You don’t get a lot of chances to drag a guy off by the collar like that, so you gotta take advantage
Post Content
Gil Thorp, 8/4/26
I have thought for some time now that Gil is universally considered the most important person in Milford, and perhaps even in whatever geographic region is covered by the whole Valley Conference (“the Valley,” I guess). Today’s strip is more evidence: I simply don’t believe that an ordinary person could call the cops and say “Uh, this guy at my wedding is being weird” and they’d show up in less time than it takes for said guy to finish his supervillain monologue.
Judge Parker, 8/4/26
The fun thing about Judge Parker is that there are two potential ways this could play out — April is furious that Neddy has left their child in the care of her perfectly capable adult sister, with a family rift and endless boring emotional processing to come, or the “April” calling Neddy is actually an AI deepfake voice program and this is part of a larger plot to kidnap Charlotte — and I’m not sure which it’s going to be.
Hi and Lois, 8/4/26
Hey, Irma is married to Thirsty, and Lois, her only friend, recently (in 1980, 1980 is recently in comic strip time) got a job as a realtor and can’t spend as much time hanging out with her as she used to. Let her have fun on her dang phone! Are a few afternoons lost to an infinite scroll through one AI slop reel after another really that much worse than watching her claw desperately at a block of wood like an animal?
57 replies to “You don’t get a lot of chances to drag a guy off by the collar like that, so you gotta take advantage”
High & Lower – That’s the only wood Irma is going to get.
Gil Thorp:
“You’re going to lose everything.”
“But I don’t have all that much to begin with — so what’s your point?”
Lack of backgrounds really working in Gil Thorp’s favor today. Is this stirring tuxedo-clad showdown taking place at a high-stakes casino? A James Bond-type situation? Anywhere that would make sense?
Gil Thorp:
I think that this coach needs to have Robert Young pay him a visit and get him to try decaffeinated coffee. It has to be caffeine that is making him so jittery and antisocial.
Judge Parker:
“Just kept wanting to see Charlotte! — just not enough, though, to do what any remotely sensible person would do under the circumstances: go to your house and knock on the door; or, if you wanted to do something that required less logistically, maybe send a text if the person you’re calling isn’t answering the phone. And isn’t Charlotte old enough now that she might possibly have her own cell phone?
Hi and Lois:
“That’s just a block of wood. Reminds me of Hi in a way, actually.”
GT: The art here in general is…something… but I really love that first panel in which Coach Wassisname is looking and pointing in two completely different directions. He is so full of rage that he has lost all motor skills and/or forgot who he was angry with.
H&L: What’s really funny about this strip is that Irma seems to be talking to her wood block in the first panel. “I’m trying to cure my cellphone addiction. Is it working? Chat? ANSWER ME!”
Hi and Lois: Irma holds her not-phone more naturally than anyone in the Mary Worthiverse holds their actual phones.
Gil Thorp : Is that some kind of Throbbing Anime Forehead Vein of Anger(tm), or did the cops hit Coach Gerads with their nightstick prior to the first panel?
**************
Hi & Lois : Lois is incapable of understanding the concept of using a prop to try to wean yourself off the object of your addiction, as she herself is currently holding a cellphone (in a way that’s even less natural than the way they do over in Mary Worth)
**************
Judge Parker : weirdest possibility : this is a misunderstanding that requires the reader to not remember April and Randy (and Charlotte) live in their own home that’s separate from the Spencer-Driver-Parker Compound, and that April doesn’t know the Parker’s home number, only Neddy’s personal cellphone number. Charlotte is fine, she’s drawing dicks in permanent marker on a passed-out drunk Judge Parker (Elder)’s face.
**************
Safe Havens : “You almost NEVER show affection to anyone, EVER!” “That’s because I withhold it to manipulate and control the feeble minded” …Things fiancés should be saying about each other!
GT: Would have been a nice touch if the officer dragging Coach Gerards away was the former student that violently assaulted him.
Irma is pining for a berter life, oke?
Garfield – What is that area in Garfield’s scrotal region (if he still has said region)? It looks like an open elevator door with some kind of genitalia protruding upward. And down below it looks like a camel toe. I’m so confused.
