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Gil Thorp, 6/7/18

So it took almost a month, but the Milford Trumpet finally landed its interview with Barry Bader, to allow him to tell his side of the story! I thought the high point was a few days ago, when Barry said that his dad feels bad about killing Boo Radley in a drunk driving accident, but he’s doing his time and have you noticed that Boo could be kind of sarcastic when she was alive but now that she’s dead everyone thinks she’s a saint? Today, though, we get to the true meat of the interview, which is that Barry is convinced that the world is stacked against him because he’s short. Did you know that Barry was supposed to be short? I sure didn’t! I guess that’s what the joke in this strip is supposed to be about, because I guess Jay Bhatia is supposed to be short too! It would probably be easier to tell which characters in Gil Thorp were short if the POV in every panel weren’t at some crazy, improbable angle, just sayin’!

Mary Worth, 6/7/18

I regret to inform you that Mary and Dr. Jeff have spent their entire lunch date chatting about Wilbur’s journey of self-actualization, although apparently they’re still of the generation that doesn’t like to use the word “therapy” and so resorts to circumlocutions like “talking to a professional” or “seeing someone at the Medical Arts Building.” Dr. Jeff seems into it, but I do notice that he’s just rattling off whatever vaguely therapeutic things he can think of while holding the door open pointedly and hoping Mary gets the hint that it’s time to go.

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Hagar the Horrible, 5/4/18

I really have to question Hagar’s theatrical eye-roll in the final panel here. Lucky Eddie is often depicted in this strip as too soft to be a Viking warrior, but today, in failing to grasp a metaphor, he seems to understand a deeper truth: the places where we are most needy and open to love are also the spots where we’re the most vulnerable. He also knows that the heart and lungs are protected by the ribcage and sternum, but the belly is exposed to attack. Look for the trail of agonized gut-shot foot soldiers writing in agony as Hagar’s band makes its way inland looking for monasteries to plunder!

Gil Thorp, 5/4/18

Ahhh, the Milford Trumpet, the school newspaper you might remember from Gil Thorp plotlines like the one where a reporter suppressed the information that one of his athlete pals had a dangerous heart condition, and also the one where it seemed like an athlete had beat up his girlfriend but then it turned out he hadn’t, and then probably some others that I can’t remember at the moment. Anyhoo, it seems that the Trumpet staff assumes that, like me, most of the student body at Milford has forgotten that Barry Bader still goes there, so they’re commissioning a hard-hitting investigative piece: “Barry Bader: Does He Still Go Here, And Is He Still An Asshole?”

Mary Worth, 5/4/18

I think we can be … reasonably sure Wilbur hasn’t hurled himself off a cliff in a paroxysm of drunken despair, right? Right? Surely Mary would look just as overwhelmed as she does in panel two upon discovering, say, Wilbur loudly singing country music tunes into a grassy puddle of his own sick. PLEASE DO NOT KILL WILBUR, MARY WORTH CREATIVE TEAM, I ENJOY HIS SUFFERING TOO MUCH

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Gil Thorp, 4/27/18

Finally, our basketball heroes have solved racism forever, so now we’re ready to launch into our spring storyline, which is centering on … Barry Bader! Barry is a tremendous asshole who really leaned in to being a heel even before his father, a travelling salesman and amiable drunk, got a DUI and was sent to jail by the judge-mom of one of his teammates, then got drunk again and was involved in accident that killed a Milford student. This made Barry even more of an asshole and everyone ended up rejecting him socially, which is I think where we left it, like two years ago? I don’t remember any Barry action since, so I assumed he graduated or quietly transferred to another school where none of the students were friends with anyone his dad killed, but it seems the Bader family is being brought back for a very special plotline involving a Mudlark looking to make pen pals with a hot prison DILF.

Spider-Man, 4/27/18

I feel like I need to go back earlier in this storyline to when Spider-Man’s hitherto unheralded jumping powers became an important means of locomotion for the characters, because the whole point of it was that (a) it was a fast way to get a desperately injured man to the hospital while avoiding Miami’s notoriously congested freeways, and (b) it at least involved jumping unnaturally long distances, which is a kind of superpower, even if it’s an extremely dorky one. Now that we’re in the swamp and nobody’s in a big rush, you’d think everyone could just, you know, walk out on their own power, but hilariously “Spider-Man needs to carry Dr. Connors to the hospital while leaping” has morphed into “some characters are going to carry other characters while strolling through the Everglades.” Meanwhile, MJ has arrived on a jet ski, which means an end to this hilarious nonsense but the beginning of even more hilarious nonsense as we watch five people trying to balance precariously on a jet ski.

Mark Trail, 4/27/18

Ha ha, Rusty, you can’t remember the names of ancient Mexican structures or of the various cultures that built them! You just got … mesoamerisplained.