I always cry at endings
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Gil Thorp, 9/29/24
As Uncle Lumpy noted last week, longtime Gil Thorp artist Rod Whigham is retiring from the strip, with today being his last entry. I’ve actually been blogging long enough that I remember when he was new Gil Thorp artist Rod Whigham! Ha ha haha haha HA HAH AHA HAHHA [cackles like the Cryptkeeper and then crumbles into dust] Where was I? Oh, right, today is Rod’s last strip, and in it Gil’s lovely plane ride is … fading into nonexistence? As we hear a doctor desperately trying to restart somebody’s heart? Is Whigham closing up shop and taking the Thorpverse with him???? Honestly I had not worried much up to this point that I might have been created by an omnipotent being who could at any time decide to quit His job and take my whole reality with Him, but now I’m going to be worrying about nothing else!
Pardon My Planet, 9/29/24
The “If They Were Alive Today” box implies that we’re going to get a whole series of these dated, shitty, mean-spirited jokes about various historical figures and what they might think about the hottest celebs of 2008, but don’t worry: Pardon My Planet simply doesn’t have that kind of follow-through.
41 replies to “I always cry at endings”
Pardon My Planet:
“I always doth have this feathered pen close to me at the ready to aid me whenever I have a severe cold or flu. No, don’t say it, Self. Yep! — it’s my nigh quill!”
PMP: Josh is so annoyed with Pardon My Planet, he didn’t include a tag for it. I get it.
GT: “Clear” is what Whigham kept hearing when people talked about his sports action scenes.
MW:
“Woof!”
“Meow!”
“Pipe down, you two! — I’m trying to drift off into a fitful sleep!”
Gil Thorp:
GT:
“Flyin’ so high with some gal in the sky
Is my idea of roughin’ to do
‘Cause I get a tic out of you….”
— Gil, adapting Cole Porter and Sinatra
Frazz: Nice to see Frazz making fun of someone to their face. Also, yes, I suppose Bolivians wouldn’t get the joke.
Luann: Masters of Misdirection!
CS: “Aw. If only I had you as my
strawmansounding board when I decided to screw over my sister.”9CL: I’m surprised Lolly or Polly has time to make out with Alistair considering all the time they devote to their mother’s lonce hotness. I’d say they need therapy, but that’s redundant when talking about any characters in this strip.
Gil Throp : pretty bold of Rod Whigham to use his last few strips to insinuate that the change in art style is due to Gil Thorp receiving severe brain damage from a near-death experience induced by getting “accidentally” tackled by one of his own students.
Especially if it goes “Merrill is initially going to try to copy Whigham, then she’ll gradually change into her own”, ’cause that’ll imply Gil’s condition is worsening.
Luckily for the writing front, “Gil is severely brain-damaged” will not affect the quality of his coaching in any noticeable way.**************
Pardon my Planet : Apparently, to be still alive in the 21st century, Shakespeare would have had to be killed fighting the Balrog and been reborn as Shakespeare the White.
GT “Going clear” ? Dang, is Gil getting recruited by Scientology? They’ve really lowered their standards.
PmP I guess the ‘they’ here is meant to imply that thus is part of a series of musings about dead literary figures (or maybe that Shakespeare would have preferred non-gendered pronouns?), but I like my alternate interpretation, which is ‘they’ refers to the Kardashian clan, murdered by William the White for making a mockery of the language he so adores.
Gil dies and is reincarnated as one of his student players. “Noooooo! he screams as the memory of his past life fades into oblivion.
Luann: (smacks forehead) Oh, fer the love of… this is going to end up being about a malfunctioning oven, deep fryer or microwave, isn’t it?
JP: That’s our Neddy. Always two months late and several bricks shy of a load…
MW: Eshtelle’s hit the trifecta with three daily ‘SOB!’s in a row!
Pardon My Planet:
“If I were to complain about dropping sounds and syllables whenever I happened to sport this neckband, would that make it an elision-beefin’ collar?”
GT: “Theorising that one could look like an actual human being within his own lifetime, Coach Gil Thorp stepped into the Quantum Lineart accelerator and vanished… He woke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change Milford youth sports for his own aggrandizement. His only guide on this journey is Beth, a bartender from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that Gil can’t see and hear. And so Coach Thorp finds himself leaping from artist to artist, striving to make sense of artwork that never will, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap to an artist that can draw a coherent series of panels…”
MW: Great, so Ed will realize he’s dodged a bullet, move on with his workaholic life and it’ll all be done, right? Right?
RMMD: June is being uncharacteristically twinkly. Is Trigger Finger her very favorite diagnosis, or does she just love roots country THAT MUCH?