Dustin – This was done much better in Dilbert when the pointy-haired boss tells his people that his motto is “Go big or go home.” The next panel shows the room empty except for the boss, who’s now thinking, “I shouldn’t have made that sound like a choice.”
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX:
On what the heck is going on between Garfield’s legs : that’s his tail being visible through the gap between his legs. It DOES look really… WEIRD, I’ll give you that.
MW: Now that this storyline is in the “characters telling one another what happened” phase, we should soon be moving on to the “Mary telling Dr. Jeff what happened” phase. That would usually lead to a reset, but this time I think there’s a small chance Tommy and Dawn will remain an item. However I’m fairly sure we won’t see the Charterstone Supplemental Nutrition Zucchini Garden again.
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: Dilbert on its worst day was better than Dustin on its best day.
And Dilbert on its worst day was pretty damn bad.
RMMD: Set fire to the house with the girls inside! It’s a good idea!
9CL: Here I’ve been hoping and praying SO hard that Brooke wouldn’t get into foot-sucking, and decide to share with his dozens of readers.
GT: I think it’s a great idea, when screaming about destroying your rival’s life, to do so in the presence of police officers. Ideally, wait until they’re physically confronting you, just to make sure their body cameras are switched on.
Gil Thorp:
The art in the current iteration of the strip is shockingly crude, but given its admittedly substantial limitations I do have to give it credit for doing a halfway-convincing job of the tricky perspective involved in a “Lord Kitchener Wants You!” shot in the first panel there.
Gil Thorp: ACAB (All Cops Are Born to serve gil thorp)
GT I expect cops would show up very quickly for kidnap-in-progress, but I don’t think they’d just be dragging off Gerads like bouncers…
MW … And this was Tommy’s first real temptation, and he was fine, and that’s it, he will always be able to resist going back to his addiction by remembering Dawn, whew! That was easy!
@Scratchy Scrotum LXIX: “Businesses today don’t train new workers, setting them up to fail and reducing career opportunities for young people. And whose fault is this? Why, the young people of course!” This is the purest example of the Dustin mindset yet.
GT: The way this strip is pinballing between zany and serious is giving me whiplash. Gerds is supposed to be an over-the-top archrival for Gil, but now he seems to have gone actually insane and assaulted and detained two bar tenders. That could’ve been played off as wacky comic strip hijinks, but now he’s being hauled away by Milford PD’s Gil Thorp Patrol to face an unknown fate, probably execution for threatening their immortal god-coach.
And they’ll still miss the playdowns.
MW: The magnanimous Wilbur is still unaware that Tommy knows that he, Wilbur, started this whole thing. Revenge is a dish best served cold. With extra mayo.
GT: “Thorp, you #@%$! I bought my own bow tie for this!”
H&L: How long has it been since poor Irma has had fully opened eyes?
GT: Of course there’ll be cops present and ready. The Gil/Beth wedding was bigger than the Swift/Kelsey deal. Half the Milford PD was there, just like half the NYPD was guarding Madison Square.
RxMD: I am neither a lawyer nor a professional criminal, but I’m pretty sure kidnapping is not considered a “con” or a “grift” or a “scam” or what have you. and will result in serious hard time, as Coach Gerads is about to learn.
Also Gil Thorp! Arthur “Killer” Kane was the gnomic bassist and organizer of the New York Dolls who later (improbably) joined the Mormon church. It’s nice to see him get a bit of acting work. It’s less nice to see him get a bit of acting work after dying in 2004, but like the Hell’s Kitchen punk scene, the comic business just ain’t what it used to be.
GT: Now, granted, I have no experience in coaching and I don’t live in a Milford-adjacent area where high school sports are so important that students are routinely sacrificed on bonfires, but I feel like if someone is arrested for kidnapping, a felony, they’re not going to be allowed to continue coaching even if they manage to stay out of prison.
FC: Well, for you, Billy, it’ll be several rungs to climb on your way to becoming an award winning animator. As for Jeffy, it’ll be barely one as I just hand him my legacy, a good photo copier, and a bottle of typewriter correction fluid.
H&L: “Ah” says Lois. “That explains the wicker effigy of Thurston in a lounge chair on the lawn.”
