Apartment 3-G Has Just Stopped Existing Or Something

I realize it’s easy to make fun of story comic strips, because there’s like two of them that have any idea how to tell stories anymore, and one of those is a spoof of story comics. But Frank Bolle and Margaret Shulock’s Apartment 3-G has somehow recently managed to become so full of nothing that the sheer total of nothingness is compelling.

Tommie and Carol will be in stitches over the stories of how all her boyfriends turn into fiancees and then get killed!

The current story: back in winter after her most recent fiancee death, Tommie Thompson hit a doe on the road and took its baby, which is some kind of horrible deer-kangaroo-fox-nightmare hybrid, back to Apartment 3-G because there’s no animal rescue shelters in the New York metropolitan area or something. After months of this and being somehow even more a nobody at work she takes the fawn to some upstate veterinarian who’s all gruff and angry and puts her to work appearing in scenes with a horse or the deer-kangaroo-fox-nightmare until he left to confront his own tragic past and maybe escape the strip altogether.

Apartment 3-G for the 13th of July, 2014: Tommie and Carol chase off town gossip Tina with the aid of some kind of deer-kangaroo-fox-nightmare manifesting in the house or somewhere.

Now, Tommie and Carol, who’s got some kind of connection to the gruff and angry vet, have been appearing in an endless series of two-shots with one another, often promising to explain something or other to each other, in two or three panels a day since the 14th of July without interruption. I’m not exaggerating this; literally, no other human has appeared on-screen in six full weeks, during which time nothing has happened, if time can be said to exist when no discernable events happen.

At this point my best guess about what’s going on in Apartment 3-G is that Tommie was accidentally caught in Wesley Crusher’s experimental warp bubble and things are vanishing from the universe she’s created from her imagination as the bubble slowly collapses. Except that suggests that things are still happening, which I’m not sure is even right.

Also, now, to the extent that something is alleged to be happening, we’re going to start with Tommie talking about her pile of dead boyfriends? The strip isn’t long enough to describe all the male suitors who’ve gone from meeting her to meeting death.