Since nothing has happened in the comic strip Apartment 3-G all year, you might be wondering: has anything happened in Apartment 3-G this past week? The answer is … it’s not clear, exactly.
I mean, Margo is still wandering around a hallucinatory and ever-mutating landscape yelling at people who seem to recognize her. That’s still going on, but since that’s been going on since the Battle of Manzikert that doesn’t count as anything happening anymore. However, this week, two of the vaguely human-shaped lumps that have been following one another identified one another as Tim and Eric. And this matters because Eric was one of Margo’s fiancées who soap-opera-died six years ago in a Himalayan avalanche. Tim’s his brother.
Now, yeah, their names were revealed in some of the many, many weeks of nothing happening before. And people who pay close attention to the comic strip action would remember Eric as the name of a fairly recently soap-opera-killed fiancée. But this does make clear that it isn’t just a coincidence of names or anything. These are supposed to be the same people as back then. The readers are confirmed in information about who is on screen and why they might be there.
After consideration, I concede this qualifies, technically, as having something happen. It may be Tim and Eric explaining things they already know to one another. Tim reminds Eric that everybody thought he was dead. Eric reminds Tim that he was going to marry Margo. But that is what passes for exposition in a non-humorous story strip. The readers know something they were only just kinda sure of before. I must turn to Greg Evans and Karen Evans’s Luann for my nothing-happening action this week.
Something that didn’t make the Sunday recap was Eric explaining that “Tibetan nuns” saved his life. And that’s kind of an interesting revelation because, because that means Eric has gone through the Origin Story for either The Shadow or Plastic-Man. It depends whether he was dropped in a vat of mysterious chemicals by his partners in crime first. If he is the new Plastic-Man then the comic strip has an excuse for his features being putty-like and ever-changing. There’s possibilities here that won’t go anywhere, is what I’m saying.
Anyway. My mathematics blog has some comic strips although since they’re all humor strips, things happen in them.
I thought Sir Galahad in Castle Anthrax.
In the end, as pointless as A3G.
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Oh, I’m not sure about that. Sir Galahad was at least moving to some conclusion. And, of course, his story eventually ended, which is another thing Apartment 3-G doesn’t seem able to do.
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With 3 consecutive panels of blank white background, Nothingness has its final victory over Apartment 3G.
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Yeah, I mourn the degradation of comic strip art. But given the way backgrounds have become increasingly unreliable guides to what might be happening and where, it might be better to do away with them. We might also do away with the characters since there’s no telling them apart either. The comic strip really is approaching the perfection of being written for network radio, which hasn’t done scripted fiction since 1962.
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