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Gil Thorp, 8/29/22

Seems its new author is transforming Gil Thorp from one of newspaper comics’ few remaining sports strips into a full-blown soaper, and at breakneck speed.

In just five weeks, we’ve seen Gil ambiguously flirt with Barkeep Bethany and mysterious blonde “Ms. Holmes,” and Coach Ms. Coach Thorp disappear with the kids on the one weekend Gil would be in town, explaining (?) that “I need Coach Gil to be more at home sometimes.” Luke Martinez, new coach at Valley Tech, is a thoroughgoing jackass who drunkenly insults Gil in a bar, libels him in a Marty Moon podcast, compulsively brags about his own athletic, coaching, and intellectual prowess, and here humiliates his teenage son (“Haha! Dad! Haha! You asshole!”). His wife Francesca humblebrags about being “just a heart surgeon” and subtly negs Mimi about being a “stay-at-home mom.” All the ingredients of an explosive melodrama!

Hey, maybe instead of the Homecoming celebration we’ll get an emotional bonfire this fall!

Crankshaft, 8/29/22

Let me save you a couple brain cells looking for a joke here: searching “kids play servers” will get you mostly family-friendly Minecraft sites, and “restaurants where the waitstaff also babysits” are very rare, imagine that.

My real interest here is Max and Hannah’s car. I get a strong “1996 Hyundai Accent” vibe, which fits their “failed movie theater entrepreneurs living with his parents” demographic. The odd thing is, everybody in Centerville and Westview seems to drive the exact same car. Check out Crankshaft himself, Ralph Meckler, and the Winkerbeans:

Crankshaft, 7/10/22 and 7/9/18; Funky Winkerbean, 8/24/22 (panels)

Did they get some sort of group discount? Was it part of Hyundai’s Rust-Belt marketing strategy? Do they pass cars back and forth between the strips? Does the Ohio UAW’s “Buy American” office know about this? Maybe they all just share one car? That last one wouldn’t surprise me; I mean none of them is going anywhere.

Curtis, 8/29/22

Free availability of an essential good mitigates absolute poverty but ruins local suppliers and distorts unrelated markets as families reallocate spending. Next up: “Ma, the rent is too damn high for no good reason,” brought to you by Ray Billingsley and Thomas Sowell.

9 Chickweed Lane, 8/29/22

When these two aren’t talking about sex, they’re talking about nothing. It’s an improvement!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Arctic Circle, 8/27/22

Arctic Circle boldly swerves out of its lane (preachy environmental half-jokes) directly into the oncoming traffic of toilet humor. Meanwhile back over in Marvin, Jeff and Jenny Miller return the tribute by composting their son.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/27/22

Hey, anybody remember Roland Mathews, the curly-haired “activist” hypocrite with a belligerent father and a blind spot for women’s rights? No? A solid number-three character during Funky Winkerbean‘s first year, Roland faded out during the strip’s evolution from political themes to high-school hijinx, reappearing once in 2008 for a reunion cameo (back row, second from right).

But the 50-year mark is a time for tying up loose ends, so here’s Rolanda! Will she recount the harrowing yet heartwarming details of her life’s journey? Will she at last unpack her complex issues with Roland’s old nemesis “Wicked” Wanda Waskowski, Westview’s no-nonsense sign-wielding “Girls’ Libber”? Most of all, will she deliver anything even remotely resembling a punchline?

Jury’s out on those first two.

Curtis, 8/27/22

On The Mickey Mouse Club of my longago youth, my least favorite day was Wednesday—”Anything Can Happen Day”—because, well, anything could happen. Mondays reliably delivered Fun With Music, and Thursday predictably brought in clowns, acrobats, animal acts, and circus paraphernalia. Wednesday? Total crapshoot, and very unsettling to the young psyche: these were the Cold War years, after all, and nuclear annihilation was on the table:

Today is the day that is filled with surprises
Nobody knows what’s gonna happen!
Why you might wake to see the Russian missiles raining down
Each one with several warheads to obliterate your town!
When they hit their mark
You will glow in the dark—
On the Mouseketeers’ Anything-Can-Happen Day!

So it is whenever Gunk arrives from Flyspeck Island to disrupt Curtis. His current gimmick is a self-filling salad bowl backed up by a salad-bowl-replicating suitcase, so that no one need ever again want for salad, or for that matter bowls. In today’s strip, Upper Manhattan’s Big Salad cartel predictably launches a witch-hunt to protect its business. But the kindly hardware-store owner begs off, since he… wait, what? “Ma! The writers murdered that kindly hardware-store owner for no good reason!” Anything can happen: this is what it looks like, people.

Many thanks to the indispensable ComicBookHarriet over at sonofstuckfunky.com for character histories of Roland, Wanda, and poor, dead, “I coulda been Lisa” Livinia Swenson.

–Uncle Lumpy

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/24/22

This week’s Funky Winkerbean is about Holly and Funky going to their high school reunion, which I think is hilarious, and to be clear, I mean that not in the sense of “this comic strip, which aims to make people laugh via jokes, is succeeding, because it’s so hilarious,” but rather in a cruel and mocking way. It’s hilarious (derogatory) because these people hang out with the people they went to high school with all time. Seriously! Is there any major recurring character in this strip who they didn’t go to high school with, other than the ones who are the children of the people they went ot high school with? So I’m not sure why they would go, but I’m also not sure why the idea of going would be so emotionally fraught, since they’re just going to see their whole social circle in another venue. I guess it’s possible that the Funky characters we know and love only represent a small portion of their graduating class and actually the rest of them rightfully hold the ones we’re familiar with in contempt? “Ugh, there’s Les and Funky and that crowd,” one of the normals will say. “Don’t make eye contact, I came here to have fun tonight.”

Marvin, 8/24/22

Ahh, Marvin, it looks like the hunter … has become the hunted. “Hunting” is a metaphor for pooping. Because Marvin talks about pooping all the time! You get it.

Judge Parker, 8/24/22

“Maybe I should just burn the whole compound down, for the insurance money! Haha, just kidding. But what if…?”