MW: The hell is going on with Wilbur’s arm?
Hi and Lois moved so gradually from “skipping the punchlines” to “checking to see if we need to call the Crisis Hotline for our friends” I hardly noticed.
JP: Neither woman has mentioned Randy. Has he been retconned out of the strip like a Soviet non-person? Because if that’s the case, I’m down with it.
“I’m taking you to task next school year,” says the scraggly-haired Howdy Doody ripoff, pointing in the direction that only one of his eyes is looking. It’s a shot that takes away any vestige of menace he may possibly have had up to this point. The only way he can salvage any real form of villainy is if it turns out he killed and ate the real bartenders.
GT: Okay, I don’t care if you’re friggin’ Dr. Doom, there’s no way you can say ‘I’m taking you to task!’ and make it sound sinister or threatening.
Ph: Wait, I thought this place was some seedy dive bar off the beaten path. Now it looks like a diner and… oh, oh NO!! The enschulbification virus from RMMD is spreading!!! Stay away from mayo and the jukebox, girls!!!
JP: Either this is a deepfake as Josh posits, or CIApril is about to become very, *very* *VERY* angry.
MW: ‘I’m glad… for YOUR sake, Tommy, otherwise you would have had to face the wrath of… WILBURMAN!!!’ [plays theme on kazoo]
Luann: Wimmen, amirite? Don’t get between them and their laundry style, otherwise you’re eating cold dinner out in the doghouse, fellas!
“Whatcha in fer?”
“My boss made us pretend to be waitstaff at a wedding so he could make vague threats to the groom.”
“Dat’s nuts! Dey gonna throw da book at him?”
“Nah. The cops crushed his windpipe dragging him by his collar. He’s never going to utter another threat again.”
@Guillermo el chiclero: I’m not convinced that’s a real cop; his “badge” is clearly a crude cut-out made by their eight-year-old child.
@Lauralot: Yeah, this is the kind of thing that usually results in an opaque e-mail from the district informing you that a staff member’s employment has been “terminated effective immediately,” and you have to search the local news to figure out what crimes they’ve committed/been accused of.
FC: An outsized mallet comes down on Jeffy’s head from stage right.
That’s my line you idiot! Says Dolly. No one’s gonna believe you know what a ‘rung’ is.
Hi and Lois: She’s also trying to cure Thirsty of his sports addiction. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find a block of wood the size of a 75-inch TV.
“Make Charlotte sit on the phone” is whoever’s impostering April’s fetish, I suppose.
JP – “Yes, we’re home! And finally safe! Our enemies at the CIA are no longer a problem. Thanks to Bogdan. With his bare hands. And he only asked for one favor in return! That’s probably him at your door right now.”
Six Chix-“I’m really starting to question why we hired you.”
Hi and Lois-Carve that block of wood into a humous shape and it will be more useful than Thirsty.
MW-I guess twelve step programs have yet to reach these people.
FC-There is only one rung of success and it’s called copying and pasting.
GT: Luckily for Gil, the Chippendale dancers he hired for the reception were actual cops who were moonlighting.
“Yeah, but it’s wood from an apple tree! Get it? . . . Apple? Like Apple Incorporated, makers of the iconic iPhone, named after the apple, which comes from an apple tree? So . . . nothing? A block of apple wood taking the place of an Apple iPhone? Christ, subtle humor is just wasted on you, isn’t it, Lois?”
RMMD-“Wait a minute. When did we go from plotting scamming to plotting kidnapping?”
GT: Coach Gerards fascinates me. His single-minded thirst for revenge is on a level usually found only in Shakespearean tragedy and James Bond villains–what crimes, real or imagined, has Gil committed against him to inspire such white-hot fury? Is it just that since Gil’s supporters love him to such an irrational degree, his detractors must be equally extreme?
GT – I have grudges I’ve held for years. Decades even. I have one classmate from all the way back to 3rd grade who I still consider my nemesis – though I haven’t seen her in 15 years, at least. But there’s nobody I hate enough to go crash their wedding and declare vengeance. Maybe I’m doing it wrong…
I personally think that the best revenge is something small that acts as a mind-f*** but can’t be tracked to you.
