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Gil Thorp, 10/18/08

You know, I think new Gil Thorp artist Rod Whigham is really starting to find his footing in this strip, creating evocative scenes for our Milford heroes. Yesterday, he served up a sort of film noir pastiche, with tough, wise-cracking heroes and the dames that break their hearts; today we go further back, to the Middle Ages, as miserable peasants pull up their rough-hewn hoods for protection from the pelting rain as they trudge back to their leaky, plague-infested hovels. You can tell how hard it’s raining in panel three: it appears that Gil’s flattop has been so thoroughly soaked that it’s lost structural integrity.

Beetle Bailey, 10/18/08

I was about to say that panel one was kind of edgy for a newspaper comic, as it features two men who are clearly drunk — and not happy, wacky drunk, but bleary-eyed, vaguely depressed and irritated, and surrounded by empties drunk. But then I saw panel two and realized that booze was least of this comic’s problems.

Marmaduke, 10/18/08

Marmaduke is about to kill and eat yet another poor soul who’s come to the front door of his house, but at least in this case you could sort of argue that it’s in self-defense.

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Beetle Bailey, 10/17/08

As part of my thrice-annual attempt to be nice about Beetle Bailey, I’ll say this: I find it pretty funny that Otto is so lazy that he’s drinking out of his water bowl through a straw, so he doesn’t have to leave the cozy confines of his neatly labelled box. I’d probably find it even funnier if I weren’t distracted by the fact that said straw appears to have materialized out of thin air between the first and second panels.

Gil Thorp, 10/17/08

Speaking of giving credit where it’s due, I find the line “Wherever girls go after they dump a guy” utterly charming. It has certain film-noiry world-weariness about it, not that that justifies the stupid fedora, Matt.

Momma, 10/17/08

You know, I bitch about the romantic drama in Luann, but it does have this going for it: it never consists of a series of baffling and repulsive non sequiturs, like the romantic drama in certain strips I could mention.

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Gil Thorp, 10/11/08

The only Marty Moon strips I like better than the ones where he passes out drunk in his car are the ones where he’s proven ragingly incompetent at his job. Surely a reporter with years of experience covering high school sports shouldn’t get rattled by some seventeen-year-old’s idea of being a difficult interview, even if he is 6′ 9″? (I note the latter fact because this may be the first strip in weeks in which Jeff Ponczak has appeared and nobody’s mentioned his height.) Anyway, Jeff has made a terrible enemy of Marty Moon, for making him look bad on his crappy public access show that nine people watch! Marty’s vengeance against his many nemeses — Cully Vale, Gil Thorp, that Ben Franklin lookalike golf hustler guy — has generally either backfired hilariously or just gone unnoticed by its intended targets, so hopefully we are in for some wacky hijinks.

Dick Tracy, 10/11/08

The current Dick Tracy plot, involving impractical robots on opposite sides of the law, will be painfully boring until the robots fight, and maybe even then, but today’s strip deserves commentary for two points. One, I am spending way too much mental energy wondering why Dick Tracy’s robot speaks in some kind of vowel-poor version of l33t-speak but the bad guy’s robot doesn’t; and two, “Elsewhere” is possibly the most minimalist and least informative change-of-scene narration box ever deployed in comics, even beating out “In another room.”

Archie, 10/11/08

Is anyone else hypnotized and unsettled by Jughead’s shirt, which offers no explanation as to who or what it’s promoting with its enormous letter “S”? Is it meant to frustrate and ultimately educate the bourgeoisie, who naively expect written text to transmit information of some kind? That explanation would seem to fit in with Jughead’s unexplained transformation from a shiftless high school student to an avant-garde photographer with a major gallery show.

Beetle Bailey, 10/11/08

OK, we get it, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC! There’s nothing in this world you love more than golf. If you had to choose between golf and your family and friends, you’d choose golf without hesitation, since if you show up at the course by yourself they’ll assign you to a foursome, so you technically don’t need them. In fact, as today’s strip shows, you love it so much that you’d rather announce that fact than, say, coming up with one of the seven weekly jokes that basically make up your job.