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Apartment 3-G, 1/31/05

So here’s Lu Ann’s long lost … well, what, exactly? Trying to guess just what sort of relative this creepily chipper person might be made me realize that I have no idea how old any of these people are supposed to be. In the comics, when you can’t see someone up close and count their liver spots, you really have to go on cultural cues to try to figure out things like people’s ages, and when everyone seems to get their clothes from a Hollywood costume designer circa 1962, that’s kind of difficult. Is this young person a teenager? Roughly the same age as Lu Ann? And how old is Lu Ann, anyway? 20? 25? 35? Anyone? I had a Texas correspondent who said he’d “been through a lot with these ladies”; maybe he knows.

Anyway, the reason I’m so eager to know this is that I cherish secret hopes that this stray may in fact be Lu Ann’s secret abandoned daughter. Alas, I think they’re far too close in age for that, but it would add a bit of interest to Lu Ann’s otherwise mind-numbingly goodie-goodie personality and backstory.

Margo’s “Hum…?” in panel three is no “More zippers, mule!”, but it is a pretty strange sound effect. I defy you to try to reproduce the actual noise being rendered here. She’s just disgruntled that she’s suddenly not the center of attention anymore, and will no doubt soon retreat to her bedroom to work on her White Slavery Scrapbook.

Bad dye job alert: Mimi the Mysterious Stranger has gone from Manic Panic Redhead on Sunday to mousy blonde during the week. Somewhere in a Malaysian comics-coloring compound, an enraged supervisor is shouting “More red ink, mule!”

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Opus, 1/30/05

So like any right-thinking person who enjoys the comics, I consider Bloom County to have been one of the greatest strips ever. Thus I’ve been primed to love Opus, which is essentially Bloom County in Sunday-only form. Except that … I don’t. I don’t hate it, but I’m not sure to what degree the enjoyment I do get out of it is a result of residual goodwill. This strip is a good example of the reasons for my frustration. The strip uses the expansive large-format space that Berke Breathed extracted from the syndicates thanks to his clout in order to set up … Steve Dallas getting hit in the genitals with a baseball! Berke Breathed’s a genius, so there are plenty of nice little touches that you catch on the second and third reading — I’ve always loved the way he inserts photographs into the strips as he does in the top row, and I think the chickens fleeing in various directions in the next-to-last panel are funny. But still, it’s all in the service of a man-getting-hit-in-the-balls joke. Am I getting too mature in my old age?

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Sally Forth, 1/29/05

Maybe the nature of this blog has left me seeing comic self-referentiality everywhere, but this edition of Sally Forth strikes me as a bold declaration of intent: this comic is not going to be doing work comic strips anymore. Now that Ralph is gone, there’s no more point! Everything at work is happy and sunshine and candycanes and la la la! No conflict! And without conflict, there’s no story! (If only the strip had come to that realization about a week sooner.) It’s the equivalent of offering to fight someone with one hand tied behind your back. Sally Forth has publicly stated that it doesn’t need work jokes. Take that, Dilbert!

Personally, I think the strip will come crawling back to the old office humor. Sally’s description of future joke topics — “family, Hilary, home life” — all seem to be pretty much the same topic to me. Hopefully work-related chaos will break out again before it the strip becomes an only-child version of the Family Circus.

Bonus observation: apparently Sally’s wonderful new supervisor, Jefferson Jowdy, has relaxed the dress code in the HR department, since Sally appears to have worn a glow-in-the-dark skull Cypress Hill concert t-shirt to work.