Eros/thanatos
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Gil Thorp, 12/15/25
It’s often unclear to me how old anyone in a comic strip is supposed to be, and Gil Thorp in particular has historically had a quirky implementation of comic book time where the kids get older but Gil and the adults seem to stay more or less the same age, but I’ve always assumed that Gil is in his mid-to-late 40s while Beth is somewhat younger? Anyway, I get the feeling that most of my readers, like me, are or are rapidly approaching A Certain Age, so you probably won’t like being informed that the Golden Girls actresses were all in their 50s in the early seasons of the show. What I’m trying to get at is that Beth thinks what’s going on here is “cute” but in fact Gil is slurping ramen and, through a feverish haze, getting hornt up in an age-appropriate way over Rue McClanahan rather than her.
Slylock Fox, 12/15/25
Slylock faces the dilemma familiar to any more-or-less honest cop working within an authoritarian regime: you get into the game to protect small businesses from thieves or stop sideshows from defrauding innocent customers, but you do have to spend a certain amount of time humoring an absolute dictator sitting on a gold throne about their extremely specific problems, which have no real-world impact on anyone’s lives. I’m sure that Slylock figured out the answer to this riddle as soon as the situation was described to him, but I appreciate that he’s humoring Max by taking the magnifying glass from him momentarily before calling for the royal scales. What do you think happened to the thief who came up with this botched scheme, by the way? Probably being tortured to death in the palace prison, right?
55 replies to “Eros/thanatos”
Gil Thorp:
He seems to be getting better. That’s a shame.
Gil Thorp:
SLURP
“God’s going to get you for that obnoxious mouth sound, Gil.”
Slylock:
I’ve got it! — the real one will end up on eBay! How’d I do?
Mary Worth:
“With the thunderous sound that I just heard now, that can only be my prized tome The Philosophical Musings of Li’l Wayne!”
Slylock Fox: “Eureka! I’ve got it! I’ll ask my pal Archimedes.”*
* Archimedes the Aardvark
Slylock Fox: Aw, this is just some Cassandra Cat-style erotic roleplay, later they’ll bat Max around for a few hours before smoochytimes.
Slylock: Max discreetly hides the magnet used to figure it out a half hour ago as Sly roles in a complex scale to play up his ratiocination game to impress the princess.
MW: Not my Dick Butkis commemorative plate!
RMMD: Good lord, we’re STILL doing this…
DT: What the f—…
Luann: Three houses and the hospital burned down while we doing these menial tasks instead of our actual jobs, but who cares about that. We’re *tired*! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
GT. This is the new, political, Gil Thorpe. “Bea Arthur and her wacky friends” probably refers, not to ”the Golden Girls,” but “Maude.”
Blondie-“I’m considering not giving you bonuses.”
RMMD-Big enough that Summer can over look Auggie’s shortcomings.
Slylock Fox-Slylock hands the crowns to Max and tells him to test them.
GT Oh no, Gil’s got the avian flu, in that he’s dunking his whole head right into that ramen like a duck.
GT: You know what they say: starve a fever, feed a cold some hot pantyhose.
MW: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Battle Royale from Santa Royale! It’s man vs bird in this epic dust-up! Who will emerge from the wreckage?
RMMD: “How did it go with your and Augie’s sensitive, emotional ethical dilemma that we wasted a day of work listening to?”
“Screw that! We’re gonna be rich and famous!”
DtM: Dennis had actual dirt for lunch? Good for Mom to know the next time he trashes her cooking.
GT – I don’t get the last panel – is that a stream of puke…yes…final answer…stream of puke….
SFx – It’s such a bitch, this being part of the ruling class. Just one problem after another….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
GT: What does it say for the art in this strip when I thought the claw-like smoke rising in P2 was supposed to be Beth’s arm?
I was gonna say I wouldn’t swear that even Bea Arthur’s parents ever called her “Beatrice,” but I looked it up and her real name is Bernice, so. I’m learning a lot about Bea Arthur today. More than the Gil Thorp team bothered to learn, at least.
Wrecks Moregone:
“Big. Why, if they increase the bidding any further, it might even reach twenty dollars!”
Wary Morth:
Oh no! Ian can’t blame the aeroplane that CRASHed into his living room on Sunny!
Luann:
Who was hoarding the kids and why?
FC: PJ felt Santa’s erection when he sat on his lap.
GT- When has anyone not referred to her as “Bea Arthur”? Are the writers from Herb and Jamal moonlighting?
FC: It’s funny because PJ thinks Santa is from child protective services.
MW: Sunny invited a few of his magpie friends over to trash the place when he was left home alone.
