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Apartment 3-G, 5/13/05

As a long-time New York Mets fan and registered Democrat, I love lost causes. Thus, every time Apartment 3-G wraps up another exciting adventure, I keep rooting for the next one to feature Tommie. There’s all sorts of wacky plotlines just waiting in her mysterious, off-cameral life, I just know it! Maybe they could revolve around medical issues she encounters on her job — like the millions of Americans who lack health insurance! There’s something that nobody has the guts to tackle in the funny pages.

Instead, though, it looks like we’re going to have to sit through eight and a half boring weeks of a boring boring storyline about Lu Ann’s boring boring boring love life, which, as you may have guessed, I don’t find very interesting. My hopes were briefly raised this week that we’d at least get to see that saintly art teacher fired and reduced to eating cat food and turning tricks down at Port Authority in order to keep making her rent, but alas, there’s only sweet, chaste, Apartment 3-G-style romance in the cards for her. As an example of why Lu Ann’s romance storylines are so dull, we need only take a good look at the “gorgeous” object of her lustful rumination: he’s just some guy who looks like every other dark-haired, suit-wearing, 1950s-white-collar-job-holding male character who’s wandered in and out of this strip (and they are legion).

I do admit that I’m intrigued by the no-color view through the window of Dr. Fielding’s office, though. Is that pane of glass really a one-way mirror that the lusty headmistress uses to spy on choice morsels who come into the outer office and do nonspecific but plausible-looking things with pieces of paper? Too bad Lu Ann is such a goody-goody with a terror of authority figures; the two of them could bond by engaging in construction-worker-like catcalls together. “I’d like to service his project — and not for our school, either!”

A word of Lu Ann-management advice for her future paramour: if you really want to get her all hot and bothered, just don’t fire her! As we saw yesterday, it’s apparently the equivalent of giving her an enormous amount of Ecstasy.

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Mark Trail, 5/12/05

It’s fun, in a self-psycho-analysis kind of way, to watch delusions of grandeur slowly transform into paranoia. For instance, now that I know that at least one comics writer reads my blog, I’ve come to assume that all comics creators do. This means that just about anything that happens in any comic could be a reaction to things said here!

Take Mark Trail, for instance. Jack Elrod has long come under sustained and savage attacks, both by me and my commentors, for his inability to draw human beings and corresponding tendency to throw into random panels adorable wildlife animals rendered freakishly huge by problems with perspective. But today’s strip is fauna-free, and instead features a disturbing closeup on the wizened, crumpled visage of Mike, the lovable alcoholic hermit. When considered along with last month’s zombie sherriff, it’s almost as if Elrod is saying, “You want strips with drawings of people? I’ll give you drawings of people! I’ll give you drawings of people until you can’t take it any more! You’ll be glad for me to go back to beavers, moose, pelicans, and sea turtles once I’ve shown you what an ugly, awful creature Homo sapiens is.” And then he laughs and laughs, one of those awful laughs that gets raspier and raspier until it degenerates into hacking coughs that raise up blood-tinged phlegm.

At least, that’s how it happens in my mind.

Well, I for one say: enough already! Bring on the beasts! Not least because the human-interaction angle of this story is possibly the dullest Mark Trail plotline on record. An insurance investigation has made for entertaining narrative exactly once in human history — in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity — and there was at least sex involved there. Jack Elrod can draw a mean sea turtle, but he’s no Billy Wilder.

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Garfield, 5/11/05

OK, this is going to take a minute, so stay with me.

Two years ago, the future Mrs. C. and I took our very first vacation together, to the UK and Spain. Since she has Panamanian relatives, and has spent time in Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico, she was in charge of hablaing the Español, and, despite her self-deprecating statements in advance of the trip, acquitted herself admirably in all the situations where Spanish was required.

The next year, we went to Garfield le Film-mad Paris. Since I had taken eight years of French in grammar and high school, passed a test in graduate school establishing my competence in the language, and previously voyaged to both Paris and Montreal, I was understandably given the mandate to parlez our vous while in the City of Light. It only took about 24 hours before the first incident arose indicating that this decision may have been a mistake. Our first morning there, we were at a little flea market, and were going to eat at a food stand there. They were selling something called a galette. We could tell from the posted menu that a galette contained tasty items such as eggs, tomatoes, and cheese; but what was it? TFMC told me to go find out. I realized in horror that this was a big difference between us: when confronted with such a foreign term, my instinct was to slink off in shame and have a Kit Kat bar for lunch, but she wanted me to, you know, ask. Unwilling to lose face in front of my woman, I walked up to the Frenchies behind the counter and asked:

“Excusez-moi, quand est un galette?”

The francophonic among you, of course, know that what I asked was, “Excuse me, when is a galette?” The proprietors of the little food cart, naturally, looked at me as if I were retarded. I thought of that little moment when I read today’s Garfield. I have to imagine that Jon, in yet another desperate, flop-sweat-soaked attempt to impress, took his date to a French restaurant that is so fancy that either (a) its staff refuses to speak English, or (b) it’s actually in France. Because otherwise this strip makes NO GODDAMN SENSE AT ALL.

Oh, and: after a humiliating retreat to a park bench where I consulted my phrase book, I came back with the correct version of my question, and they still gave me that baffled “I know those words, but they don’t make sense in that order” look. I suppose if you walked into Burger King and asked “What is this so-called ‘burger’ I’ve heard so much about, and how’d you get to be ‘king’ of it?” you wouldn’t do much better. After some deeply embarrassing hijinks, we eventually just ordered the damn thing. Word to the wise: it’s a savory crepe, and it’s pretty yummy.