Just getting her husband’s feeble mind palace revved up then going back to her sudoku
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Blondie, 11/1/25
The thing about Dagwood is that he’s a dullard. He’s not stupid, though he’s also clearly not a genius, but mostly he just lacks any kind of imagination, which is driven home by the fact that we get to see his reveries and learn that they’re just the most on-the-nose stuff imaginable. “Wow, chefs racing through kitchens on zip lines? I think that would go … a little … like this!” [imagines a bunch of chefs racing through a kitchen on a zip line, adding zero additional information or details]
Gil Thorp, 11/1/25
The current Gil Thorp storyline is a flashback to the ’80s, when Milford dabbled in having a girls’ football team, with Emily “Mimi” Clover, the future Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp and subsequent Coach Ex-Mrs. Coach Thorp, being one of the students most excited about the prospect, and Coach Gil Thorp being the team’s … coach? A student coach, maybe? I hope??? Because he married Mimi later????? Anyway, we learned earlier that the whole scenario ended badly for unspecified reasons, which is why Mimi doesn’t like to talk about it, but I think after today’s panel three we’re going to learn that the school district shut the team down because it was getting “too sexy.”
47 replies to “Just getting her husband’s feeble mind palace revved up then going back to her sudoku”
Gil Thorp-If they are playing football then where is the equipment? Even when they are practicing regular football teams wear the equipment.
Gil Thorpe. I was all “Wow, the artist is starting to improve from her debut. Good for her.” But then, I saw it was a guest artist.
GT:
“Nice tackle, Roxanne.”
“This is no time to talk about fishing equipment, Emily.”
Blondie:
I think that the lysergic acid diethylamide is just starting to kick in for Dagwood here.
MW: “I believe love is the conduit for telepathy”
“That’s interesting, Mary, because I have a guide book on the art of living well, the nature of love, finding partners, maintaining s-x life, and other aspects pertaining to pleasure-oriented faculties.”
“Forget it, Jeff. I’m not reading the Kam@sutr@.”
Blondie:
“It says to ‘sue Doku‘ here, Dagwood, but I don’t even know who ‘Doku‘ is!”
MW:
“Because desperate times call for desperate measures!”
“And, as John Heywood aptly put it in 1546, when I was just little a girl, Jeff, ‘Muffin ventured, muffin gained’ !”
GT: An smooth transition for Gil from “Protect your balls!” to “Protect the ball!” when coaching the girls football team.
GT: BOOM! Right in the boob! And so begins Mimi’s lifelong and unsuccessful quest for identity.
BLONDIE: Does Dagwood identify as a chef? Sure, he can slap together a hell of a sandwich, but I’m pretty sure he’s never turned on the stove.
MW: Is this post-mortem even longer and stupider than usual, or am I just getting older?
The Blondie team blew their entire budget on drawing something at an angle, you can’t expect details.
RMMD:
Today’s purple-infused waiter applied for a position at the Thai Palace because he heard it was a “plum” job.
@MKay:
MW- Unfortunately all three are correct. But Moy seems to be more insufferable than usual.
MW: Last week, Sunday had no mention of Olive’s telepathy, while the dailies have been soaking in it. Someone speculated that they’d start diverging, Sunday remaining about a meddlesome old lady, while the dailies became a Sense8 ripoff. So I’m really looking forward to Sunday, to see if it’s going that way.
To be honest, I’m also hoping Sunday starts a new arc, putting an end to this interminable Olive story line. Though when Wilbur Weston’s face fills four of Sunday’s panels, I may regret saying that.
RMMD No, you fool – you’ve been talking about the most in-demand manuscript of this century openly in front of the waiter! Now he can go to the parking lot, steal the copy from the car, cross off your name and submit it to another publisher to gain the riches and cause chaos when two identical novels are published… wait that might actually require an interesting plotline, and we can’t have that
MW The first panel dialogue is so much like a mad scientist explaining themselves to the hero of a bad movie plot that I wouldn’t have been surprised if the second panel jumped scenes to show Olive hooked up to wires and machines
JP Is Neddy supposed to look jazzed that she gets the candy pile? Because the Halloween arc wrapping up with “I didn’t care about trick or treating, certainly not for the candy results which every other little kid is so excited to get, but it’s nice you thought to include me in a normal human activity, something my parents never managed to do” is either incredibly sad or a sign that this isn’t a human girl but rather the experimental android that replaced her and needs to learn how to act human.
GT — Emily sure did an excellent job of protecting the ball, considering the tackler suddenly vanished from her left side and reappeared to lower the boom on her right.
GT — Oh, and I never understood why people called football erotic before. Thanks, guest artist!
DT: I remain confused about when this Minit Mystery is set. Costumes, speech, and stereotypes are right out of early Dorothy Sayers, suggesting the 1920s, but algebraic chess notation wasn’t used in Britain until much later — though it had been invented and was used on “the Continent,” which might be an obscure clue pointing toward a foreigner. Or maybe the writer thinks people in present-day Britain still dress and act that way?
Does anyone else check in on 9CL every few months just to see if Brooke has gotten help yet? Does anyone else feel the need to scour their web history after doing so?
@But What Do I Know?: shhhhh, don’t criticize the guest artist. Otherwise, we’ll be back to the weirdly angular heavy-chin version that we had.
