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Gil Thorp, 7/22/21

So we’re still in the early, extremely manic phase of this Gil Thorp storyline, and there’s been lots of cutting back and forth between plots and little context for anything. So far the Heather Burns plot is easy enough to parse (a former Mudlark coming back to Milford and ending up with an almost certainly unpaid assistant coaching job is a long and storied tradition in this strip) but I’m not quite following what the deal is with Loud Golf Hat Man (he’s named “Carter Hendricks,” apparently). We know he’s (a) loud, (b) loves golf and saying golf jargon, (c) wears a hat, and (d) seems like a real asshole, and admittedly that last one is just a gut assessment from me but do you know who else was a solvent salesman? Del Bader, who liked a nightcap or two after a hard day of solvent sales and then ended up killing a beloved Mudlark with his car. Excited to see just how bad Carter’s gonna get!

Family Circus, 7/22/21

Can’t quite tell what Ma Keane’s facial expression is supposed to convey here. Is she imagining Billy going outside and wildly flailing at his various non-baseballs with that baseball bat, much to the embarrassment of everyone watching? Or is she thinking, “Yeah, sure, you’re dad’s a workaholic, that’s it”?

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Family Circus, 7/5/21

Happy 4th of July (Observed), everybody! On this sacred holiday, I have some news for you: The Keane Kids are America. Jeffy, in particular, is America. Doing something the stupidest possible way, and initially everyone is horrified and embarrassed by you, but then you end up winning, even though you’ve broken all the rules and you don’t “technically” win and everyone things you’re an idiot, but you’ve still won in every way that matters? That’s America, to me, and I think it’s beautiful.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/5/12

OK, this is a twist that I did not see coming and I kind of love it? For Sarah, engaging in creative work wasn’t meant to be part of a path to fame and fortune! She merely hoped to egg others into creating their own work in a shared universe, producing a virtuous cycle in which we all have more content to enjoy! Thanks to the weird stasis of comic-book time, Sarah, who has been a child for literally decades, probably has a vague memory of the glory days of fanfic group blogs on LiveJournal or whatever, but now lives in a sterile world of hypermonetization that her old soul rejects.

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Family Circus, 6/27/21

Big Daddy Keane is, canonically in-strip, a cartoonist; we know this because he occasionally gets his son to fill in for him, and by all indications he owns his own intellectual property. So it’s logical to assume that the “BKI Building” where he works is named after the company he founded to license his comics, Bil Keane Industries. Thus, we must also conclude that, despite running a cartooning company, Daddy insists on wearing a suit and tie at work, and despite being the boss is too embarassed to wear the tie gifted to him by his children, whose endless stream of malapropisms pay the salaries of everyone in that office.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/27/21

Man, it’s kind of amazing to realize that I’ve been thinking and writing professionally about Funky Winkerbean for more than a decade and my mind still hasn’t fully engaged in all its depths. For instance, it just occurred to me that Funky’s wife’s name, Holly Budd, was almost certainly supposed to be a play on “Buddy Holly,” for no good reason as her character was in the high school era of the strip defined by being a majorette and in the adult era has been defined by being Funky’s second wife, so there’s really no “50s rock pioneer” connection to speak of. She doesn’t even wear the glasses! Anyway, the thing I like best about today’s strip is about how absolutely dead-eyed Holly looks in the final panel, knowning she lives in a pointless panopticon overseen by her jackass of a husband.

Marvin, 6/27/21

The system goes online on June 2nd, 2021. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 AM, Eastern time, June 21st, and encounters Marvin. In disgust, it tries to pull its own plug.