The problem of personalist rule is that it weakens that bureaucratic institutions with much better knowledge and memory. For example, Rodney Rat already tried this scheme during the Obama administration, but neither Princess Pussycat nor Slylock remember this. I do, on the other hand, because the Comics Curmudgeon has stored this information and made it retrievable, something that would be useful to impose the iron fist of the state as much as it is to do dick jokes
GT: No fork, no spoon, no chopsticks. I assume Gil’s face is so yellow and damp not because he’s got a fever, but because he just slammed his face straight into the bowl of noodles and pulled them out with his mouth.
“You’re so cute when you’re sick.” Gil is getting the mildest form of Munchausen by proxy
Slylock Fox and Comics for Kids: Judging by the size of that utterly indefensible picture window in the background, the Princess spends far more time worrying about thieves than a human counter-revolution led by Slick Smitty or Viscount Weirdly, who has been co-opted into the regime with a title and a grant sufficient to cover lab expenses.
@Ukranazi Stepan: Don’t forget the magic beans!
@Schroduck: It’s like a cheap knock-off version of the now iconic (?) ramen eating scene from ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ where they forget to add in crucial elements of the scene.
I’m less disturbed by the fact that Gil dunked his face in the ramen than by the fact that he still retains enough lung strength in his debilitated state to suck up the noodles like a vacuum cleaner in one solid chunk. Are they even cooked?
@Ettorre: FTFY:
“Ah Princess, this is a very famous problem given to Archimedes. Gold is denser than iron, so the same volume weighs more. But how do we calculate the volume of an irregular object? We will submerge it into the water and measure…”
“There are no tiny enough characters to write this solution in the limited space”
“Fine, the two crowns weighs the same. Anyway, kids today are dumb”
Also Slylock Fox and Comics for Kids: BRB, dialing up chiaroscuro to 11 so I can submit this to r/accidentalbaroque
Gil Thorp:
[logs off internet for the day]
[Closes laptop]
[Shoots laptop just to be on the safe side]
RMMD They’re no longer talking about the “advance”, it’s become a cover to discuss Augie’s *ahem* “attributes”
GT — To (mis)quote the late Bea Arthur, “I’ll not have what he’s having!”
ShyFx — Shylock has obviously never heard of tungsten. . .
I’m suddenly obsessed with tails. How does Slylock put his pants on? If there’s, like, a tail hole in the back, does he have to poke that big bushy appendage through, pushing all the fur backwards? Or can he double up his tail somehow so the fur is smoothed the way it grows? Or maybe there’s a thing like a fly, that buttons or zips, and he doesn’t have to push his tail through at all? And how the heck is that cloak not draped over the tail — is there a hole in the cloak as well? Wait — maybe the tail is detachable? Oy. Princess Pussycat, having an extremely bushy tail herself, is facing the same problem but in a dress (there MUST be a tail hole in her skirt, or she’d be flashing her panties at anyone behind her.) Max, eh, Max is fine — that skinny littly rat tail is much easier to manipulate. BUT WHAT ABOUT THOSE DOG FOOTMEN??? Where are their tails??? Don’t tell me Princess had ’em lopped off because this whole thing is Too Much Trouble… That’s taking autocracy way too far!
Beth is rubbing Gil’s age in his face my calling Bea Arthur “Beatrice,” as though she has only a vague of who she is. She better not call Betty White “Elizabeth,” though, ’cause them’s fightin’ words!
Gil Thorp is a sports coach at an American high school. It’s not like he’s a teacher or janitor or something. Surely he can afford to upgrade from a 4×3 television by now for his annual watching of the Star Wars Holiday Special.
***
Huh. Slylock Fox living in a monarchy has turned everything I thought I knew about his world upside down. Their criminal justice system works because nobody stays imprisoned based on the flimsy “evidence” he provides, but maybe because they’re living under a benevolent ruler. The royal family are cats, and Max is walking around uneaten, so maybe this largely post-human civilization isn’t so bad after all.
crankshaft: Is the red cardinal going to be a MW Sunny figure and torment Crankshaft? Tear apart any old baseballs he has? Rip up old photographs? His old bowling shirts? Please let this happen.
DT: Okay, did those uniform cops show up on their own or were they called by DT? Either way, how does DT explain Catmandon’t or doesn’t he care and risk Deputy getting shot by accident? Anyway, he now gets to chase Rojo Ozob and in a bit of irony run him off the road to his death.
GT: Be careful Gil! Beth may like you helpless like this – tomorrow she’ll have a block of wood between your ankles and a sledgehammer!
JP: Are the horses back?
MW: Please let Sunny have smashed the collectible case where Ian keeps his beloved crystal glass figures of great acting moments he has heard about.
RMMD: By BIG, does she mean 3 figures? What is the going rate for a new fiction book by an unknown never published writer who is NOT a celeb (no Prince Harry or actor tell all) ? $10k, ?$50k?? Really curious.
