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Gil Thorp, 3/26/20

Hey, remember Gil Thorp? Comic about teen sports? Usually pretty reliably nutty? This basketball season plot, about how Chris and Alexa are both basketball players and also only a fraction of a GPA point away from one another in the race for valedictorian, has been so boring that I haven’t talked about it in a month, so here, let me catch you up: the mean bullies who have it in for Chris tried to trick him into studying off a stolen chem test, but Chris didn’t use the stolen test and Alexa exonerated him, and it turns out they only had it in for him because Chris had ignored one of the mean bullies being bullied, three years ago, and anyway Chris had already told the administration that he wanted to be co-valedictorians with Alexa before all this happened. And that’s it! Everything’s fine! Everything’s fine and all drama is over. Except: Chris’s girlfriend from another school is about to make an appearance! Will she hit it off with Alexa, or possibly Phoebe? Does she exist at all? Is she just part of Chris’s long-running lie that he “has a girlfriend” but she “goes to Mercy, in Goshen” and everyone will meet her at his “end-of-season party” and now he’s finally going to run out of room to continue the charade? Why hasn’t this been the engine of the plot for the entire basketball season instead of this extremely dull valedictorian business?

Arctic Circle, 3/26/20

My read on this strip is that the penguins of Arctic Circle and the polar bears of Arctic Circle are friends, but what if they aren’t? I can’t stop thinking about the (I assume polar bear?) hand/paw reaching in from the left of panel three. I really adds to the sense that these polar bears, being obligate carnivores, are about to follow up their unsatisfying vegan shoe snack with some delicious penguin meat, having surrounded and corralled these poor birds before tearing them to bits in a savage, bloody frenzy. And sure, real polar bears don’t hunt in packs, but they don’t drink coffee or talk either, so I think I’m not off-base in imagining some real horror in store here.