After more than half a century as a staple of the funny pages, the comic strip Apartment 3-G, centering around the romantic and professional exploits of three young women sharing a New York apartment, quietly ended its run on Sunday, having been canceled without fanfare by its distributor, King Features Syndicate. Fans should probably have seen this coming. The entire newspaper industry is in jeopardy, and old-fashioned “soap strips” like Apartment 3-G are looking especially antiquated these days.
But A3G had other problems: Under the stewardship of writer Margaret Shulock and nonagenarian artist Frank Bolle, the strip had lapsed into a strange, almost surreal state of incoherence. The original writer, Nicholas P. Dallis, and the original artist, Alex Kotzky, both died back in the 1990s. In the hands of the new creative team, plots became disjointed and unfollowable, and the artwork became stiff and minimalist, with characters nearly always depicted from the shoulders up and a few standard props (including a lamp and some drapes) decorating the otherwise eerily blank backgrounds.
In its latter years the strip attracted the attention of numerous fans and was the subject of frequent discussion and blog activity.