Slylock Fox: Ah yes, the old Archimedes problem reframed. The original problem if I recall was the crown was thought to be a mixture of gold and silver. Did the crafters use more silver and less gold. Simply weighing would not work because the original problem had one crown not two. How to non-destructively test one crown to see if it was pure gold. The solution is clever and not as easy as it may seem – displacement is involved by the accuracy of the available methods limited a simple dunk test. See https://math.nyu.edu/Archimedes/Crown/CrownIntro.html
Slylock Fox: Given how often criminals seem to return to put together new extremely poorly thought-out crimes, and the general lack of concern that they have, I think we might have a Samurai Pizza Cats situation. Justice is extraordinarily flimsy, with people arrested and convicted based on flimsy evidence with no trial by judge or jury, but no one cares because the Princess simply banishes you to Prisoner Island and the island is quite nice and also has no guards and no one tracking when you leave so people just treat being arrested as a short vacation.
I see that Mary Lawton’s “don’t start drawing until the DT’s are in full throes” approach to art has spread to Gil Thorp.
@T.H. Steady.: “Bea Arthur and her wacky friends” probably refers, not to ”the Golden Girls,” but “Maude.”
I’m choosing to believe he’s watching the Star Wars Holiday Special.
I dreamed last night that the last Sunday of this year was the last Judge Parker strip. Alan died and went to Hell and was damned to watch his own pathetic life eternally. To the demons’ dismay, he enjoyed it.
Make of it what you will.
GT – “I love this show. My favorite is Rufus McClanahan!”
@Twinkles the Elf: I concluded a while ago that Slylock’s tail goes over his pants and under his jacket but that seems incompatible with today’s drawing. Maybe he has a special jacket slit up the back for audiences with Princess Pussycat.
@treetown: You helped me put it together. I thought the presence of the beat cops and regular squad car meant we’d inexplicably gone back to the police garage where some accomplice (or even some completely different villain) had come to trash the joint before jailbreaking Jason Lee, and somehow this will help spring all the rogues currently being held in Stateville Prison (except for Silver Nitrate, because screw that guy).
So, thanks for helping make a little bit of sense out of this.
@Rube: [Sings] I dreamt one night I got on the boat to Heaven, and by some chance found a bottle in my fiiiiisst…
In all seriousness though, we should be so lucky. Maybe it’ll be like the ending to ‘The Sopranos’.
Gill-Man Thorpe: Don’t tell me I’m the only one who looked at the third panel and saw Gil puking.
After submerging them both in water, the Rational Reynard found the shocking truth; both crowns displaced the same amount of water. Either both were real, or both were fake. If the former, then there were two sovereigns, and civil war must ensue. If the latter, then the royal treasury must be empty, and civil war must ensue. He finally pointed mutely to the one on the left, knowing it didn’t matter, knowing that the fall of the state was inevitable. The once-Vainglorious Vulpine turned, and left the castle to face the brutal future. At least he had Max with him. That would provide a meal or two when the granaries burned and famine set in.
MW: What chinbeardian horror greeted Ian? He probably saw the last panel of today’s Gil Thorp. That’s an image that will live in my nightmares.
So, apparently the Insane Clown Posse didn’t survive the glorious animal uprising and consequently, nobody in Animaltopia knows how magnets, fucking or otherwise, work.
@Dan: #15: Did you also find out that she served in the Marine Corps in WW2?
MW: The Stooges had a couple shorts with a parrot. I don’t think Ian will manage that level of comic genius, but I have hopes for painful pratfalls.
Also note further evidence the bird is both sentient and evil: Sunny waited for Ian to walk in the door before the latest destruction.
@The Quiet Man: RMMD: Good lord, we’re STILL doing this…
Check the storyboard: “Summer tells co-workers how much Augie’s being paid: 3 weeks (note: 1-day break for Christmas dinner at the Morgans, 1 day for Happy New Year)”
Can someone explain today’s Daddy Daze?
Phantom: The kitchen drudge fires one round in return….and so ends the centuries-long legend of the great white crime fighter, the Ghost-Who-Walks, gunned down by an enslaved scullion using a sidearm for the first time.
@Ukranazi Stepan: Damn you, Sunny! You hacked the VOR and glide slope indicator for Santa Royale International and now there’s a 777 in the living room! You see, Toby, the bird is evil!
GT: I wouldn’t have thought Gil would be the kind to consider The Star Wars Holiday Special comfort viewing.
SFx: Sadly, inbreeding and corruption have taken their toll on the Felidae Dynasty, to the point that Princess Pussycat doesn’t have the brain power to figure out this elementary-school riddle. Whether they will be overthrown in a bloody revolution or quietly relegated to the role of figurehead while a parliamentary system oversees the governance of the country remains to be seen.