Wednesday is for the afterlife, the underworld, and so forth
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Six Chix, 7/29/26
So purgatory is a place where … angels can have sex? Or the souls of the dead, who may also be angels, in this scenario, can have sex? But then in heaven, they can’t have sex? I know the Catholics have a lot of extra-biblical lore about all this, but I haven’t really kept track of it. Maybe the joke is supposed to be something else, but I dunno, I think we’re all on board with “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” referring to sex stuff, right? Unless purgatory is supposed to be a casino, which honestly makes even less sense.
Gil Thorp, 7/29/26
A thing that always bothered me about the end of Clueless is how many of the high school characters are in attendance at their teachers’ wedding. Seems inappropriate? Anyway, there were a bunch of Gil Thorp prom strips last month that I didn’t really talk about, but now that the teens of Milford have turned Gil’s wedding into Prom (Extended Remix Edition), I need to take a stand: these kids are having too much fun.
Hi and Lois, 7/29/26
Trixie! You have lavished too much affection and attention on the Sun! You have neglected the primordial chthonic deities, and by angering them … have doomed us all.
56 replies to “Wednesday is for the afterlife, the underworld, and so forth”
Oh guys, it was just Thirsty! Doin’ Thirsty stuff! Man, that Thirsty, what a character!
I hope these two were a couple, a line of black people being guided around by a white guy sounds a lot like the bus station.
GT: The couple in panel 3 seem to be recreating the opening of “The Lion King.”
Luann: If you’re wondering what that thundering grinding sound was, it was my brain seizing within my cranium. Luann as a role model? Divide by zero error. ABEND. Blue Screen of Death.
RMMD: So don’t mess with Sarah Plain and Tall and risk antagonizing the dogs, just mow ’em all over with your big honkin’ SUV. That would be pretty good revenge, wouldn’t it, Baby Face?
Luann: I’m less peeved at Evansii attempting to play this ‘revelation’ straight than at the fact that they’ve already played this card at least twice before. There was the now memory-holed poor little rich shy girl Luann was secretly hired to ‘mentor’ and then those daycare kids that Luann was *such* a good example for she allowed her friend to bring deadly weapons for unauthorized show n’ tell. Third time’s the charm or three strikes and Phil’s out?
Ph: That stupid alien mask must be cutting off Schmelon Schmusk’s oxygen. He can’t remember that if you ‘end’ someone, you kill them dead. Does he want that, or does he want Stripeypants to wear his little doohickey? Does he think if Stripeypants wears the doohickey he can take over the whole of Africa or something?
JP: And at last we come to why ‘Ann’ inexplicably came to this meeting, so she could serve as Ces’ virtue-signalling hand puppet about ‘grrl power’ and so forth. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if she turned out to be CIApril with dyed hair at this point. The pissyfaces make them all look the same anyway…
It does bring me to something I’ve thought about a lot lately. Through 100+ years of constant production, and now AI slop and corporate consolidation, Hollywood appears to have exhausted every possible story there is to tell. What if they just *stopped* and turned all their billions towards simply maintaining the vast, vast, VAST library of material they already have?
What bothered me about the end of Clueless was not so much “The high school characters are at their teachers’ wedding” as “I know it’s faithful to the source material but Paul Rudd should not be dating a high school student.”
This seems to be out of a Pluggers’ manual to jerking off.
H&L: It’s OK, it’s just that Slick Rick asked the mirror who is the top choice of them all.
Hi and Lois / Mary Worth
Yessss!!
This is how it ends!
Actually, I’m OK with Hi and Lois, and hope the earthquake/gentrification/chthonic retribution thing works out for them. Ultimately I wish I was exulting the long, drawn out, excruciating, and utterly humiliating end of Wilbur Weston.
Chix (sic): What does middle angel keep in his pockets? Gum? Loose change? Frankincense?
Mary Worth Mashup: How about we add a slightly NSFW panel to show what’s distracting Tommy from Dawn’s phone call?
Six Chix:
“And there’s no reason for you to be in limbo about it!”
Gil Thorp:
All these couples seem oblivious to the fact that dancing is simply displacement behavior.
GT: Credit where it’s due, this is probably the best looking strip of the new artist’s tenure. The blonde girl’s dress in panel 3 is a bit of a blob, but otherwise I think it’s alright.