Mary Worth Mashups: Some missing final panels. Which one of them do you wish were canon?
Blondie – …and today on Plugger Express – Our contestants sit on auto-flush toilets as conveyors of loaded burritos continuously deliver the goods….
GT – Splendor in the grass…no balls required….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
@Baja Gaijin: I feel Jeff’s “desperate times call for desperate measures” cries out for a panel showing Mary being bundled into a straight jacket, ideally with Jeff telling someone “Yes, quite mad, kept babbling about telepathic dogs.”
@22 Ken: That’s a great idea. I, though, don’t have any straightjacket images. I do have a link to Los Straightjackets.
RMMD:
Gazing wistfully at the teapot, the waiter muses: “What a crock!”
Don Abundio, translated:
“Being alone together in nature will really let us get to know each other!”
“Look, I only agreed to come on this stupid trip…”
“because your servants needed a fourth for bridge!”
@Ken: The notation concludes with ‘le roi morte’ so a Frenchman, or a Brit putting on airs.
@Baja Gaijin: If the first one leads to Mary being whisked off to a hidden jungle village to meddle the Bandars and never bother us again, I’ll take it!
@CanuckDownSouth: But is the world ready for a version of H. Rider Haggard’s She with Mary Worth in the title role?
FC: Long before I reached elementary school age, I was able to consume candy without smearing it all over my face. Of course, I’m not a Keane kid.
RMMD:
[Waiter]: ‘I just fell into a vat of Thai plum sauce — Nam Jim Buay. Now what am I going to do?”
***
[Augie]: “Why the purple haberdashery, ‘garcon’?”
[Waiter]: “I’m plum out of other clothing choices!”
@20 Baja Gaijin:
I don’t know but the third one should have an extra panel with a couple of dudes singing Fish Heads.
Blondie- ZIP guns would be more interesting.
Blondie I could absolutely imagine a show called ‘Zip Line Chefs’, as a kind of hybrid format between ‘cooking competition’ and ‘hospital emergency show’, with a dash of ‘courtroom drama’ at the end.
GT Oh man, you work six months on your Gil Thorp Erotica fanatic and they just…print this.
RMMD: Augie looks very creepy when he’s leering.
Blondie: Wait. . . so now the Food Network (TM) (violation) shows hour-long programs all night long?!? When did this start happening? No sign-off after the Star Spangled Banner? No reverse mortgage infomercials? Crazy!
Blondie: Now we know why her chair faces away from Dagwood and the television. The next panel would have shown him masturbating to a fantasy cooking program.
GT – “Also, good job avoiding the roadwork on the other side of those orange cones.”
GT: As the marching band strikes up the “boom-wacka-wacka” background music.
Blondie: 24 chefs cooking 24 meals in 24 hours? So… each chef gets a whole day to cook one meal? Wow, slow down with your crazy impossible food fantasies, Blondie.
Gil Thorp: It actually took me a moment for it to register that this is Gil Thorp because the art isn’t utterly terrible for once.
I’ll give this to Dagwood’s imagination – he’s not afraid to use real trademarks because no corporation is going to send a team of lawyers into that mind.
***
Not being a leading expert on onomatopoeias, should the sound of a tackle be “BOOM” or did something go terribly awry? One or both of these girls need to be taken to the hospital, stat! But give them some time first, they’re having a moment and I’d hate for one of them to have to settle for that boring coach.
@Schroduck: Even each chef needing to make 24 dishes – with a once-per-hour judging and removal of the worst dish’s chef – doesn’t sound very intense. A whole hour to make a dish instead of 20-30 minutes? or needing to showcase 5+ courses in an hour? Have they seen even one episode of Chopped, Iron Chef, Masterchef…? The only thing mildly strenuous is the round-the-clock aspect and with the leisurely timeline, a chef could get ahead early on the finicky steps of any dishes planned for the wee hours!
Blondie – If a chef and a half takes a day and a half to cook a meal and a half…
@Bono Vix:
Yeah, my first thought was, “Hey, when the art on Gil Thorp get GOOD?”
@CanuckDownSouth:
Maybe the appeal is that each chef does a different recipe, and no chef can copy a recipe a chef already used for a previous hour, meaning over 12 000 different recipes? Maybe it’s the VOLUME that appeals to Dagwood?
(Though that’d still be kinda crazy, because why would you bar chefs from making the same dish as another chef in a COOKING COMPETITION? The entire point is finding out who is better at cooking, being able to directly compare how different chefs make the same dish is one of the best ways to do that!)
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Crankshaft : “… huh. Hey, has that animatronic bear mascot always been ther-*SUDDEN JUMP SCARE SCREECH*”
GT in the comments there seems to be a lot of confusion whether Gil is an actual coach or a student coaching but I think in the not-clear-at-all way the comic now works that it was implied he’s a student helping out because he knows football and no one else will? There was some throw away comment about pranking him that made it seem he was a student too… Since they went through the trouble of saying this is 1982 specifically, it does make Gil and Mimi canonically quite a bit older than I assumed….
GT: Why are these girls playing tackle football without any protective gear? The answer, of course, is simple: because it would get in the way of Emilmimi’s sapphic awakening.