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Gil Thorp, 5/5/25

Hey, remember when we met Marty’s AA pal, “Clam,” and I said, “Ha ha, wouldn’t it be funny if that was the same person as Clambake, the guy who did some unpaid coaching for Gil and claimed to be a Negro Leaguer, but it turns out he was a fraud?” Well, ha ha, it seems that is the same guy, and he only went around lying about his baseball career because he was drunk, I guess, but now that he’s clean and sober he’s welcome to come back to the Milford dugout to do some unpaid coaching again, or at least to stare meaningfully out at the field with Gil.

This actually gives me a chance to talk about the weird Gil Thorp variant of comic book time, in which the kids age in real time, spending no more than four years as school-age characters and occasionally returning as adults, but Gil and his fellow coaches seemingly do not. And the original Clambake storyline, which ran in 2007, actually gives us some pegs to real ages: in his fabrication, he claimed to have been 83 years old and played in the late 1940s, when in fact he was only 71, as Gil found out with some help from the local cops once he decided to maybe figure out if this random dude who’d been hanging around the school for weeks was on the up and up. That would make him 89 years old now … or maybe still 71, if he’s in the same time-stasis as Gil? Unclear. I’m interested in finding out, though.

Dick Tracy, 5/5/25

I haven’t really been keeping up with the details in Dick Tracy, but I am happy to inform you that Dick finally has all the information he needs to put an end to Neo-Chicago’s nephewcrime epidemic once and for all. I love that the only photo the cops have of these two is a party pic printed out from Facebook; I assume that the heavily armed SWAT team currently converging on their location has been warned that “suspects may be enjoying canapés, repeat, canapés.”

Pluggers, 5/5/25

Now, the other coastal elitists and I all like to see pluggers engaging in their vaguely depressing down-home antics and ask, jokingly, “Are pluggers OK? Ha ha!” But, for real: are pluggers OK. Are pluggers no longer able to properly care for themselves, or possibly being physically abused. Do we need to call a social worker, to keep the pluggers safe.

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Dennis the Menace, 4/23/25

Dennis, while you’re distracting your father with these inane questions, Mr. Wilson has gotten the jump on him: look at him, he’s already sound asleep! Another total Wilson victory unfolds while the Mitchells pointlessly contemplate hypotheticals! It’s unclear if Mr. Wilson has dozed off because the company is boring or if “mini-chess” played on 5×5 board simply can’t hold his interest, but either way he’s come out on top, by losing consciousness so he doesn’t have to listen or talk to you anymore.

Gil Thorp, 4/23/25

Uh oh, is Gil’s son Jami using his “shining” powers to recognize that Gil is slowly become one with the ghost “Pops”, or that perhaps he’s always been Pops, in a “time is a flat circle but you come out taller at the other end somehow” situation? More on this story as it develops, but if it doesn’t develop, don’t blame me, I’m not a ghost expert.

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Gil Thorp, 4/14/24

Look, my mission is as always to read the comics so you don’t have to, but sometimes with the continuity strips you really do need to read them daily, because the seemingly insignificant ones are there to set up the highlights. For instance, today’s strip, in which Marty is doing Step 9 of the twelve AA steps at the lady who took over his job and his beloved wooden crate press box, is much funnier if you had read Saturday’s strip, which establishes that he’s doing this in the middle of a game, probably in the hopes that some of his apology goes out on-air and people feel sorry for him and proud of the hard work he’s doing and give him his job back.

Heathcliff, 4/14/25

I’ve always assumed that Team Heathcliff resents Garfield at some level because, even though Heathcliff was the first orange cat comic on the block by several years, it never became the multimillion dollar marketing and merchandising juggernaut that Garfield evolved into. But then I see strips like today’s and realize that Heathcliff clings fiercely to its punk rock ethos. “You hate Mondays because you’re pandering to some sub-Dilbert level workaday everyman relatable feeling,” you can imagine Heathcliff saying here. “I love Mondays because I get to make other people hate them by ripping their face off and stealing their milk. We are not the same.”

Slylock Fox, 4/14/25

Wow, the post animalpocalypse society really is becoming more and more like ours every day, as Slylock (who I assume works for the Forestville Bureau of Investigations) becomes increasingly focused in getting one up in the bureaucratic war against the FSA (“they rely too much on high-tech gadgets and refuse to do the real legwork of law enforcement!”) and kind of forgets to do anything about Weirdly and the current giant robot situation.

Pardon My Planet, 4/14/25

Hey, man, uh, what do you think is in the milk you buy in the store. Like, for real. Because I don’t think milk works the way you think it works, like, at all?