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Gil Thorp, 6/22/18

So here’s the difference between Barry Bader and his dad: Barry has an incredibly abrasive and confrontational attitude all the time, but especially when he’s unloading some truly noxious and self-serving opinions like “Everyone’s pretending Boo Radley was so nice just because she’s dead but actually she was kind of sarcastic” and “Everyone is mean to me because I’m short.” But Del has a much slicker and smoother aspect, even in prison, allowing him to seem somewhat more amiable as he drops truth bombs like “I started the accident, but that other guy finished it” and “D’you ever notice that people find the deaths of innocent teenagers with their whole lives ahead of them particularly repellent?” That’s the attitude that made him the Valley’s number one chemical solvents salesman, right up until he killed someone with his car.

Mark Trail, 6/22/18

Ha ha, Howard Carter certainly is an old tomb raider! Specifically, he was born in 1874, making him 144 years old — quite old indeed! — and the tomb he raided was King Tut’s. Probably he was cursed with one of those ironic immortality deals, but he actually seems pretty chipper at the moment, perhaps because he’s lured another set of sacrificial victims to sate the appetites of the universal Dark Pyramid God he serves. If this story doesn’t climax with the reappearance of “Dirty”’s erstwhile pharaonic pal (surely it takes more than a little light stabbing to dispatch an 4,000-year-old Egyptian God-king) I will be very upset at the missed opportunity!

Pluggers, 6/22/18

Ha ha, it’s funny because pluggers resent their wives and don’t want to spend time with them!

Beetle Bailey, 6/22/18

Ha ha, it’s funny because General Halftrack will soon be shitting uncontrollably!

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Gil Thorp, 6/12/18

If there’s one thing Gil Thorp is committed to, it’s the lore, so yeah, I guarantee there was a Gil Thorp plot years back about a star baseball prospect who accidentally lost a finger or three to a grain thresher, and I’m devastated that I missed it. Mostly what I love here is how completely Kevin Pelwecki, a delusional quarterback wannabe who, thanks to obsessively watching YouTube videos, has turned out to be Actually Good at baseball, takes this information in stride. A baseball player with a mutilated hand? A football player who accidentally cut off his leg with a chainsaw? It’s all par for the course around the Milford athletic department!

Six Chix, 6/12/18

So, imagine you have a dog holding other dogs at gunpoint yelling “DROP THE BONES!” Would it be funny? No, not at all. Would you at least be able to parse what’s happening? Yes, for the most part. Now, imagine that the “gun” is drawn so that it might not be a gun, but it still looks kind of like one, and the gun(?)-weilding dog also makes a reference to an “app” of some sort. Would you be able to parse that? Not anymore! But would it be funny now? Not really! Anyway, you don’t have to imagine all this, because it just got printed across America, in several newspapers!

Shoe, 6/12/18

The Tip O’Neil-esque bird-senator in Shoe is named Batson Belfrey (it’s wordplay, get it????) and I guess the bat logo on the front of his podium is part of a personal branding effort. I’d like to imagine that today’s somewhat labored punchline is a result of a new Shoe intern being told to write dialogue for a pre-drawn strip without really being given any background, and they saw the bat and thought, “Well, is he … goth? I guess he’s a goth senator? And goths like the Addams Family, right?”

Hi and Lois, 6/12/18

The two garbage men looked at each other in mounting horror. Irma had worn them down over the period of months, with both carrots and sticks they wouldn’t talk about, even to each other, until they said they’d take her husband’s body to the dump. But when the agreed day arrived, it wasn’t what they had signed up for at all. He was still alive. But they were in too deep now. They had no choice.

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Gil Thorp, 6/7/18

So it took almost a month, but the Milford Trumpet finally landed its interview with Barry Bader, to allow him to tell his side of the story! I thought the high point was a few days ago, when Barry said that his dad feels bad about killing Boo Radley in a drunk driving accident, but he’s doing his time and have you noticed that Boo could be kind of sarcastic when she was alive but now that she’s dead everyone thinks she’s a saint? Today, though, we get to the true meat of the interview, which is that Barry is convinced that the world is stacked against him because he’s short. Did you know that Barry was supposed to be short? I sure didn’t! I guess that’s what the joke in this strip is supposed to be about, because I guess Jay Bhatia is supposed to be short too! It would probably be easier to tell which characters in Gil Thorp were short if the POV in every panel weren’t at some crazy, improbable angle, just sayin’!

Mary Worth, 6/7/18

I regret to inform you that Mary and Dr. Jeff have spent their entire lunch date chatting about Wilbur’s journey of self-actualization, although apparently they’re still of the generation that doesn’t like to use the word “therapy” and so resorts to circumlocutions like “talking to a professional” or “seeing someone at the Medical Arts Building.” Dr. Jeff seems into it, but I do notice that he’s just rattling off whatever vaguely therapeutic things he can think of while holding the door open pointedly and hoping Mary gets the hint that it’s time to go.