APARTMENT 3-G

I subscribe to the King Features website Comics Kingdom. King Features has long been America's leading comic strip syndicate, and if anything its dominance has increased in recent times. I subscribe mostly for their Vintage section, where they rerun past strips like Alex Raymond's Rip Kirby (when I was eleven or twelve Rip Kirby was to me the coolest guy in the world!), Roy Crane's Buz Sawyer, and Frank Robbins' Johnny Hazard.

As an afterthought, I also follow several current strips. The ones I follow are mainly story strips that I read about on Josh Fruelingher's blog The Comics Curmudgeon. (Though I also follow Slylock Fox for its mini-mysteries--I'm always ashamed when I can't guess the solution.) These include the famous soap-opera strip foursome of Mary Worth, Rex Morgan, M.D., Judge Parker and Apartment 3-G.

For the many people who have better things to do than follow soap-opera strips, A3G is about three single women living the eponymous New York apartment. Brunette Margo is a publicist-event planner who's often a bitchy diva; Blonde Luann is an artist who's often a romantic featherhead; Redhead Tommie is a nurse who's always boring. There's also an older Greek guy who's their neighbour, whose name I can never remember, and various boyfriends who come out of a cookie cutter.

Goodness knows that comic-strip has declined since the days of Little Nemo in Slumberland or even Steve Canyon. You can blame newspapers for whom comics are a low priority, with their allotted space reduced again and again. The decline is especially painful in the case of A3G, which had stylish artwork by Alex Kotzky. Today it's drawn by Frank Bolle, a veteran who's worked on dozens of strips over a career that's lasted more than fifty years. But he's definitely seen better days. (Another example is Mandrake the Magician artist Fred Fredericks: it's sad to compare his '60s work and his output today.)

A3G, like the Kingdom of Spain in the 17th century, is declining so quickly that you can almost see it decline! The strip today is less well drawn than it was even a few years ago, let alone in Kotzky's time. How poor is today's artwork? A few weeks ago Margo stepped into a cafe to talk to the proprietor. One day we saw a scene with the street in the background, and the next day we saw the two of them with a plain wall behind. They never showed the cafe itself! And back in December, I swear to you, there was an episode with two panels (remember the time when some strip episodes had four panels or even more?) that looked so similar it was like one of those Slylock Fox puzzles where they show you two panels of the same scene and challenge you to spot all the tiny differences between them.

I've never been a big fan of the soap-opera strip. As I said, I read them to stay current so I'll know what Josh is talking about. But it is sad to see these once-famous strips go down the drain.