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Funky Winkerbean, 7/23/21

I don’t mean to tell people how to deal with shocking news, but I feel like this Comic-Con crowd has moved on way too quickly to the part where they’re heaping heartfelt praise on undeserving Funky Winkerbean ancillary characters and haven’t spent enough time dwelling on the part where Phil Holt faked his death. This Q&A in real life would feature fewer questions like “This is more a comment than a question, but in a meaningful sense you two guys were like our parents” and more like “Why did you fake your death?” and “How did you fake your death?” and “What was it like being a ghost?” and “Have you looked into the legal ramifications of faking your death? Because I bet there are legal ramifications.”

Dick Tracy, 7/23/21

Remember when this strip used to be a nonstop symphony of graphic violence? Now it’s just letting its creators work out the most indulgent possible fantasy for a comic strip artist: that if their strip went into reruns, at least one of their readers would care enough to try to figure out what had happened to them.

Gil Thorp, 7/23/21

Ha, not only will Heather definitely be unpaid, but this unpaid job will prevent her from getting any actual jobs! Just perfect. I also have to wonder if the newspaper would consider Heather taking this gig a conflict of interest, seeing as the only newsworthy stuff that happens in this terrible town is inevitably Milford High-related in some way.

Zits, 7/23/21

Oh, nothing much to see here, just the Zits mom humping the TV during a sex scene. Enjoy your weekend, everybody!

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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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Gil Thorp, 7/13/21

It’s summertime in Milford, everybody! Is this the year we’re going to get a wacky summer storyline that isn’t about golf? Maybe! We definitely are going to get a wacky summer storyline about a beloved character from the past: Heather Burns, who you might remember as the girl who convinced a professional basketball player to get a master’s degree in history, possibly one of the worst pieces of advice I’ve ever seen given and I read the Mary Worth where Mary told a woman that if she didn’t like her past she should just remember it differently. Anyway, I can’t wait to see what Heather learned in Iowa (possibly after taking out tens of thousands of dollars in loans to get an MFA in creative writing) that will definitely help her career as a poorly paid writer for a dying small-town daily newspaper.

And in the other plot, we have … well, golf, I guess! At least one guy’s wearing a dumb hat, though. Can’t wait to see what antics this hat dude gets up to!

Hi and Lois, 7/13/21

Speaking of golf, I know it’s a rule that legacy cartoonists have to spend the entirety of each and every workday absolutely consumed with thoughts of all the golf they’re going to play when they’re finally done drawing cartoons for the day, but I think they’re supposed to actually come up with a punchline before they head out to the links, sorry guys.

Shoe, 7/13/21

[don’t get mad don’t get mad don’t get mad] IF YOU THINK HE TALKED FOR TOO LONG WHY ARE YOU MAD THAT HE TALKED SO FAST, WOULDN’T THAT HAVE MADE THE WHOLE THING GO QUICKER?????? [aw crap I got mad]