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Gil Thorp, 3/29/21

The Gil Thorp winter basketball storyline is over! Donezo! It was boring and I’m not even going to bother recapping it! We’re cruising right ahead into spring, the new season that smells like freshly mowed baseball diamonds and [sniffs air] [record scratch] musty old books????

Yes, it appears our baseball/softball season is starting in the library — and the boringest part of the library, where they don’t even have any books or anything. Not sure what prospect would be funnier: if Debbie’s trailing spouse here got replaced on the library board by Gil or Coach Kaz or some other Milford-adjacent jock who really shakes things up in the stacks in a way that at first ruffles some feathers but ultimately everyone agrees it’s for the best, or if market research has shown that sports fans stopped reading newspaper comic strips years ago and so Gil Thorp is about to take a hard pivot into the thrilling library governance drama the last few remaining newspaper readers crave.

Hi and Lois, 3/29/21

I love how genuinely shocked Lois looks overhearing Hi’s tale. “Oh, no, he’s telling them about … golf? But we agreed! Not until they’re older!”

Family Circus, 3/29/21

Speaking of ruined innocence, I am very much enjoying Mommy’s expression. “Oh, no, am I going to have to deal with this moron’s thoughts about … his own mortality? At this hour? Absolutely not.”

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Blondie, 3/26/21

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but every once in a while a character pops up in Blondie who, even though they’re clearly drawn in the prevailing Blondie house style, gives off the vibe of being a caricature of a real person rather than a character made up out of whole cloth. I always assume this is done as a favor for a friend — or, in cases like today, when the dude in question is giving a knowing glance to the reader that says “eh? eh? I fell out of love with my fiance during the pandemic and no longer wish to marry her? eh?”, a personal attack on a nemesis.

Dick Tracy, 3/26/21

I’m continuing to refuse to try to understand the plot of the current Dick Tracy storyline and am just going along with its ~vibes~, and honestly having a pretty good time with it! I particularly like the final panel today, with a grim-faced Tiger Lilly shoving a crude drawing of a peace sign at a cop. “This is the commune’s cryptic symbol,” he’s saying. “Figure out what it means and you’ll be able to crack this thing wide open.”

Family Circus, 3/26/21

Billy looks pretty embarrassed, as well he should. If you’re putting on pants the normal way and can’t win a pants-putting-on-race against a kid who squirmed around until he somehow crammed both his feet through one pant leg while wearing shoes, you are not very good at putting on pants.

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Shoe, 3/21/21

You have to respect the absolute dedication that went into the production of today’s Shoe. For instance, someone at the syndicate presumably informed whoever thought up the joke that, no, society has not degraded so much that we can just print “cover your ass” in our talking bird funny-strip in mainstream newspapers. Did that deter them from soldiering on, even though the bowdlerized version of the phrase isn’t in common use at all? No, no it did not. Then, presumably, there came a point where the artist realized that, due to the long-established character design and the viewing angle chosen for the second panel of the strip, Shoe and the Perfesser’s tail feathers would be clearly visible. Now, you’re probably asking yourself: are the tail feathers themselves the analogue to the “ass” (or “rear”) of the common phrase, or do they themselves do the work of covering one’s ass/rear (which in this interpretation is the cloaca, I guess)? An interesting philosophical question, to be sure, but either answer renders the whole joke completely and obviously pointless. And yet, nevertheless, the Shoe creative team persisted. I for one think that’s beautiful, in its own way.

Family Circus, 3/21/21

One of the fundamental problems with long-running franchises and “cinematic universes” is that each new individual story adds a layer of canon that must be taken into account by future stories, and while I like to argue about Star Trek chronology and uniform design as much as the next nerd, I have come to sympathize with how this restricts the freedom of storytellers to produce an engaging narrative. That said, there are some lines that I feel strongly should not be crossed, no matter how entertaining the result. For instance, if there’s one thing we know from reading the Family Circus for decades, it’s that Jeffy does not understand the concept of object permanence.