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Gil Thorp, 7/30/08

I can’t hold back any longer! Summer, my friends, is the season when Gil Thorp is traditionally freed from the shackles of its need to focus on boring high school athletics and truly finds its completely deranged natural level. 2006 brought us vicious fights between little girls and Ben Franklin, time-traveling golf grifter; last summer, we saw one-legged boxing follies and the glory and majesty of Coach Kaz, PI to the rock and roll Carole King. Thus, I’ve been patiently awaiting the end of the very special “Elmer gets deported” storyline so we can move on to the summer madness.

But now, as we’re only a few weeks away from the start of football practice, it’s becoming clear that there is no joy in Milford. Elmer’s springtime woes have just dragged right on into July, as he’s been recalled from his two-week Mexile to take a spot on the independent minor league Kalamazoo Kings. So instead of boring high school sports action, we’re getting boring vaguely professional sports action, and it’s boring. The faint hopes that were raised by my first read of panel two’s narration box — “It’s the Kings vs. the Chillicothe Pants” — were dashed by a closer inspection of the text. Even the red-hot lower back action in panel three can’t save this from snoresville.

For Better Or For Worse, 7/30/08

After the trivet incident, I’m hesitant to admit when I have to look up a word in the dictionary, but: mucilage? Really? Maybe the reason Lynn Johnston is retiring is because there will soon literally be no words left in the English language to pun upon.

“An adhesive solution” is no doubt the meaning intended here, but the dictionary built in to my computer has as the word’s first definition “a viscous secretion or bodily fluid,” so this actually may not be a pun at all. “What you’re feeling? That’s mucilage! Please, change me! My own daughter refused and said I was ‘gross!'”

Beetle Bailey, 7/30/08

Like the fact that he could see right up your skirt in panel two, for instance.

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Mark Trail, 7/19/08

Smart thinking, Kelly! After all, if you’re a foolish young woman prowling around at night with a forty-year-old camera and an off-tan slab of bacon, the last thing you want is to be surprised wearing only your sexy body-shaping slip. No, it’s best to put on your mom jeans and tuck in your shirt. But be careful! Make sure you don’t wake up your fellow campers with the sounds of rustling polyester as you tie your cravat and adjust it to that kicky angle that all the boys like.

Beetle Bailey, 7/19/08

At last, the idea that Beetle Bailey is completely out of touch with today’s military has been disproved! Obviously General Halftrack refuses to be shown up by those jerks over at the Air Force and has managed to divert Camp Swampy’s allotment of anti-terrorist money to the construction of his own comfort capsule.

Hi and Lois, 7/19/08

Today’s unsettling thing that sounds like the title of ’70s exploitation movie about prostitution and should not be coming out of the mouths of little girls in the comics: “Torn between profit and pleasure.”

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Apartment 3-G, 7/16/08

I’m a tad bit uncomfortable at the notion that the phrase “husky note of longing” is just sitting there in the comics pages where little children can see it — not because I’m sexophobic, but because I worry that impressionable eight-year-old-boys everywhere will try to imitate it, and end up sounding like Lauren Bacall. Wait, did I say “uncomfortable”? Scratch that, because that actually sounds hilarious.

In panel three, Margo is looking discombobulated and holding the phone several inches from he ear. She looks less like someone being proposed to and more like Peter Parker being berated by J. Jonah Jameson.

Beetle Bailey, 7/16/08

Good Lord, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC, how clear do I have to make it? ENVIRONMENTALISM DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.