6C – What fun! A necromancy gag….
GT – Timely and topical! The latest earthquake photos from Japan….
H&L – And the sixth seal was broken….
Adios Amigos, DJ.
H and L:
“It felt like an earthquake.”
“Nah. That’s just Link Wray doing his hit instrumental!”
Well, Luann, identifying cause and effect isn’t something you’re good at. What does being shy have to do with being apprehensive about milking a goat? How does performing the basic job tasks of a camp counselor define what you’re good at? Especially when we saw none of it?
CS: It says a lot about Tom Batiuk that he thinks the world needs Ed Crankshaft’s permission to make a generic video game about exploding barbecue grills. Batiuk routinely uses copyrighted characters, the name/image/likeness of real people, and in one case a child’s drawing, in his own comic strips, without so much as a “thank you.”
MW: I hope Tommy goes into hiding and lets everybody think he’s dead, like a certain character I could name.
Pluggers: Oh, come on, every plugger owns a power washer.
@Bob Tice: How low can you go?
@The Quiet Man: Hollywood is out of ideas, but they refuse to take my script about a talking marsupial founding a Mars colony, only to be undermined by both the KGB and CIA!
GT: Nobody puts Keri in a corner. But, it would be great if they did.
H&L: As she drops into a huge crack, Trixie speaks her first words: “Good bye, Sunbeeeam!”
RMMD: Sarah may not be the sharpest knife in the block, but she’s going to recognize identical, orange-haired twins whom she last saw committing the unspeakable crime of fake violining.
Right?
Six Chix:
“It’s 9 in the morning, and you’re already telling us what we can and can’t do up here? W-who are you, anyway, Mister?”
“Just call me ‘Angel of the Morning’ !”
@Comically Challenged:
You needed to use a rabbit, man! Marsupials make people think too much!
6C: Even in heaven, it’s men’s robes that have pockets.
H&L- this is what you get when you put the strips too close together- the collective stomach rumblings of Dagwood and Wilbur.
Curtis: Tomorrow’s Strip: “Greg, it’s real creepy how you can be tracked around and not even know it!”
JP Writer’s a bit upset at criticism of “CIApril’s One Last Job – Again!” stories?
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX:
The reference to hoes sounds like he’s paying.
H&L: I thought Trixie was supposed to be talking to her stomach in the second panel. As if her stomach rumbled so loudly that her parents mistook it for an earthquake. Granted, the sound appears to be coming from the opposite direction of Trixie, but maybe her organs are capable of ventriloquism.
MW: So, to recap, Tommy overhears Wilbur saying he’s bad news and Dawn defending him. He then has a crisis of faith and buys drugs, only to flush them upon remembering Dawn’s advice about sobriety. And so, having proved Wilbur wrong and stayed strong in the face of temptation due to Dawn’s encouragement, he proceeds to…ghost Dawn? I guess that must make sense in Brigman’s world.
Hi and Lois-Your cutesy ways have upset the gods, Trixie. You must sacrifice your Uncle Beetle to appease them.
RMMD-“Make sure you take out the dogs on the first pass.”
MW-From being around Dawn Tommy has somehow turned into Wilbur.
Yeah, sure…bus station…right.
6C: Isn’t Purgatory a place you’re working to get out of? So if what’s happening in Purgatory is sinful, then it and the sinner(s) would have to stay in Purgatory longer. So that’s my theory as to why this guy is turning down the offer to participate in a threesome.
Hi and Lois: [Chortles darkly] Sorry, Flagstons, just me moving around.
Sick Chicks — I’m no theologian, but shouldn’t it read “what *happened* in purgatory stays in purgatory? Because there’s no going back, if what my 10th grade canon law class told me is true. . . In Heaven, no one judges you–that’s why it’s heaven. . .
@But What Do I Know?: People can’t be kicked out of Heaven? Fallen angels and all that?
Six Chix: Speaking of extrabiblical lore (as who does not), there is a large and gnarly body of literature speculating on the nature and origins of angels, ranging from nephilim mating with human women to angels being emanations of the divine being, which if horny is big news. You know what? Yes, what happens in Purgatory stays in Purgatory, let’s just leave it there.
