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2. Wonder
I love comic strips. I don't get daily papers anymore though, so the only ones I see now are the ones I subscribe to in my blogreader: Doonesbury, Mutts, Get Fuzzy, Dinosaur Comics, For Better or For Worse, Get Your War On, Dykes to Watch Out For, Two Lumps, and Zits. I have a fondness for the many other classic strips I grew up with which, frankly, aren't really that good at all. So The Comics Curmudgeon has been a godsend (I should also mention Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke, for a more focused, one-strip approach).
Josh, the Curmudgeon, pulls out those comics that just need to be commented on, and gives it to them. So I only get the small, appropriate dose of such strips as Curtis, B.C., Gil Thorpe, Mary Worth, and Funky Winkerbean, to name just a few (and what the hell HAPPENED to Funky Winkerbean anyway? When I was growing up it was a semi-funny strip about high school kids, now it's a depressing soap opera about a bleak, hopeless world where nothing good can ever happen to anybody!).
One of the most-hated and discussed comics in the comments at The Comics Curmudgeon is Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse. I have been reading this comic since its inception, and as a result have become completely caught up in the saga of the Patterson family, who have been aging in real time over the last 30 years or so. I have been so close to this strip, following it so long, that it has only recently become apparent to me how horrible most of the people in it are, and how terrible Johnston's storytelling has become. But I'm trapped. I've been with them since the beginning. I have to follow the lives of the Pattersons, even as they've become a mawkish, sentimental, saintly group in a world of evil outsiders.
I was thinking I might be freed this year, when Johnston announced that she was ending the strip. But she has since changed her mind, and will allow other hands to continue the story, and worse, FAR WORSE, the characters are going to freeze in age where they are now! No, oh god, no no no. I can't stop reading it, and reading it gets more and more painful.
The only way to make it bearable is to decide (as many readers at Curmudgeon have done) that it's become some kind of Mulholland Drive situation, and that at some point Mike Patterson has slipped into a coma, and the events of the strip now are his deranged coma dreams, in which he and his family make all the wrong choices about everything, and yet somehow every keeps turning out better and better for them! Yeah, that works.
The Curmudgeon has also made me a fanatic for the hijinx of those wacky girls in Apartment 3-G, a strip I'd always heard of but never read. This soap-opera strip about three career girls in NYC, with glacial pacing and insane plot twists, has recently gone over the edge.
First, red-headed non-entity Tommie (who has had nothing interesting happen to her in 45 years or so of the strip's existence) sees a friend in an Off- or Off-Off-Broadway show (it's not clear; looks like something in-between), attends the cast party, tries to give an intelligent critique to the show's director, and instead suddenly finds his tongue in her mouth (see my new avatar above) -- yes, this happens all the time in NYC theatre, of course, that's why we do it (Berit notes that usually everyone's drunker first - a few well-placed bubbles around Tommie's head would have made the whole sequence more realistic). She's spent the past week going over this with Apartment 3-G's distaff-Sammy Glick, Margo, demon-goddess with hair the color of her blackened, shriveled soul. Worship the Margo, fools, for she is She Who Must Be Obeyed!
Now, bubble-headed blonde Luann, an aspiring painter who has her first NYC gallery show coming up, has rented a studio so she can work on her art in peace to get it all ready for the show (there are so many things wrong with that sentence I don't even WANT to try and mention them). The room she has rented as her studio once belonged to . . . okay, get this . . . Albert Pinkham Ryder. Yes, really. Don't know who he is? Check the link. Great painter. Eccentric guy. Character in Caleb Carr's sequel to The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness. Always kept a stew pot simmering, 24/7/365, that was all he ate from, into which he just kept throwing stuff. Crumpled up his smokes and other bizarre materials into his paintings. A favorite.
Shortly after she moved in, weird poltergeist activity started happening, and Luann began speaking to "Albert," who would reply by beeping Luann's microwave (ALBERT PINKHAM RYDER is in a comic strip, beeping someone's microwave?! The HELL?!). Maybe he's hoping she'll make him some stew.
Here's today's strip. Mr. Ryder has now manifested to Luann in ectoplasmic form. Either that, or it's President James A. Garfield in the guise of Ryder (I didn't imagine Ryder looking so spiffy, but maybe it's what being on The Other Side does for you). I can't WAIT to see where this goes. I am slightly worried that this will all turn out to be a series of hallucinations brought on by Luann's prolonged exposure to paint and turps fumes, but if we're lucky, Margo will wind up in a face-off with the ghost of A.P. Ryder for possession of the soul of Luann. We won't be lucky.
One of the best comments ever on Apartment 3-G was actually from TV's The Golden Girls, and reported by someone in the comments at Curmudgeon. I've never seen that show, so I have no idea who the characters are, and I'm repeating this from memory, but it was something like:
WOMAN #1: Let me have the paper, I have to keep up with my girls in Apartment 3-G.
WOMAN #2: I haven't read that comic strip since 1962.
WOMAN #1: Oh, you haven't? I'll fill you in. It's later that same afternoon . . .
I love comic strips. I don't get daily papers anymore though, so the only ones I see now are the ones I subscribe to in my blogreader: Doonesbury, Mutts, Get Fuzzy, Dinosaur Comics, For Better or For Worse, Get Your War On, Dykes to Watch Out For, Two Lumps, and Zits. I have a fondness for the many other classic strips I grew up with which, frankly, aren't really that good at all. So The Comics Curmudgeon has been a godsend (I should also mention Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke, for a more focused, one-strip approach).
