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Gil Thorp, 3/26/20

Hey, remember Gil Thorp? Comic about teen sports? Usually pretty reliably nutty? This basketball season plot, about how Chris and Alexa are both basketball players and also only a fraction of a GPA point away from one another in the race for valedictorian, has been so boring that I haven’t talked about it in a month, so here, let me catch you up: the mean bullies who have it in for Chris tried to trick him into studying off a stolen chem test, but Chris didn’t use the stolen test and Alexa exonerated him, and it turns out they only had it in for him because Chris had ignored one of the mean bullies being bullied, three years ago, and anyway Chris had already told the administration that he wanted to be co-valedictorians with Alexa before all this happened. And that’s it! Everything’s fine! Everything’s fine and all drama is over. Except: Chris’s girlfriend from another school is about to make an appearance! Will she hit it off with Alexa, or possibly Phoebe? Does she exist at all? Is she just part of Chris’s long-running lie that he “has a girlfriend” but she “goes to Mercy, in Goshen” and everyone will meet her at his “end-of-season party” and now he’s finally going to run out of room to continue the charade? Why hasn’t this been the engine of the plot for the entire basketball season instead of this extremely dull valedictorian business?

Arctic Circle, 3/26/20

My read on this strip is that the penguins of Arctic Circle and the polar bears of Arctic Circle are friends, but what if they aren’t? I can’t stop thinking about the (I assume polar bear?) hand/paw reaching in from the left of panel three. I really adds to the sense that these polar bears, being obligate carnivores, are about to follow up their unsatisfying vegan shoe snack with some delicious penguin meat, having surrounded and corralled these poor birds before tearing them to bits in a savage, bloody frenzy. And sure, real polar bears don’t hunt in packs, but they don’t drink coffee or talk either, so I think I’m not off-base in imagining some real horror in store here.

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Gil Thorp, 2/21/20

I know I’ve been “letting you down” when it comes to the Gil Thorp updates this basketball season, but I think I’ve built up a lot of trust over the years as the guy who reads the comics so you don’t have to, so please believe me when I say that it’s because the strip has been extremely dull. Alexa Watson is very smart and competitive and has to learn to be moderately more aggressive on the court, and so has been trying to shift her everyday mindset a bit to get her there and that’s been … it? Sports? Sports action? In Gil Thorp, the comic strip about sports? I know, nobody is more disappointed than I am.

Dennis the Menace, 2/21/20

One duty I will never shirk is the fulfillment of my ongoing mission to keep you appraised of Dennis Mitchell’s wild oscillations between menacing and non-menacing, and I don’t think I need to tell you where “extremely excited about the possibility of electronic correspondence” falls on the spectrum.

Pluggers, 2/21/20

Pluggers will grab onto any possible human connection, even if it’s tenuous and accidental, as tightly as possible. All their friends are dying and they’re terribly, terribly lonely!

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Hi and Lois, 1/28/20

True story: When I was a kid and my mom first got an answering machine, her mother did not know how to deal with it, and would leave messages like she was talking to a person who wasn’t us, e.g., “[long awkward pause, then speaking very slowly] Tell Carol that mother called.” Anyway, this is just to say that Lois clearly has a physical answering machine attached to a landline, not “voice mail,” and you can’t listen to the latter in real time, so I question when this strip was actually written, or at least when the joke was conceived. I also don’t think we’ve ever seen Lois’s mother appear in the strip, so maybe she’s running to the phone to turn down the volume, because she doesn’t want her kids to know they have grandparents.

Mark Trail, 1/28/20

So, uh, the Mark Trail art is continuing to shift and change even outside the context of Dr. Camel’s flashback? Not sure if this is meant to represent everyone slowly losing their mind due to oxygen deprivation or if new-ish artist James Allen is trying to put his own visual stamp on the strip rather than hewing to the models established by his predecessors, but the important thing is that Mark and Harvey are going to snipe at each other until they freeze to death.

Gil Thorp, 1/28/20

Finally, something interesting is happening in Gil Thorp: the bully clique is going to mess with the aspiring valedictorian by playing what I firmly expect to be a series of escalating fart noises during his oral report. I hope this goes on for weeks.

Dick Tracy, 1/28/20

Mister Roboto acts like he’s mad that he has to mansplain Styx’s concept album Kilroy Is Here to a sexy part-alien lady dressed as a robot who he’s tied to a chair, but let’s be clear: he’s very excited that he gets to mansplain Styx’s concept album Kilroy Is Here to a sexy part-alien lady dressed as a robot who he’s tied to a chair.