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Archive: Gil Thorp

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Mimi saw Marty’s goatee and thought she was in the mirror universe for a second

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Gil Thorp, 2/22/19

You know, I joke about how everyone in Milford is obsessed with high school sports, but we could be getting a skewed view into this town because so many of our characters work for the Milford High athletics department. Gil and Kaz seem to only seem to socialize with each other, occasionally dragging their partners along for double dates, but it seems that Mimi does in fact close, rewarding friendships of her own, in the form of these three women who we’ve literally never seen before in the 14 years I’ve been reading this strip! Anyhoo, because true friendship means hating your friends’ enemies, Mimi’s pals are furious that Marty Moon has dared to, uh, come into a public place to exchange money for goods and services. Mimi knows that the best way to defuse the awkward social situation that arises when you bump into a nemesis in public is to do some elaborate pantomime that really draws attention to yourself.

Hi and Lois, 2/22/19

I love how genuinely crestfallen Chip looks in the second panel. “You mean that I’ve been a sullen dick for my entire adolescence and my room is a borderline health hazard and mom … doesn’t love it? Who could’ve predicted!”

Pluggers, 2/22/19

You’re a plugger if you buy one of the pricier kinds of vegetables and immediately throw it into the garbage disposal just to make some kind of point.

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Mark’s chitinous exoskeleton will definitely come in handy here

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Mark Trail, 2/19/19

Hell yeah everyone, the seemingly eternal Mexican vacation is over and Chris “Dirty” Dyer is back and ready for revenge! “Dirty” was last seen lounging erotically on a beach somewhere almost a year ago in between bouts of knife-thorwing practice, and by all means follow that link for a bunch of other links that explain who he is and what his beef is with Mark, but the important thing is that “Dirty” has given up on knives and moved on to flamethrowers, and is now using one to melt what appears to be a simulation of Mark Trail, only blonde, and made out of … candle wax, maybe? Or plastic? A plastic mannequin devoid of emotions and genitals, much like Mark himself? Anyway, I hope this presages the final conflict between Mark and “Dirty”, but probably this glimpse is supposed to tide us over while we endure another 10 months of Mark writing a story about [spins wheel] endangered frogs and getting mixed up in a [spins wheel again] insurance fraud scheme.

Mary Worth, 2/19/19

Hell yeah once again everyone, the seemingly eternal Ian-Jannie plot is over and now Mary is back and gonna get her friend Estelle laid! Not sure what this bodes for Libby, who Mary only fobbed off on Estelle because she missed her dead husband, but we’ll deal with that when we need to! The important thing is that Estelle “miss[es] having a man around,” if you know what she means (she means sex). If fortysomething Iris can bed a 23-year-old millionaire, elegant Blythe Danner lookalike Estelle should at least be able to woo a 45-year-old with a steady job and health insurance.

Gil Thorp, 2/19/19

An interesting contrast between the public and private sectors here! It looks like yet another concerned citizen — the real customers of the Milford school district — has come to the conclusion that Gil Thorp sucks, but since Gil and everyone else at the school have cushy union jobs, they don’t have to respect anyone else’s opinion or even try to stop sucking! Meanwhile, in the cut-throat, free market world of sports radio focusing exclusively on high schools, B/Robby has already shown he can beat Marty Moon at the metrics the station owners care about, so he’s about to climb the corporate latter at Marty’s expense. The system works!

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He’s going by “Maxwell” now, which is probably a good idea to be honest

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Blondie, 2/15/19

Look, while it’s conventional wisdom that legacy strips somehow remain lucrative enough to pay ghost writers and other gagsmiths, I don’t have any specific knowledge of what goes on behind any particular strip. Officially, Blondie has been written by Dean Young, son of strip creator Chic Young, since 1973 — literally as long as I’ve been alive — and beyond that one can only speculate. Still, I recognize creative exhaustion when I see it; all I can say is that back in 2005 whoever was behind the strip was still enjoying themselves, coming with absurd names for characters like Glambaster just for the sheer silliness of it. But now, fourteen years later, it’s a different, and much grimmer story. “These people, uh, they don’t like it when you’re late. What should we call them. Uh. Time. Clock. Clock … ers? Clockers. There. Done. What was that, Friday’s strip? Just one more to go for the week, thank Christ.”

Beetle Bailey, 2/15/19

I once was a groomsman in a Catholic wedding where the sermon started off nice and went quite long, and I tuned out for a little bit and then when I started listening again the priest was in the middle of a story about how his parents has a huge fight with each other at a McDonald’s because they couldn’t fully love each other because they didn’t love Jesus. “This seems like an odd childhood story to dig up in this context,” I thought, but then it became clear that I had missed the setup and the fight had actually happened less than a month prior to the wedding, at which point I thought “This just seems to reflect badly on your persuasive powers as a professional clergyman, Father.” Anyway, should Chaplain Staneglass have advised Beetle and Sarge that fellowship in Christ might improve their relationship rather than just telling them tautologically “you’d be nicer to each other if you were nicer to each other”? Maybe, since you’d think he would have some sense of how profoundly emotionally damaged Sarge is and realize that heavy spiritual artillery is in order.

Gil Thorp, 2/15/19

We all of course remember B/Robby Howley, the student basketball manager who perpetrated the entirely victimless crime of hooking a player up with fake Adderral, who for his trouble was banished to the rec center and would grow up to become twisted and hell-bent on revenge. But whatever happened to Max Bacon, the other participant in that transaction, the one who incessantly badgered and guilt-tripped poor B/Robby who finally came up with his hare-brained fake pill scheme just to get him off his back? He’s grown a beard and stopped bleaching his hair and is totally still in Gil’s good graces when he comes back to his old high school to yuck it up! Remember, it’s natural for an athlete to use any means necessary to compete at the highest level, and it’s the moral responsibility of those around them to not fulfill their expressed wishes.