BG&SS: One shudders to think what Loweezy un-learned to achieve her current kordon blew status.
BB: How much more delineated could that quicksand be? Knock that idiot Snorkle down a rank or two.
Oh good, Josh is softened up for my come-to-Jesus talk!
Zits: No one likes to play Hungry, Hungry Hippos IRL.
FC: You’re wearing too much pink and not enough black for that particular darnedest thing, Dolly.
MW: “Looks like we’re going to have to feast on her unconscious body.” “Yep. She’s pretty gamy, but I don’t know how to operate the can opener.”
GT: Didn’t this strip do the Damar Hamlin plot last year? Is this going to be a recurring gag in Gil Thorp where someone suffers a bonkus of the cardiopulmononkus every year?
PMP: I don’t necessarily think the Bard would be writing about the Kardashians if he were alive today, but he’d likely find them a worthy subject if he was alive 100 or more years from now, if he had the time to squeeze them in between his Harry and Meghan stageplays.
Unfortunately alive today…Ugh, thanks for reminding me Vic Lee exists.
Rex Morgan, MILF Diver: Truck is not a master of his domain.
PmP: There was a fantasy novel I read, where the protagonist’s magical instrument broke, so he goes on a big long quest to get it repaired.
At the end of his quest, the talking Coati who fixed it, shows him a machine that plays music from other dimensions, and he had been using it to listen to music from our world (where the protagonist is from)
“And this is Beethoven’s 12th symphony”
“He only wrote 9 symphonies”
“Not when he was alive.”
And said that in the afterlife, people are continuing to do what they enjoy.
“If they were alive today” Quill pens are still in style… or maybe came back in style because Shakespeare is using them, or never went out of style because the death of ancient celebrities never happened, causing society to never progress.
The Kardashians are probably Tavern-wenches or something in that reality.
Crankshat – How is Ed going to tell Loathsome Lil that she did the right thing by not letting her sister read the letters sent by Eugene? If Batiuk can pull that off, he’ll deserve that Pulitzer.
DtM: Dennis does his after dinner standup routine for the Mitchell’s guests. Like many young comedians, he copies more established comics. Although some people think his take on Carlin’s Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television is a bit much for a six-year old, Wilson loves it. “You’re killing it, kid! You demolished the room!”
FC: Dolly prepares Jeffy for their hospital visit to see PJ who is nowhere to be seen in the car.
CS: Ed Crankshaft, Paragon of Courage, Defender of Intellectual Honesty, and Staunch Patron of All That Is Noble and Good. If this were England, he’d be up for a Knighthood. But as it is, he’ll get bored with the book in five minutes and give it to Pam for her next birthday.
MW: Hey, Sid, Libby and Pierre are two class acts! Yesterday Pierre let Libby speak her line first, and now today she returned the courtesy and let Pierre speak his line first. That shows an inspiring degree of mutual respect between two artists who each could easily command the entire spotlight if either wished to. My compliments!
GT – Yes – that’s it Beth! We want to go clear!! Now where’s that E-Meter!!!
PMP – Nostradamus noted in the Centuries a blight worse then the Gumm sisters – even more horrible than the Gabor sisters – even a butch Olympian like Bruce Jenner will morph before them….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
B. Bailey: Sarge in quicksand asking Beetle to fetch a rope; “What are you waiting for!?”
Beetle: To see exactly how fast you’re sinking and whether I’ll have plausible deniability.
Mary Worth Mashups
DT: Dick didn’t bring the magic screw-you-I-win ring?! Why did he even show up if his plan was just to curl up into a ball and shriek for someone else to rescue him? Why would Ro-Zan’s powers summon security when they’re not bothering to investigating the blinding light blocking out all the cameras in the room? What are security guards going to do that Dick can’t? Why is Ro-Zan taking so long or even bothering to converse with Dick? What was the hope if Thorin hadn’t randomly showed up and Mysta was somewhere else because it’s the middle of the night? Why was any of this allowed to transpire at all? And why does Mike Curtis think anyone but him gives a crap about the ugly yellow space cars?
FC: This is less “kids say the darndest things” and more “kids hear about a concept and spend time considering and crafting a play-on-words that references but is otherwise unrelated to that original concept,” and I’m not sure I like this new Crankshoe direction for the Keane children.
JP: I’ll give Francesco Marciuliano one point for choosing an appropriate window of time for Neddy’s CIA information to not contain Declandad’s death, but I’m taking away a thousand points for pretending that this wealthy family desperately wanted to contact their son but had absolutely no means of doing so because he changed his phone number.
Luann: Solid point by Dez, but isn’t The Fuse a fairly large restaurant and also a kind of youth center? How the hell would they have only one female employee? Do the Evanses ever think about anything they write?
