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Gil Thorp, 5/18/20

Oh, wow, it turns out Mike “The Mayor” hasn’t just been suspended or kicked off the team for his knifecrime; he’s been expelled from school, which has him understandably soured on the American education system! Still, I don’t like the sneering way he labels a woman who I assume is his mom as a mere “real estate appraiser” unfit to deliver insights into Southern Gothic literature or whatever. You can learn a lot from a real estate appraiser! Obviously they use a lot of applied math in their job, and they’re mostly independent small business people with a lot of practical knowledge of what that entails. They also are pretty attuned to the nuances of the real estate market, and how it’s connected to both macroeconomic and socioeconomic conditions — and because they go inside a lot of people’s homes while they’re still living in them, they can tell you quite a bit about the diversity of human private lives. That’s gotta be good for, what, a week or two of home-schooling, until Gil grandstands at a school board meeting and Mike’s back in class, stabbing whoever he wants?

Dennis the Menace, 5/18/20

The gap between “Margaret has a weird romantic obsession with Dennis” and “All the things that are ‘annoying’ about Margaret are actually future marketable skills, whereas all the things that are annoying about Dennis are actually annoying” has never been greater than it is today. Margaret is sitting there with a Bluetooth headset and a laptop because, I assume, she has an actual white-collar job now, whereas Dennis isn’t even making a joke here, he’s just painfully stupid. Painfully stupid. And by Margaret’s face, she may have finally wised up.

Mary Worth, 5/18/20

“No resistance on his part? Or did he stay behind enemy lines, plotting with confederates, importing weapons with the help of British spies, occasionally assassinating Gestapo officers, and preparing for the day when the rest of the Allies and an army of colonial troops would arrive on his shores, and your relationship would once again be liberated from the boche, who I guess is Jared, in this scenario?

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Gil Thorp, 5/6/20

Finally, the engine of this baseball season plot has been revealed: Mike “The Mayor”‘s wacky on-the-go-meal lifestyle has fallen afoul of Milford High’s dumb zero-tolerance-on-“weapons” policy. The hard lesson: kids either need to get up early enough to enjoy a leisurely balanced breakfast at home, or only eat nutrient-units small enough to hold in one hand and soft enough that they don’t need to be cut or, ideally, chewed.

Arctic Circle, 5/6/20

The funny pages are reacting to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic in all sorts of crazy ways, but I definitely did not see “jokes about penguin Zoom sex” coming.

Crock, 5/6/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because … Captain Preppie wants the men under his command to be outfitted with uniforms well suited for the climate?

Funky Winkerbean, 5/6/20

Yes, panel three, right there: this is exactly the amount of revulsion and contempt you should feel when Les Moore leans towards you and attempt to make physical contact.

Marvin, 5/6/20

Toddlers who are too young to be potty trained speaking in complete sentences and being capable of adult-level cognition: totally normal, not even worth remarking on

Newborn infants capable of same: OH MY GOD SO WACKY A SUREFIRE PUNCHLINE BABY

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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