What I love about The Phantom is it will happily take a break from a storyline about an alien on a private jet from Guantanamo blowing up a warlord's brain with magic TikTok to give us a very specific kink scene where a shirtless man in a cage is taunted by a scantily-clad bongo player. I call this fetish 'bondage at Lilith Fair.’
Shoe, 12/31/04
OK, never mind the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — what’s the most recent year in which a joke about Shirley MacLaine’s belief in reincarnation would have been funny?
Hah! Trick question. The correct answer is never.
Mark Trail, 12/30/04
White powder? Referred to as “stuff”? And … am I crazy … or is that a package wrapped in brown paper she’s reaching for? It’s too good to be true!
Apartment 3-G, 12/29/04
Though I may on occasion fill this space with rants about my cranky opinions and/or the incredibly minor setbacks in my personal life that fill me with rage, I never lose sight of my “core mission” (as they used to say in the business world before I got laid off from it), which is, of course, to read the comics so you don’t have to. So, because I know all of you, especially those readers left bereft by the Baltimore Sun, want to know what’s happening to captive Margo, I’ll tell you: Eldon copped a plea, his slave-managing minions fled the sweatshop, the oppressed garment workers liberated themselves, and Margo, turning her back on her newfound friends as soon as she was no longer forced to spend her time or her rat-infested sleeping quarters with them, took a cab to Manhattan and headed for the tub. Problem solved. There’s no trauma that can’t be washed away by bubble bath!
A comment posted on an earlier strip in this storyline speculated that maybe the whole point of this plot was to force Margo to learn the true meaning of Christmas. I’m beginning to suspect that the real purpose was to create an excuse for another patented Apartment 3-G sexy bath scene.