Way to kick the old artist on the way out if Barajas (?) is about to imply that most of the events he drew under his pen were a coma-induced dream.
I prefer this take on “if Shakespeare were alive today”. Or maybe this one.
JP: “So Neddy, if you will just hand over all of Declan’s contact information, you and your friend here can leave.”
FC: “Except the ones who are going to Hell. Then the Devil moves them to the Burn Ward.”
@Baja Gaijin: I like how Estelle’s last thought in the first mashup is on Mary’s Meddlevision in the second mashup.
RMMD-Truck can take a few weeks off but his manager can’t. There’s a new album that needs to be made.
Gil Thorp-“Life is too short to sweat the little stuff.” Like coloring in your few final panels.
MW-That night Stella dreams of Wilbur as a fish.
FC-“If somebody dies in the hospital, it’s Rex Morgan’s fault.”
GT: Huh, I thought Wingham’s tenure as artist began a lot more recently, but he’s been doing this since 2008? Time flies when you’re trying to make sense of random sports tableaus.
PMP: So if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d completely abandon the structure of iambic pentameter and write in free verse?
Gil Thorp-“Coach Thorp’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.”
GT – And just like that, we learn that Beth is a Scientologist.
C’shaft: “Um, Ed, you know those books are for the students….”
“Who gives a crap about them?” *walks off with the book without paying for it*
JP: “And get rid of the last witness to my crimes–oops, did I say that part out loud?”
HotC: What exactly is a “high stakes” hobby? Day trading? Russian roulette?
Luann: Oh please, you are NOT going to try and sell Nancy deGroot as a MILF, or a MAnybodyLF.
MT: Does everyone in Violet’s family cosplay as a member of the British Royal Family?
MW: “Woof!:” Good! We don’t want to share a house with Odin; he’s always picking fights and stealing my chew toys!
“Meow!:” And he hogs all the wet food, the Persian bastard!
SH: Like the man in the joke said, “What, and give up show business?”
GT – One month later: “Gil honey, why have you been spending every day on the couch playing video games and gorging yourself on junk food? Whenever we’re not fucking, I mean. Don’t you think you should at least put in an appearance at your job once in a while?”
“Beth, you never know when your time is up! I have to make every second count!”
Don Abundio, translated:
“Admiral! You made it to the memorial service!”
“But about the deceased… Is it true he owed you a lot of money?”
“That’s right, Abundio!”
“So I intend to get as much value as I can out of this buffet!”
Luann: Tiffany misunderstands what Les means when he talks about how much he loves his gal’s pussy. Sadly, no hilarity ensues.
CS: Never has so wide a bailey been claimed from such a tiny motte.
I spent a little time a couple weeks ago thinking about how to fix this story or do it properly, and one of the bigger hurdles is that it’s just not possible with the Funkyshaft cast. As TheDiva touched on a few days ago, Tom Batiuk has an extremely narrow view of the world and that vision extends to all of his major characters. For example, can anyone name an issue or matter where two significant characters in this series would fundamentally disagree? I cannot recall a single time this occurred, or even possibly could have occurred. Every character has the same “correct” opinionon everything, and whenever someone expresses their opinion, other characters present just smile agreeingly.
So there’s no potential to explore any level of nuance in any serious subject, because Batiuk cannot even imagine reasons why anyone would disagree with the “correct” opinion and thus neither can his characters. That’s a problem, because this is a very nuanced subject and pretty much everyone believes some things should be banned, either situationally or entirely, for all kinds of reasons. And you’re going to run into problems when you start making sweeping declarations without any nuance or consideration.
So here we are, with the entire Funkyshaft gang arguing for the value of content based solely on its notoriety. Today’s actual quote: “If people are frightened enough by a book to ban it, then there must be something there that’s worth reading.” Seriously. I’m sure if Batiuk were pressed on this he’d retreat back to a position of “I’m just talking about people being allowed to read this one barely-controversial novel,” but he’s so lost up his own ass that he’s essentially been arguing that teachers should be able to procure and distribute pornography of children to their students, and that it would be especially applaudable because a bunch of complainers think it should be illegal. What a goddamned dunce.
MW:
“Pierre and Libby, let’s the three of us play a word association game to take our mind off things. We’ll start with you, Pierre. Come up with the missing word in the lyric of a famous song! — ‘There’s room enough for two/Up on the —-‘ ”
“Woof!”
“Now let’s try you, Libby! ‘But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman —‘ ”
“Meow!”
“Pierre and Libby, the two of you are geniuses!”
Is Shakespeare a wizard or is his lower eyelid cracking?