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One Big Happy, 10/24/04

No, no, no, no, One Big Happy! No incest references and no pants-wetting references — please, I beg of you. Other strips feature young children of pants-wetting age and don’t feature pants-wetting jokes. If you open the floodgates (so to speak), think of the madness that will ensue in Hi and Lois and Curtis and (God help us) The Family Circus.

Incidentally, it seems like there’s a lot of downtime in this strip, even if you discount the potentially-lopped-off top row. If the pull of the “mistake in my pants” joke was irresistible (and I concede that I can see how it may well have been), surely it could have been taken care of in three panels, and then never spoken of again?

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Mark Trail, 10/23/04

I’m very much looking forward to seeing this whole bunch on a future episode of Ricki Lake entitled “Bitch, I’m-a steal your man!” At last, the artifact-wrangling is taken care of and now the cat-fighting can begin. Cherry may have a porn star’s name, but she clearly has a thing or two to learn about keeping a man satisfied. When your boyfriend has just snagged an evil artifact-smuggler with nothing more than an ordinary fishing line (an act so at odds with the known laws of physics that it wasn’t even depicted in the strip) you don’t just tell him he “did good”; you slobber all over him and ask him to tell you some fascinating facts about migratory birds, if you know what I mean (and I think you do). At least Cherry and Kelly are on a level playing field in terms of attire: they’re both wearing matching pink polo shirts, presumably because they know they make Mark hot.

Meanwhile, I’m beginning to suspect that Mark’s fishing buddy “Bill” is actually Slate magazine founder Michael Kinsley.

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Apartment 3-G, 10/22/04

Well, as predicted by me and her mother, Margo’s lucrative new job hasn’t turned out the way she’d hoped. I haven’t been commenting on Apartment 3-G here lately because, when compared to the meth-happy wackiness in Mary Worth, it’s been pretty by-the-numbers. Margo falls afoul of her evil employer, tries to bluff her way out, led to the car at gunpoint, blah blah blah. Boooorrrring — that is, until we get to today’s baffling fight over the special pillow!

OK, a shiny virtual quarter goes to anyone who can explain to me what in God’s name is going on here. Who is the other not-Lloyd chauffer? Why does Lloyd keep a pillow in the trunk of Mr. Eldon’s death sedan? Why does Lloyd offer Margo a pillow, then insist that it’s his, then appear to take it out of the hands of the not-Lloyd chauffer — even though he’s the who’s holding it in the previous panel? The only way the last panel makes even a vague sort of sense is if the position of the two blue-clad henchmen were reversed — but even then Margo’s position would be inconsistent with the previous panels. This is one mystery that even Photoshop can’t solve.

Margo earns kudos for nimbleness in the first panel: she’s wearing a micro-miniskirt and her hands are tied up behind her back, but she’s still climbing into that trunk like a pro.