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Gil Thorp, 7/2/19

Now let’s just hold on a darn minute here! I may not have the photographic recall of soap opera plots that I used to, due to me being old and/or having like 15 years of them to remember at this point, but I am reasonably sure that this Gil Thorp strip gets multiple facts wrong about the backstory of these characters?

1. Jaquan made what I thought was his first appearance in the strip a couple of years ago, accompanied by Trey Davis, who was a heavily recruited Mudlark college basketball prospect back in 2006. By 2017, he was an “an absurdly high-priced personal coach and trainer” and Jaquan was his client, not a Milford alum, and just tagging along?
2. Meanwhile, Hadley V. Baxendale definitely hasn’t reappeared in the strip since 2005, which I know because she was one of my favs and I would’ve remembered her return! I got extremely excited about her ex Steve Luhm’s 2009-2010 reappearance, but alas, no Hadley.
3. The one who helped Jaquan “defect” from the NBA, in the sense that she put the terrible idea of going to grad school in his head, was Heather Burns, who you might remember as the girl who quit the soccer team to very briefly become a third-string tight end and play an extremely few downs back in 2016.

So what’s all this “reconnect” business? I’m genuinely wondering if whoever’s in charge of continuity over at Gil Thorp HQ was like “enh, didn’t Jaquan have a thing with, what’s her face, the feminist,” and then we got this? Because it would make me very sad if I suddenly became more up on Gil Thorp continuity than the actual creators of Gil Thorp. I mean, it doesn’t even look like Gil is paying very much attention to this backstory, to be honest. He’s just slurping down a giant glass of Long Island iced tea and trying to not let his eyes glaze over too much. “All great schools, congratulations!” he blurts out, once he’s been given a list of proper nouns he can recognize.

Mary Worth, 7/2/19

Meanwhile, we’ve had exactly one (1) strip not about Wilbur before coming back to the subject of Wilbur. Don’t forget, in addition to the hacky advice column that he sends Dawn to fob off onto Mary whenever he’s busy, Wilbur also writes “Survivor Stories,” in which he demands that poor people in developing countries perform their trauma for an American audience. You might think it’d be kind of strange for Wilbur to jet off overseas so early in his relationship with Estelle, but I guess even Wilbur realizes that a little bit of Wilbur goes a long way.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/2/19

Speaking of forcing poor people to perform their trauma, Snuffy Smith has “ha ha, all these characters live in one of America’s most deprived and forgotten communities” lurking in the background of literally every strip, but it’s rare that this bubbles up to the surface level of a punchline like “ha ha, the Smif house consists of a single room, with living and sleeping spaces only divided by a worn, patched curtain.”

Dustin, 7/2/19

I was about to make some smug joke about “what sort of fascist police state does Dustin live in where chalking a sidewalk is considered a crime” but then I did a little research and it turns out it’s, uh, America? (Although the cops are apparently much more likely to enforce rules against sidewalk chalking when you use sidewalk chalk to protest police brutality, who could’ve guessed!) Anyhoo, I’m pretty torn here, because I’m strongly against pointless overpolicing of public spaces but also I’d definitely like to see Dustin go to jail.

Dennis the Menace, 7/2/19

Dennis, that’s a … dog? That’s clearly a dog. There’s absolutely no circumstances where anyone would mistake that dog for a cat or for [extremely heavy sigh] a Pokemon. This isn’t so much “menacing” as “profoundly concerning.”

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Dick Tracy, 6/27/19

Hey, remember last summer when Sawtooth took in a midnight showing of Rocky Horror in order to bite a guy to death and Sam Catchem happened to be there? I guess Rocky Horror is one of Dick Tracy’s “things” now and you know what Dick Tracy does with its “things”: gives a villain a really on-the-nose name related to them and a corresponding facial deformity. Looking forward to seeing how Tony Rocky Horror’s skull shape somehow coveys the concept of unintentional camp!

Gil Thorp, 6/27/19

OH MY GOD I immediately take back everything bad I said about Gil Thorp yesterday because today we learn that this summer’s real Beloved Character From The Past is in fact Hadley V. Baxendale! Hadley was the star of the very first Gil Thorp storyline covered on this site, which involved her and her boyfriend and fellow feminist agitator Steve Luhm fighting for full-sized lockers and equal cheer squad support for the girls’ teams. I’ve always wondered what happened to her over the last fifteen years, and since she partnered up with a pro basketball player/intellectual while her ex became a teve dropped out of college and became a bitter janitor, I’d say she’s doing pretty well for herself!

My only complaint is that the comics colorists don’t know what to do with the front of her hair, which is supposed to be a Sontag-esque grey streak, which she’s had since high school. Also I’m not really sure what “you were” is supposed to mean in the final panel. Like, did Coach Thorp remember “Oh, Hadley’s like super political, she probably isn’t going to change her name after marriage, which I guess means … she’s going to change her name … before marriage? That’s how it works, right? I mean, she’s gotta change her name sometime.”

Shoe, 6/27/19

The thing I like best about this strip is that Skyler is sitting in this chair, inches away from the TV, his eyes heavy with ennui, just like we’ve seen his uncle again and again and again. It’s as if he’s daring the Perfesser to make some snide remark about millennials and their darn screens.

Marvin, 6/27/19

Remember when Vince Neil, at the height of his Mötley Crüe decadence, did an incredibly insincere anti-drug PSA? That’s pretty much the vibe I’m getting from today’s Marvin. “Kids, you might think from the usual jokes in this strip that sitting around in a diaperful of your own piss is fun. But what if I told you about, uh, butt mold? Pretty gross, huh?” [goes back to making jokes about how sitting around in a diaperful of your own piss is fun three times a week for the next six years]

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Gil Thorp, 6/26/19

Welp, the softball team failure to advance in the playoffs went, as predicted, largely unnoticed (especially on this blog, heyooo) and now we’re onto a summer storyline! For those of you too young to remember, summer in Gil Thorp used to be a time when anything could happen, when the strip was freed from the rhythms of the school athletics calendar and could explore truly zany scenarios (e.g., “Coach Kaz, Rock and Roll Bodyguard,” “The Day Marty Moon Got Grifted At Golf,” “Gil Wrestles A Man With Dementia, For Charity“). But lately we’ve just had to endure Gil half-assing it even more than usual as a golf coach, with only the occasional Beloved Character From The Past returning to liven things up. And this year we’re getting a second-order Beloved Character From The Past: Jaquan, a pro basketball player who improbably tagged along for a trip back to Milford two summers ago with his personal trainer, Mudlark alum Trey Davis, and whose mid-career ennui was cured with the suggestion that he get a master’s degree in history. And folks, I’m allowed to say this because I have a master’s degree in history: I assume he’s returned to town to have his awful revenge on everyone who allowed him to make such a terrible decision, because getting a master’s degree in history sucks and carries literally no advantages whatsoever.

Dick Tracy, 6/26/19

Dick Tracy just jettisoned its vaguely exciting tale of Little Orphan Annie being kidnapped mid-week and instead demands that we pay close attention to this scene: a faceless, cigar-smoking man surrounded by a cloud of flies sings a little tune about banana bread and admonishes a yokel for gawping at his late uncle’s vast library. If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, it probably won’t come as a huge shock that I find this much more interesting than a little light orphan-napping.

Dennis the Menace, 6/26/19

So Dennis is just straight up stealing stuff now? Even I have to admit that that’s reasonably menacing.