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Gil Thorp, 11/16/22

It’s been a while since I’ve kept you up to date on the various plot threads in Gil Thorp, a strip that appears to be on a breakneck pace to cover all the Teen Issues before comics and/or teens are declared illegal, but the important thing to know here is that (a) Milford High held a hyper-realistic mass shooter drill, presumably with help from an overly enthusiastic theater department, that left Keri sobbing uncontrollably in front of their peers, and (b) a hitherto unseen Milford student named Allyson is one of three hitherto unseen Milford students who have died of a drug overdose this semester, so naturally these threads come together with a fistfight at a funeral. I’ve noticed what struck me as a fairly deliberate choice to show Keri sporting chunky rings across four fingers this whole semester and I’m quite pleased to have seen this little detail pay off so violently! Anyway, I deem this as the greatest Newspaper Comic Strip Funeral Fight (Continuity Strip Division) since the Great Rex Morgan Coffinside Strangulation of 2012.

Crock, 11/16/22

Man, sometimes you have to admire it when a newspaper comic strip manages to slip a grammatically correct but semantically absurd “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” type sentence in there. “The government gave my cousin Kyle a great buy on his farm” sure is a sequence of words, all right! Did you manage to parse out what they meant? Did you successfully interpret them to potentially mean that Kyle still owned the farm, but the government was able to do things like bury toxic waste there? I myself did not.

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Crock, 11/8/22

As America’s #1 syndicated newspaper comic strip blogger, I probably have a better handle on the internal lore of many of the strips than their actual creators do. I’m not mad about this, it’s actually funny to me, but it does mean I’m compelled to point out that (a) Grossie and Maggot live in a tent, so it’s strange to think they have indoor plumbing complete with ceramic fixtures, and (b) Maggot’s job in the Foreign Legion is digging latrine pits, so it’s sad that this issue has become another source of conflict for them rather than something they can bond over.

Mary Worth, 11/8/22

OK, it turns out that Zak almost falling to his death did prompt Iris to change her mind about marriage, but not because she was faced with the awful realization of what life without him would be like and decided that she wanted to fully commit herself to their relationship. Nope, it was because the incident in which they worked together to save his life after he did something extremely stupid showed what a great team they were, and why shouldn’t those teammates get the tax advantages they have coming to them?

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Crock, 10/16/22

I’ve been reading Crock for … let’s just say “many” years now, so I am of course well familiar with all of its terrible running gags, one of which is that Crock’s mother (never actually seen in the strip) is in a nursing home somewhere and she’s very, very mean, even meaner than her cruel son. But in all that time, I always assumed (quite reasonably, I think) that the nursing home she was in was back in France. Algeria is a colony under military occupation, which is the very reason Crock and the Legion are there in the first place! It’s no place for old French civilian ladies! But no, it turns out that she’s been in the Maghreb all along, which really raises a lot of questions about (a) whether the creative minds behind Crock ever really had a handle on the geopolitics behind Beau Geste or if they just liked the aesthetic, and (b) why Crock never visits his mother if she’s actually so close.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/16/22

Ha ha, wow, looks like Hank Jr.’s impulsive marriage really was meant to be. They’re both fans of roots country legend Truck Taylor! Who could’ve guessed? Not Hank Sr., he’s not going to the concert because he clearly hates that shit, but he’s making nice to keep the pancakes coming.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 10/16/22

No real notes here, just want to say that I am in love with Koppy’s sarcastic greeting here. They might not have invented a Bill of Rights for animals yet, but nothing can stop Koppy from firing off the subtle yet sick burns! Except getting punched in the mouth by Slylock, probably.