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Gil Thorp, 3/30/17

As usual, once this Gil Thorp plot shifted from its insane setup to its inane resolution, I sort of lost interest in it, and I apologize! Quick summary: Aaron’s mom is on drugs and so he often goes hungry because she’s spending the grocery money on drugs, which affected his athletic performance, so Gil took him out to eat a lot, and it seemed like maybe Aaron was going to get sent into foster care and he was mad at the Freezy Bomb Boys for inadvertently narcing on her, but then she agreed to go to rehab and came to a game where Aaron did well and now it turns out that the family of one of the Freezy Bomb Boys will be letting Aaron live in their basement, and presumably feeding him. I’m not clear on whether this guy’s Ken Brown or Mike Granger, but whoever he is, I hope he likes having raves in his basement, because Aaron is definitely going to be throwing a bunch of raves in his basement.

Dennis the Menace, 3/30/17

I will sheepishly admit that “Dennis cheerfully blurts out all the shit his parents talk about their friends and coworkers behind their backs” is one of my favorite from the list of typical menacing actions in this strip. You’d really think that the Mitchells would have figured out that little pitchers have big ears and no sense of discretion by this time, although what with Dennis being eternally five, who knows, maybe every single Dennis panel over the past 66 years only takes place over six months or so of strip time so they haven’t gotten used to it yet? Anyway, Henry really shouldn’t be speaking ill of four-time NFL Pro Bowler Alex Karras, who could almost certainly beat him up.

Family Circus, 3/30/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because the other Keane Kids don’t care about Billy’s emotional distress and would rather watch their TV show about a businessman mouse who lives in the jungle!

Blondie, 3/30/317

Having been thoroughly enervated by the ennui of suburban middle-class life, Dagwood can only be cheered by the prospect of his own agonizing death.

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Pluggers, 3/2/17

You know, Pluggers has blurred the line between beasts and beast-people before, and they’ve even hinted at the kind of sexual relations that mark a universe where there’s a spectrum of sapience, but this — this is pretty explicit. Too far, Pluggers. Too far! The fact that the credit for this “joke” is given to a name that very well could be given to a dog is extremely not helping.

Gil Thorp, 3/2/17

Ugh, fine, Aaron isn’t actually on drugs, it seems; his mom’s on drugs, like far too many economically downwardly mobile Americans these days. I’m still not sure why he does well at basketball around payday? Shouldn’t that be when his mom can afford her drugs? I kind of want the payday thing to be a total red herring just to prove that the Freezy Bomb Boys were entirely wrong about literally everything.

Mary Worth, 3/2/17

Hey, speaking of America’s out-of-control opioid crisis, what’s going on in Mary Worth? Well, once again, it turns out that Iris has been so caught up in her own frivolous hobbies (before it was pursuing higher education, and this time it was fucking a 25-year-old) that she’s neglected her pill-addict son. Don’t worry, though: Jesus, who has long been Tommy’s hairstyle icon, is now also his not-giving-in-to-the-temptations-of-sweet-sweet-Vicodin icon.

Mark Trail, 3/2/17

Haha, Cherry sure seems anxious in panel two, doesn’t she? “Wasn’t someone out there doing a black-footed ferret and prairie dog survey? A bear isn’t going to help that at all! A bear can really mess up that kind of thing! I don’t remember who it was who was doing the survey exactly, but if they run into a bear, that survey is toast! This is terrible! I’m not going to be able to sleep at night, thinking about all the work what’s-his-name is putting into that black-footed ferret and prairie dog survey, which just is going to be ruined by some dumb bear!” “How’s Johnny doing? We haven’t seen him in years!” says Doc, pointedly ignoring everything his daughter is saying.

Shoe, 3/2/17

“I tried that once. It made me constantly aware of the crushing aesthetic demands that our society places on women, and let me tell you: no thanks.”

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Dick Tracy, 3/1/17

Dick Tracy started running in 1931, and The Spirit in 1940, which means that, at these characters’ origins, the early 20th century era of enthusiastic trust-busting was still within living memory, an era marked by this sort of political iconography:

What I’m trying to say is, in taking on this criminal “Supotoc” corporation, Dick and the Spirit may be rejecting the modern neoliberal Borkian approach to antitrust law and will instead be tackling monopolies the old fashioned way: with firearms.

Gil Thorp, 3/1/17

OK, my prediction is that probably what’s happening here is that Aaron’s mom has a crappy low-paying job with no insurance so they can only intermittently afford the prescription medication he needs to stay 100%. Maybe he has ADHD? That would be charmingly ironic, considering that molly and Adderall are both amphetamines.

Still, the funnier possibility is that Aaron is just straight-up into recreational drugs, despite his previous denial. It would really bear out the old Sherlock Holmes adage, “Once you’ve eliminated the impossible, maybe go back and check if you only think something’s ‘impossible’ because you asked a suspect whether he was guilty and he said ‘no’ and then you did no follow-up investigation.”

Shoe, 3/1/17

Hey man, I have to come up with funny material for this website each and every day, and I get that sometimes you’re tapped out. So when your dentist offers up a perfectly serviceable joke mid-cleaning, you don’t sit around fretting about, “Oh, my characters are all anthropomorphic birds, they don’t have teeth, this doesn’t make sense.” You use that shit, man. You use it and you don’t look back.