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Archive: Gil Thorp

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“I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant: 40+ Edition”

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Mary Worth, 11/29/19

Well, Iris has decided to consult a doctor for the symptoms she’s been experiencing. This guy kind of looks like Dr. Jeff, except younger, so maybe it’s supposed be Dr. Jeff’s son Dr. Drew, who two-time Dawn and got smacked around for it but hasn’t been seen since the new art team took over. Anyway, remember years ago in Funky Winkerbean when Les’s wife Lisa was told her cancer was in remission, but it really wasn’t and she was only told that as a result of some kind of paperwork mixup, and then she died? Well, it looks like Iris’s obvious pregnancy is currently being misdiagnosed as a typical case of old-broad-itis, which should lead to wacky results. As Marx put it in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

Gil Thorp, 11/29/19

Ha ha, Chet thought he could trust Marty Moon to help him with his plot to undermine Chance Macy and win his stepson’s love, but that’s too far even for Marty, so Marty narc’d him out, probably ruining his career and his marriage! Good times, good times. When the Mudlarks fail to make the playdowns yet again, Marty and Gil will be able to agree that at least nobody likes Chet anymore, so the season hasn’t been a total loss.

Gasoline Alley, 11/29/19

Is … is this really a great story? I know that the economic collapse of many small-town and mid-market media outlets has been devastating, removing an important check on political power in those communities, but I’m starting to wonder if they maybe deserved it.

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“I’m listening” is what Marty says to people who call into his radio show right before he runs off to take a dump

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Gil Thorp, 11/18/19

Well, weeks after making the mistake of trying to blow the whistle to Milford’s “mainstream” (i.e., Thorp-friendly) press, Chet is doing what he should’ve done in the first place, which is talk to Marty Moon, preferably in a context where Marty can get as drunk as possible with a non-Marty person paying for the drinks. So the setup is right, but the execution is botched. Marty says he’s listening but you can see in panel three that he’s already tuning out Chet’s blather about “two-a-days” and “Sam Finn” or whatever. C’mon, Chet! Lead with the scissors-throwing! Everyone loves a good scissors-throwing!

Family Circus, 11/18/19

“Daddy” may be back at the help of the Family Circus, but the layers of narrative artifice on display during “Billy (age 7)’s run” are still present. Dolly prays to the Christian God, but He does not exist within the Circus’s circle; the Father and Creator is downstairs, watching football. (Of course, in real life, this God is dead, and in-panel reality is sustained by Jeffy, depicted here as His prophet.)

Mary Worth, 11/18/19

Crouching in your office chair, airing your hairy legs out and pressing an ice pack gingerly against one side of your head doesn’t exactly scream “patented hangover cure” to me, but I guess Wilbur’s the expert! I don’t want to say every plotline in Mary Worth should involve Wilbur getting dumped or otherwise romantically devastated, but, like, every fourth one or so? That’d be great.

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Not sure if it’s worse if it’s short for “Zakary”

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Gil Thorp, 11/6/19

Aww, sweet injustice-hating Chance Macy nobly faked an injury so that his backup (who is the stepson of his antagonist) could get some playing time and a touchdown in a game where the Mudlarks were already way ahead. Could this guy get any more saintly? Looking forward to Chet getting unmasked and then dumped from the school board and then Charlie Roh’s mom divorces him and then he’s ritually burned to death in next year’s bonfire.

Mary Worth, 11/6/19

See, the difference between me and Wilbur is that if I were drunk and trying to needle a romantic rival about his name, the worst I could do is wonder why a woman would think she had honored a person with a totally normal name lke “Zachary” by giving her son the dumb misspelled name “Zak,” but Wilbur just went there with “Zachary fucked your mom, LOL,” huh? Anyway, shoutout to everyone who only just today discovered that “lovely but stern late-middle-aged woman jams a spring roll down a hapless doofus’s throat while a handsome man watches, smiling” is their primary fetish.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/6/19

“It was cold-blooded murder! I left those keys where I knew he would find them! And I’m not sorry! I’m not sorry at all!”