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Gil Thorp, 7/31/09

I was hoping that Marty DeJong’s wrath was going to cause some actual introspection on the part of Gil on how he handles his young charges, but what with Kaz’s quick quips, I see now that these meatheads are completely incapable of self-reflection of any sort without drastic measures. So: remember how at the beginning of The Sixth Sense, Donnie Wahlberg breaks into Bruce Willis’s house and totally kills him, but he doesn’t realize it, and he’s, like, a ghost throughout the whole movie? Well, what if that’s what’s going to happen here? Marty DeJong has in fact already burned down Thorpe Manor, killing the entire Milford coaching staff. Since they very rarely interact with the student athletes they ostensibly coach, and much of the actual day-to-day coaching work is performed by random community members who wander in off the street, it may take them until the middle of basketball season to realize that they’re dead; when that moment comes, they’ll finally walk off into the light in order to reach the next plane of existence, greeted by a white-robed Clambake.

Dick Tracy, 7/31/09

“Yeah, I mean, she’s dead already, so belay that order to do anything urgent about it. We’ve all seen a dead body or twelve, am I right? I know I have. C’mon, these people paid good money for their circus tickets, on with the show! You might want to throw a blanket over her, if you can find one around somewhere; no big deal, otherwise.”

Curtis, 7/31/09

I haven’t mentioned how Curtis has been all Oedipal and creepy and weird for the last two weeks, with Curtis and his dad fighting for Diane’s attention with dueling ailments, but boy howdy has it been all Oedipal and creepy and weird. At least most of the strips have contained actual jokes, or reasonable joke substitutes; today’s strip seems to be under the impression that being Oedipal and creepy and weird qualifies as a punchline in and of itself.

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Beetle Bailey, 7/29/09

The action in today’s Beetle Bailey obviously violates every workplace sexual harassment regulation known to man, not that I expect Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Enterprises LLC to realize that there might be something inappropriate about handing a co-worker a skimpy undergarment and then demanding that she put it on right in front of you. Ignoring that for the moment, though, I do have to say that I like the (probably accidental) way that the always-unsettling wiggle lines of horniness emitted by Killer’s hat-nodules form what appear to be quotation marks around the word “present.” “I got you a ‘present.’ Well, it’s not really a present for you.”

Crock, 7/29/09

Now here’s a problem that arises when the art in your strip is mangled and impenetrable: I guess today’s punchline is supposed to some cruel joke about how the librarian’s girlfriend is ugly, but this being Crock, who can tell? Whether the joke is about supposedly ugly people or supposedly pretty people, they’re all just barely-recognizable Crock-squiggles.

Dick Tracy, 7/29/09

Wait, did I say that Dick Tracy was like German expressionist film? Now that we have an elaborately dressed ringmaster responding to a tragic scene by repeatedly shouting “It happened!”, I’m updating that assessment to David Lynch.

It’s nice of Dick to address our no-doubt-implicated-in-the-crime-but-still-emotionally-tortured ringmaster as “Mr. Ringmaster.” He knows that it costs him nothing to be polite, just as it will cost our overburdened court systems nothing when he executes everyone involved without trial in front of hundreds of horrified onlookers.

Mary Worth, 7/29/09

Oh, goodness, Charley isn’t just a sex pervert, but also an alcoholic, by which I mean “someone who drinks alcohol that isn’t the terrible ketchup-red wine they serve at the Bum Boat.” Delilah is right to cringe on that couch in terror! Of course she wants plain soda water, as flavored sodas are far too exciting.

Family Circus, 7/29/09

As several faithful readers have pointed out, this Family Circus camping sequence actually consists of reruns from the early 1980s. This explains the vintage station wagon, and the hanky code.

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Dennis the Menace, 7/25/09

It’s possible that Dennis simply lacks the intellectual capacity to be particularly menacing. Certainly the way he and Joey are looking at that shoe, with a sort of earnest puzzlement, doesn’t really speak well of their brainpower. “Hmm, can we eat it? Only one way to find out!”

Gil Thorp, 7/25/09

There’s something wholly unbelievable about this cartoon. It’s not that Coach Kaz has rounded up some no doubt wholly innocent young man after 48 hours of “detective” work, and it’s not that he’s delivered the kid by the scruff of his neck to Gil, with the expectation that swift justice will be dished out in the form of a vicious beating; that all makes total sense. But I refuse to believe that alpha jock couple Gil and Mimi spend their lazy summer afternoons playing chess like a couple of poindexters.

Dick Tracy, 7/25/09

Dick Tracy’s look of intense bug-eyed excitement in the final panel tells it all: though he knows that it’s important to represent himself as a feeling human with at least a tiny glimmer of empathy, any scene where corpses tumble through the air is exactly the sort of thing that he likes the looks of.