Post Content

Gil Thorp, 4/29/20

The current Gil Thorp baseball storyline has been almost as boring as the recently concluded Gil Thorp basketball storyline — Mike Knappe, a baseball player known as “the Mayor,” is often running late and makes weird breakfast-on-the-go combos and gives people nicknames and so far that’s been about it? — but today we have an embarrassment of riches. First off, we have NUTSO brand peanut butter; in contrast with Planters’ Mr. Peanut, which is a cheerfully foppish business success, the NUTSO mascot is an ordinary peanut that knows it’s about to be ground up into a delicious paste, and is spending its last conscious moments screaming in terror. Side note: wasn’t there some other zany peanut-snack brand in a this strip that we all had funs with a few years back? Like, called NUTZ or something like that? I’ve been spending way too much time Googling increasingly baroque variations on “nuts” and Gil Thorp and it’s killing me that I can’t remember! (UPDATE: Thank you to faithful reader Usacotts: It was NUT BOY!)

But [record scratch] all this zaniness is about to come to an end as Mike and his pals start diving into the oeuvre of Flannery O’Connor. Can “the Mayor”‘s good cheer and fundamental lack of self-reflection stand up in the face of Wise Blood’s dark musings on free will and the inescapable nature of religious belief?

Gasoline Alley, 4/29/20

TIRED: Tricking teenagers into performing manual farm labour without pay
WIRED: Tying farmers to their profession from birth to death, therefore creating a new class of feudal serfs

Post Content

Dennis the Mance, 4/11/20

Yes, yes, the real menace here is that Dennis’s mom is forcing her son to be a messenger in her marital psychodrama, and is just standing in the doorway watching him do it to boot, but I cannot get over the suitcase that Henry is backing for his bacchanalian trip to Sin City. Crisp white dress shirt after crisp white dress shirt … blue check pants, or maybe a sport jacket, or maybe a whole suit … those ladies aren’t gonna know what hit ’em!

Dick Tracy, 4/11/20

Many people worry: how will the elderly and others not fully plugged in to the internet stay informed as print media finally dies out? Well, don’t worry: they can just pick up their old-timey crank-driven phones and call up their cop friends to find out what they missed.

Gil Thorp, 4/11/20

Say what you will about Gil Thorp, but the strip really knows how to build up to a narrative crescendo and end the week on a cliffhanger! A walk? In the third inning? I’m on the edge of my seat!

Post Content

Pluggers, 4/6/20

A rule of classic horror, which has somewhat fallen by the wayside in this era of all-too-perfect CGI effects, is to never quite let the audience get a good look at the awful thing you’ve been hinting at all movie, because their imagination will inevitably fill in something far more terrifying than anything you could depict in practice. That’s why I respect what Pluggers has done today, allowing us to dream up our own image of what that greasy slice of pizza, which just landed cheese-side-down on this plugger’s nasty-ass floorboard and is now covered by a thick layer of matted fur speckled with gravel, will look like right before he shoves it into his greedy maw.

Gil Thorp, 4/6/20

It’s finally baseball season and we can move on from the utter snooze-fest that was the basketball plot, though we’re still in the early stages of this storyline, which is to say that Gil is just rattling off the names of various players to his compliant, favored media outlet. Still there are hints of fun to come: the outfield will feature unapologetic fraud artist Tiki Jansen and violent scissors criminal Chance Macy, so I assume that by “a lot of speed” Gil means they’ll be running a amphetamine-dealing ring from the dugout.

Dennis the Menace, 4/6/20

“He’s still sittin’ there watching it, though! Dad says old age has really turned his brain to pudding.”