Josh, the Curmudgeon, pulls out those comics that just need to be commented on, and gives it to them. So I only get the small, appropriate dose of such strips as Curtis, B.C., Gil Thorpe, Mary Worth, and Funky Winkerbean, to name just a few (and what the hell HAPPENED to Funky Winkerbean anyway? When I was growing up it was a semi-funny strip about high school kids, now it's a depressing soap opera about a bleak, hopeless world where nothing good can ever happen to anybody!).
One of the most-hated and discussed comics in the comments at The Comics Curmudgeon is Lynn Johnston's For Better or For Worse. I have been reading this comic since its inception, and as a result have become completely caught up in the saga of the Patterson family, who have been aging in real time over the last 30 years or so. I have been so close to this strip, following it so long, that it has only recently become apparent to me how horrible most of the people in it are, and how terrible Johnston's storytelling has become. But I'm trapped. I've been with them since the beginning. I have to follow the lives of the Pattersons, even as they've become a mawkish, sentimental, saintly group in a world of evil outsiders.
I was thinking I might be freed this year, when Johnston announced that she was ending the strip. But she has since changed her mind, and will allow other hands to continue the story, and worse, FAR WORSE, the characters are going to freeze in age where they are now! No, oh god, no no no. I can't stop reading it, and reading it gets more and more painful.
The only way to make it bearable is to decide (as many readers at Curmudgeon have done) that it's become some kind of Mulholland Drive situation, and that at some point Mike Patterson has slipped into a coma, and the events of the strip now are his deranged coma dreams, in which he and his family make all the wrong choices about everything, and yet somehow every keeps turning out better and better for them! Yeah, that works.
The Curmudgeon has also made me a fanatic for the hijinx of those wacky girls in Apartment 3-G, a strip I'd always heard of but never read. This soap-opera strip about three career girls in NYC, with glacial pacing and insane plot twists, has recently gone over the edge.
First, red-headed non-entity Tommie (who has had nothing interesting happen to her in 45 years or so of the strip's existence) sees a friend in an Off- or Off-Off-Broadway show (it's not clear; looks like something in-between), attends the cast party, tries to give an intelligent critique to the show's director, and instead suddenly finds his tongue in her mouth (see my new avatar above) -- yes, this happens all the time in NYC theatre, of course, that's why we do it (Berit notes that usually everyone's drunker first - a few well-placed bubbles around Tommie's head would have made the whole sequence more realistic). She's spent the past week going over this with Apartment 3-G's distaff-Sammy Glick, Margo, demon-goddess with hair the color of her blackened, shriveled soul. Worship the Margo, fools, for she is She Who Must Be Obeyed!
Now, bubble-headed blonde Luann, an aspiring painter who has her first NYC gallery show coming up, has rented a studio so she can work on her art in peace to get it all ready for the show (there are so many things wrong with that sentence I don't even WANT to try and mention them). The room she has rented as her studio once belonged to . . . okay, get this . . . Albert Pinkham Ryder. Yes, really. Don't know who he is? Check the link. Great painter. Eccentric guy. Character in Caleb Carr's sequel to The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness. Always kept a stew pot simmering, 24/7/365, that was all he ate from, into which he just kept throwing stuff. Crumpled up his smokes and other bizarre materials into his paintings. A favorite.
Shortly after she moved in, weird poltergeist activity started happening, and Luann began speaking to "Albert," who would reply by beeping Luann's microwave (ALBERT PINKHAM RYDER is in a comic strip, beeping someone's microwave?! The HELL?!). Maybe he's hoping she'll make him some stew.
Here's today's strip. Mr. Ryder has now manifested to Luann in ectoplasmic form. Either that, or it's President James A. Garfield in the guise of Ryder (I didn't imagine Ryder looking so spiffy, but maybe it's what being on The Other Side does for you). I can't WAIT to see where this goes. I am slightly worried that this will all turn out to be a series of hallucinations brought on by Luann's prolonged exposure to paint and turps fumes, but if we're lucky, Margo will wind up in a face-off with the ghost of A.P. Ryder for possession of the soul of Luann. We won't be lucky.
One of the best comments ever on Apartment 3-G was actually from TV's The Golden Girls, and reported by someone in the comments at Curmudgeon. I've never seen that show, so I have no idea who the characters are, and I'm repeating this from memory, but it was something like:
WOMAN #1: Let me have the paper, I have to keep up with my girls in Apartment 3-G.
WOMAN #2: I haven't read that comic strip since 1962.
WOMAN #1: Oh, you haven't? I'll fill you in. It's later that same afternoon . . .
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 10:04 pm (UTC)From:After re-reading that paragraph, I feel that I need to emphasize that I SWEAR TO GOD THAT I DIDN'T MAKE ANY OF IT UP, not even the part about the billionare janitor.
jf
no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 10:14 pm (UTC)From:When I'm done with back pages of CC, I may go back and get the full does of the last two years of 3-G, just to really understand it, if such a thing is possible.
3-Gee!
Date: 2007-02-21 03:45 pm (UTC)From:You might remember that I wrote a sketch for the Crash Box featuring the girls from Apartment 3-G, which proves that they still have a claim on my imagination. But it wasn't until reading your post that I've been inspired to once again make them part of my daily routine - for which I will either thank you or curse you somewhere along the line.
Re: 3-Gee!
Date: 2007-02-21 07:14 pm (UTC)From:Is that sketch on the one episode of Crash Box (for those of you not not aware of it, The Brick Radio Crash Box was a live comedy "radio show" we did a few episodes of for podcast purposes) as yet unmixed and mastered? I'll be working on finishing that as soon as I can.
Re: 3-Gee!
Date: 2007-02-21 07:19 pm (UTC)From: