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Gil Thorp, 9/3/15

YES YES YES MARTY MOON PAST ROMANCE PLOT YES I’VE NEVER WANTED ANYTHING SO MUCH IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!!! I’m assuming the lady in panel three is in fact Marty’s ex, and is the same lady from earlier this week who is supposedly some sort of smart person, though the fact that at one point she did sex stuff with Marty calls that into question. Clearly the “mental baggage” she’s referring to in her thought balloon is the unshakeable memory of the smell of Marty’s goatee, all discount whisky and microphone disinfectant.

Apartment 3-G, 9/3/15

Oh dear, it looks like Margo really has lost her grip on reality, for confusing and unrealistic reasons. No, Margo! If you have the money and she doesn’t, that makes you her boss! Are you so far gone that you’ve even forgotten basic capitalism?

Spider-Man, 9/3/15

“Yeah, blah blah, we’re literally poisoning you, your friends and family are sick and dying because of our negligence, please don’t dump our garbage directly into your home. Heard it all before! Get a job, hippie!”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/3/15

Poor Les has been haunted by thoughts of aging and death all week, so probably the sudden appearance of Dead Lisa shouldn’t be a huge shock. Is she here to gently shepherd her beloved through the Veil to the Other Side? Let’s hope! Cayla can use the life insurance money to have dinner in Paris, blessedly alone!

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Funky Winkerbean, 9/2/15

Ha ha, remember Coach Stropp, who used to cruelly mock Les’s athletic ineptitude, back when this strip was funny? Well, he’s dead now.

Hagar the Horrible, 9/2/15

Ha ha, a Viking always pays his final respects to his enemy. After he’s dead! Like that guy is about to be. Hagar’s sword didn’t slice through the flesh of his face, but the blow to his head was probably hard enough that his brain is already starting to hemorrhage.

Heathcliff, 9/2/15

Ha ha, those birds have a feeling of impending doom! Probably because Heathcliff is about to kill and eat them, hopefully in that order.

Mary Worth, 9/2/15

Well, at least nobody’s dead or about to die in Mary Worth, as Toby prepares to stride purposefully out into single life wearing a purple tracksuit and electric blue jacket, and … wait, what’s that? Over on the bookshelf?

OH MY GOD IT’S THE ASHES OF A DEAD DOG, PROBABLY! Fido has never appeared as a beloved Cameron-pet in the thirteen years I’ve been reading this strip; possibly Ian owned the pup before he even met Toby. I sincerely hope tomorrow we see Ian lying in bed, weeping and reading Toby’s note for the fourth time, clutching this urn of dog cremains like his favorite teddy bear. “You understood me, Fido,” he sobs. “You’re the only one who ever understood me.”

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Gil Thorp, 8/31/15

Not to be one of those people who keep saying “The good old days were good and the present day is bad” all the time, because those people are wrong, but there was one specific way in which the good old days were good, and that is that we use to get totally bonkers summer storylines in Gil Thorp. Those were the days when Coach Kaz spent his vacation serving as a security guard for an aging rocker, or when Marty Moon got golf-grifted by a Ben Franklin lookalike in a dumb hat. There was a brief return to form in 2013 with a zany senile pro wrestler plot but mostly the last few summers have been an uninterrupted run of dumb golf storylines; this year we didn’t even get that, with the focus mostly being on True Standish convincing his fellow big-time high school football prospects to ease up on having press conferences to announce their college choices, which was so dull that I’ve only mentioned the strip twice since the beginning of June.

But! That could change fast if the strip’s football-season plot proves to center on the long neglected Marty Moon, and change real fast if centers on a Marty Moon who mingles self-aggrandizement and self-loathing while day drinking alone and talking to nobody in particular. Throw in some sort of terrible “reality series for braniacs” B-plot and my expectations are suddenly so high that they’re guaranteed to be dashed in short order!

Crankshaft, 8/31/15

I’m pretty impressed by the rapid cycling from manic glee to abject horror between panels two and three here. “Seriously? You’re … participating in the democratic process? Oh, God, guess it’s finally time to throw the Constitution in the garbage and admit that this country’s centuries-long experiment in self-government is an abject failure.”

Funky Winkerbean, 8/31/15

Remember when you were young, and each additional year gained you social status and physical might that you could use to impose your violent will on your inferiors? Now the passage of time just brings you closer to the blessed end of your current suffering.