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Garfield, 2/7/05

Sally Forth signals her understanding and appreciation of her own wit or that of others with a look that one of my brilliant readers refers to as “sly”; but Garfield proves to be the Zen master of the minimalist reaction shot. See how Jon, his eyelids heavy with ennui, reacts to Garfield’s typically wacky demand: he doesn’t go overboard letting us know the punchline has happened, he just tips his head back about a quarter of an inch and moves his eyes slightly to the right. Why hit everybody over the head with it? It’s not a Three Stooges routine.

There’s just something about Garfield that gets everybody up and agitated, whether they’re combining him with Satan, running him over with a van, or doing alarming, freaky things that you really have to see to appreciate. (Thanks to Nicholas, Lynn, and Michal, respectively, for the tips. Folks, we’re all gonna get sued.)

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Apartment 3-G, 2/6/05

I know, I know, I know, Apartment 3-G isn’t even really that interesting right now, and yet I just can’t look away. It’s a disorder, I freely admit. Fun observations about this installment:

• Margo really likes hanging around the apartment in very short skirts. By which I mean: somebody really likes drawing Margo hanging around the apartment in very short skirts.
• Bottom row, middle panel: Mim needs to be nice so as to stay out of the homeless shelter, but I’m guessing that what they actually say at home doesn’t include the “someone who is so bright” bit.
• Last panel: I love the look on Margo’s face. You’d think Mim had just said, “The person who’s having the baby is me … and in fact, I’m having it right now! Say, do you think Margo will mind if I put the afterbirth in her purse?”

Meanwhile, the fact that Tommie wears that crazy fetishistic uniform makes me all the more resent her marginal role in the strip.

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Blondie, 2/8/05

It took me a while to figure out why the first two panels of this otherwise bland installment of Blondie looked so odd to me. Then I realized that, most of the time, people in Blondie are about the size of Dagwood and Alexander in panel three; panels one and two offer an unusual closeup view. Which is not to say that we’re given any more details or a better view of things in those panels. In fact — and remember, this is just my entirely uneducated first impression — one might get the impression that panels one and two started life as standard-perspective Blondie drawings that were then just magnified electronically, for unfathomable but presumably aesthetic reasons.

One might also point out, if one were unkind, that panels one and two are nearly identical to one another, with only a few lines tweaked. But to do so would be gauche.

Question for you: has anyone ever worn both an old-school letterman jacket and a jauntily angled backwards baseball cap as Alexander does here? Discuss.