JP: “How about this, a family goes back in time and reconciles with a long-lost relative?”
@But What Do I Know?: In Heaven there is no beer, that’s why we drink it here > What happens in Purgatory stays in Purgatory
FC: Tonight at dinner, Big Bil tells a Polish joke. Billy puts down his fork and glares at his mom in silence.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: (Slightly) more serious comment: The joke depends on the confusion and mixed messages about the afterlife in Jewish and Christian tradition. Angels are from Jewish tradition, while Purgatory is a development in Medieval Christian thought, particularly as a means of explaining the nature of salvation. What is very clear, no matter the theology, is that angels are not humans and generally do not act like it, nor do humans progress through Purgatory to become angels. In this article I will describe the category errors demonstrated by this one-panel comic…
The femme is lifting the butch? I’m all for wokeness but this is too radical even for me.
***
Look at how Trixie is holding her stomach! Feed your damned baby, Hi and Lois! Her rumbly tummy shouldn’t be shaking nearby houses!
Thirty-some years in the future, climate activist Trixie Flagston will point to this moment as the start of her lifelong obsessive fear. What she doesn’t tell the audience is that it’s not fear for the planet, oh no. It’s fear for her life.
H&L: Are you mad at us?” says Trixie as she stares at the signature of Eric Reaves. Just as Trixie asks her creator for clarity, Eric questions the motives of a silent god through his child avatar as he struggles to make sense of an increasingly violent modern world.
Was the world really crying out for this particular remake of Dirty Dancing?
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Good luck countering the decades of Hallmark Greetings-level understanding of angels :-)
Arlo and Janis: That’s rather sweet, actually.
@The Quiet Man:
What?! That’s all the entertainment has been doing lately, what with their never-ending supply of remakes and rehashes and reboots and remixes and the like. They could probably find “new stories to tell” if they actually to a risk toward exploring new things out of their comfort zone and stop strip-mining their “vast library of material” and being slavishly devoted to profit.
@Tabby Lavalamp: The writer seems to be channeling the cartoon “Rugrats” here.
But seems to not realize that the “whimsy” in Rugrats wasn’t the parental neglect, but rather the adventures the babies went on when their parents weren’t watching.
GIL THORP: Hey, speaking of pointless unneeded remakes….
“Prom Night/No more feeling uptight/Prom Night/Everything is all right”
6C: So Purgatory is where angels go to let off a little steam and indulge in the vices they can’t get away with in Heaven? There’s a Good Omens-esque fantasy novel in that concept…
GT: In the recently released proshot for Hadestown Patrick Page, the actor who plays Hades, had recently come off surgery for a blown Achilles tendon and performs using a medical boot and cane–a fact which is so seamlessly integrated into the staging and his performance that it feels like it was always meant to be there. Certainly he handles himself more gracefully than Disabled Girl in panel one.
H&L: Trixie, in her innocence, does not realize that the earth has a great many reasons to be angry with humanity.
BG&SS: If this is anybody but Gearhead Gertie, you’re stealing my bit!
RMMD: There’s never a stray rabid dog around when you need one.
Gil Twerp: Is Ted Striker talking about Gil’s wedding to some bored 747 passenger?
@GarrisonSkunk: Gil Thorp is giving us “all” drinking problems.
No? Just me?
Next week in Pluggers: “A Plugger’s car may be old, but his power washer is always up to date”.
I have to say I initially read that as Trixie having farted loudly, or perhaps taken a giant noisy poop. If this were Marvin, that would totes be the punchline.
@TheDiva: In “The Sims Medieval” you play as, pretty much God. With Patrick Stewart giving the opening narration.
About how you created humanity, then the people left to their own devices end up fighting amongst each-other, starting wars in your name that you never asked for, and just all around being idiots.
Patrick Stewart: You have come to the conclusion that, PEOPLE ARE DUMB
@The Quiet Man: If Luann is as fundamentalist as I think it is, one of two things will happen next:
1. Phil proposes marriage to Luann. “Oh, you found your life path? Screw that. Your life path is to be a broodmare stay at home mom.”
2. Phil breaks up with Luann. “Oh, you found your life path? Screw that. Your life path is to be a broodmare stay at home mom, but you rejected that to arrogantly pursue your own path. We’ll pray that you come to your senses.”