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For reasons too complex to go into here, faithful reader Sue Trowbridge recently posted on her blog a list of the comics in the Baltimore Sun in 1991. This is in fact my own hometown paper, and the one from which all the strips in IRTCSYDHT are drawn. It’s interesting to see that many of the old favorites are still here, but also interesting that the funny section is so much bigger now. Baltimore, like almost every other city in America, is a one-newspaper town that used to have two newspapers, and the current comics page represents the inheritance of both former papers. So see, whiners like Noam Chomsky are always going on about how media consolidation limits information to the citizenry and puts control in the hands of corporate conglomerates and blah blah BLAH, but they miss the really important thing, which is: better comics pages. So there.

This week’s unsettling search terms, both from Yahoo!: “Paleolithic Age jokes” and “cartoon strips and steroid use”.

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The Lockhorns, 9/24/04

Shame on you, The Lockhorns! You know I depend on you for your savage merry-go-round of marital misanthropy, for the Platonic ideal of a doomed marriage that you embody so well. To that end, you ought to stick with what you do best: the same restricted set of concerns (Leroy’s paycheck, Loretta’s shopping, Leroy’s drinking, Loretta’s cooking, etc.), hashed out over and over again until they’re honed to stiletto sharpness and wielded with cruelty and precision. It’s all as abstract and as repetitively structured as a Beckett play, and when there’s suddenly some attempt to pretend that the Lockhorns live in 2004 and watch popular TV shows, it’s unfortunate.

This panel has great potential, too. There’s the bizarre fact that Loretta is just singing loudly at what appears to be a cocktail party: Why? The internal logic of the strip requires no more reason than that it offers Leroy a chance to make fun of her. I also love the fact that the people in the background are just disembodied floating heads (well, disembodied floating heads wearing dickies, apparently). It adds to the timeless quality of the fight: it’s like Leroy and Loretta are in their own private circle of hell, doomed to fight it out for all eternity, with the ghostly shades of the damned watching them in stony silence. I’m not sure how the guy standing next to Leroy figures into it, but he sure doesn’t look happy to be there.

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Apartment 3-G, 9/23/04

And here I was thinking that the feds still needed to resort to antiquated concepts like “probable cause” or “a warrant” before launching a drug investigation. Apparently, though, all they need nowadays is a tip-off from a notoriously amoral PR flack in order to swoop on in. Hopefully all Pete did was break into poor Jack Landrow’s apartment and rifle through his stuff while he wasn’t there; if the whole thing ended in a Ruby Ridge-style debacle, it would no doubt generate a lot of paperwork, which would take Pete away from valuable pretending-not-to-flirt-with-Margo time. It’s a little-known fact that FBI-CIA cooperation on infiltrating militant Islamic groups has been hindered by the amount of energy intelligence agents spend on dealing with their ex-girlfriends.

Speaking of militant Islamic groups, I think the Taliban would want you to cover up there, Margo. I suppose that if you’re just going to be casually hanging around the apartment pretending to cook, while chatting with your former lover about the illegal abuse of his authority that you convinced him to undertake, then that’s the sort of thing that you’d wear.

Incidentally, while it’s always difficult to gauge the passing of time in the soaps, from the next few strips it appears that Tommie will spend the entire remainder of the evening in the next room listening to this conversation. Um, Tommie, I feel bad for you that the writers never give you anything to do and all, but don’t you have somewhere to be?