GT: The problem with this strip (that is to say, one of the many problems with this strip) is that it wants to eat its cake and have it too. It seems to be attempting some form of heightened reality: Gerads crashes weddings in the most obvious disguise ever and smashes basketballs with his bare hands, Martinez hosts a seance, Jami walks around in daily life cosplaying Wes Anderson characters. But then it also wants to have realistic consequences for its actions: Gerads is arrested, Martinez is suspended, Keri and their friends go to jail for vandalism, and so on. The two do not work together. Maybe they would in the hands of a more skilled writer or in a different format. But here it’s just a mess.
C’shaft: And that was how the wildfire that took out most of Centerville started.
Dustin: So, Dustin left a job because they expected him to jump in without any proper training, and…this is a bad thing, apparently?
FG: The way this strip constantly nails the Brian Blessed “no indoor voice” for Vultan never ceases to amuse me.
MW: So, we’re just going to ignore the fact that Wilbur’s brusque dismissal of Tommy’s ability to overcome addiction is the reason why Tommy even felt tempted in the first place?
Pluggers routinely ignore their spouses.
Phantom: Credit to Manley for letting Wheezy dress like an actual 20-year old woman. Those weird granny dresses and skirts the JP gals have been sporting the past few weeks were making me wonder whether Cavelton is situated in Mormon country.
Hi and Lois: My grandmother had a knicknack, I think it was called a do-nothing
It’s literally just a block of wood with a handle on it that you spin around. That is literally it.
It was useless and kind of boring, but I’m still nostalgic for it in this digital age.
@TheDiva:
I *THINK* it goes like this :
1. Coach Gerards is a gentle, mild-mannered coach, as kind as the sheep his giant poofy hair evokes.
2. Coach Gerards ignores a bunch of his rougher players’ plea to be substituted in during a game, leading to their team’s loss. The players in question wait for him in the parking to beat him up. This causes Coach Gerards to become afraid of his own students.
3. Gil Thorp finds out about it, and something happens*
4. Coach Gerards, now driven mad, swears vengeance on Gil Thorp. He begins taking supplements and hormones to turn himself into a REAL ALPHA MALE. His giant poofy hair regresses into a hair curtain because all the performance-enhancers he’s taking are making him bald.
*I don’t know whether what happened is that Gil Thorp tried to help Gerards overcome his fear and regain control of his students (and Gerards took it as an insult), or that Gil Thorp tried to take advantage of Coach Gerards phobia to win matches. The former makes more sense if we’re supposed to see Gil Thorp as a good guy, but I’ve heard the latter is what actually happened?
@TheDiva: If I recall correctly, this weird obsession with destroying Thorp started after Gerads got drunk at a Coach of the Year award ceremony (neither he nor Gil won) and accused Gil of pitying him for being beaten up by one of his students. Gil’s response was, essentially, “Go home, you’re drunk.” When they next played against each other, Gil decided to use psychological warfare by sending the student who had assaulted Gerads onto the field, which gave Gerads a panic attack but did not win Milford the game.
And ever since then it’s been Snidely Whiplash antics.
@Lauralot: Wait, I forgot. Before the drunken ceremony thing, Gil had said Gerads used to be a force to be reckoned with. And that was apparently the grievous insult that led to all of this.
@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: Oh, I noticed. I noticed.
PHANTOM: Is Kadia afraid of her father, and if so, why? Or is she just disgusted the DoJ is releasing a man who does evil?
JP: Judge Parker : weirdest possibility : this is a misunderstanding that requires the reader to not remember April and Randy (and Charlotte) live in their own home that’s separate from the Spencer-Driver-Parker Compound, and that April doesn’t know the Parker’s home number, only Neddy’s personal cellphone number.
I think it’s 50/50 at best that the writer remembers any of that.
@Lauralot:
Oh snap! Is this all setting up Kaz to be the next target for one of Gerads’ insane, one-sided rivalries? “I’ll show you who the king of correctional-league sports is, Kaz! My Milford Penitentiary Motherstabbers are going to destroy your puny pathetic Delinquents at the exhibition game on the White House Lawn!”