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Gil Thorp, 4/17/09

One of the many charms of Gil Thorp is its punctilious attention to the names of players, teams, and incidental characters whom we may never see again and will certainly never care about! Rich, here, for example, or WHCC, the fictitious one-step-above-public-access Milford TV station (and not the actual Bloomington, IN country FM radio station). But “Spartans” seems a little off for the St. Mark’s team — shouldn’t it be the “Lions” or the “Friars” or something? Hey, the “Notaries” would be a great name for a ball team!

Shoe, 4/17/09

Shoe ups the ante on “that is not how birds work” humor.

Beetle Bailey, 4/17/09

When does anvil season start? Soon, right? Please?

Mary Worth, 4/17/09

“That’s not love — that’s not even coherent.” But hey, do you suppose Doc Jeff ran a background check on his beloved Mary? And if so, what dark mysteries did he uncover?

Judge Parker, 4/17/09

I basically got nuthin’ here — a little more exposition on the The Fabulous Ledge-Danube/Rasmussen-Akermans to run out the clock on a slow week, tempered as always by Eduardo Barreto’s handsome draftsmanship. But thanks in no small part to determined rabble-rousing by faithful reader Dave and others, and a rousing response by us cookie-clearin’ survey-stuffin’ rabble, Judge Parker has been reinstated by The Washington Post. Way to go!

— Uncle Lumpy

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Gil Thorp, 4/8/09

Yesterday I was mildly amused by Gil getting hit in the head with a pop fly, but nothing could prepare me for the sheer awesome madness of … this, whatever this is. A baseball improbably rapping our favorite flattopped coach in the flattop twice before landing neatly in his hat? It’s one of those terrifying moments when you suddenly realize that the safe narrative confines to which you’ve grown accustomed have fallen away and ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN. Perhaps Gil will be on the receiving end of any number of bizarre events, good and bad and escalating in oddity, with the spring storyline turning into some kind of Latin American magic realist novel. Of course, everything after that first whack on the noggin will be just a dream percolating in Gil’s polyhedronical skull; in reality, he’s lying unconscious on the field, and his players are trying to figure out if they can get his wallet out of his pocket without waking him up.

Beetle Bailey, 4/8/09

You know, sometimes I have little moments when I think to myself “Maybe it’s gone a little too far with this whole comic strip thing.” Those moments come when I, for instance, spend fifteen minutes poking through my archives trying to figure out the deal with Beetle Bailey’s hats. Someone once told me that the hats the soldiers in this strip wear are a mishmosh of different uniform styles from different decades (which is true for just about any visual cue in a Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC strip, I suppose); while everyone else seems to get just one designated bit of headgear, though, Beetle actually gets to change hats now and then. In the iconic image of Beetle that I have in my mind, he’s wearing this mushy baseball-cap-type thing, but lately he generally wears a slightly more military looking cap. The hat he’s wearing today is the one I usually associate with Killer, though perhaps it is the Army-approved lady-sexing cap, because Beetle seems to wear it on his dates with Miss Buxley and other environments where ladies might be romanced.

In other news, Miss Buxley apparently lies around her house disheveled and wearing only sleepwear in what I assume is the late afternoon or early evening. This is also true of me, but I’m guessing nobody gets all hot and bothered about that.

Marvin, 4/8/09

Good lord, what is that inky black puddle Marvin’s mom is cleaning up? Does the awful tyke piss out pure evil?

Momma, 4/8/09

Wait, did that guy just offer to donate a kidney or something to Momma? Because I can’t see what else he might mean about Momma needing a couple of orgAUGH UNTHINK IT UNTHINK IT UNTHINK IT

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Family Circus, 4/5/09

This has got to be one of the most heartbreaking Family Circus cartoons I’ve ever seen. After spending all day (and all of her young womanhood) shut in with her litter of squallers, she’s suddenly confronted with the prospect of interacting with another adult — someone who wouldn’t want to spend time in a living room covered with cheap plastic crap and poorly-colored pictures, someone who she might even want to look nice for. Naturally, it turns out to be just another one of the little neighborhood urchins. At least he’s proposing to take Jeffy outside, so she can weep with abandon.

Beetle Bailey, 4/5/09

At long last, Beetle Bailey admits that American soldiers in training might be preparing to do something other than make stale jokes about alcoholism, sexual harassment, and fisticuffs! Still, one has to hope that the final panel — in which it is suggested that Castro’s long-standing paranoia about a U.S. invasion is true, that France’s Pacific possessions will be an invasion target as America gets involved in its first-ever war with a nuclear-armed opponent, and that American soil itself will soon find itself under military occupation and martial law — is as far removed from reality as this strip’s typical content.

Crock, 4/5/09

The throwaway strip that sits atop each Sunday’s Crock always features the strip’s title character’s name carved into a stone monument sitting majestically in the middle of the desert, like some kind of Ayers Rock-like monument to the French colonial empire; generally random characters wander around said Crock-rock making confusing references to the joke to follow. So I suppose I shouldn’t be unsettled by today’s edition, in which the great monolith seems to be muttering obscenities to itself — but I am, OK? I really am.