is a prime example. I can’t sum up this attitude any better than the Simpsons’ Jimbo Jones: “Dude, you kissed a girl! That is so gay!”

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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.”