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Gil Thorp, 7/17/17

Oh, man, it looks like I stopped paying attention to Gil Thorp back in, uh, May? We all learned some valuable lessons about how domestic abuse is bad but also it’s possible to construct an elaborate narrative scenario that makes someone seem like a domestic abuser when they really weren’t, so don’t jump to conclusions, but also you shouldn’t let anger get the best of you or pretend to like some girl just because your friend likes her friend. Anyway, baseball’s over and now we’re coming to … football? Ugh, remember when Gil Thorp used to do delightfully insane summer storylines, like Coach Kaz moonlighting as a rock star’s bodyguard or Marty Moon getting grifted at golf or Gil wrestling a possibly senile old pro wrestler, for charity? Anyway, this year’s football plot actually looks a lot like last one, when an ex-trainer turned unpaid assistant football coach helped a goofy linebacker (?) who wanted to be a quarterback but who was extremely bad at it get marginally better at it, but never actually play a meaningful down. Anyway, are these … the same people? Does Kevin want to be a fullback now? Who are the tall Watchers cooly and dispassionately observing them from the stands? Are we gonna get a fucking bonfire this year or what?

Mark Trail, 7/17/17

There was a brief moment when I thought we were about to have a big reveal where the lady we’ve thought was a hostage this whole time was actually a member of the gang, but, nope, she was already tied up and gagged while Baldy McBankrobberboss was talking to another criminal associate, which, whatever happened to that guy, anyway? But the important thing is that I find it 100% plausible that these two FBI dudes spent hours staring at video footage of a bank robbery and thinking “There’s something off about this robber, who must be a man because bank robbing is something men, not women, do. But what it is it? Can’t put my finger on it, let’s send it to the nerds down in Analysis and see what they come up with.”

Spider-Man, 7/17/17

I’m not an expert in How Hollywood Works or anything, but I’m finding a studio flack telling an actress “thank God you weren’t killed in that freak armadilloid attack that destroyed half of Brentwood, because we need you at a junket in San Francisco right away!” to be extremely believable.

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/23/17

Crazy Harry is one of those characters who Funky Winkerbean has never really figured out what to do with, post-time jump. His nickname is a callback to his amusing eccentricities during the wacky teen version of the strip, but now mostly is a sad reminder of his pervasive anxiety and depression. Anyway, you may think this is a strip about a man so out of touch with reality that he doesn’t recognize what ordinary household products like shampoo look like, and it is of course about that, but it’s also keeping with the strip’s canon about one of Crazy Harry’s business ideas/hobbies: digitizing VHS tapes. So maybe it’s Crazy Harry’s wife who’s confused here? Anyway, the point is, somebody couldn’t resist the “what if a person thought ‘head cleaner’ was another word for shampoo” joke, even though they literally stopped making VCRs last year.

Gil Thorp, 5/23/17

“I’d say it was news — in another time and another place. Specifically, in a time and place where domestic abuse allegations have long-term consequences for elite athletes. That time and place certainly isn’t here and now, ha ha!”

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Gil Thorp, 5/15/17

OK, finally, after much dramatic wheel-spinning, we have this spring’s Gil Thorp storyline coming into shape: everyone loves muckraking investigative journalist Dafne when her reporting is bringing down fat-cat school board members, but when she starts nosing around the past of transfer student/rage maniac Ryan van Auken, she’s going to find out that her fellow teens aren’t that jazzed about a free and independent press after all! The last couple weeks have mostly been about a couple of boys’ track team members engaging in some extremely mild flirting with Dafne and one of her softball friends, so that will presumably work its way into the drama somehow, though honestly I’d rather it didn’t because it was frankly pretty boring.

Also, Dafne jokes about phone conversations being totally ’90s, but note that she’s apparently switched to her cell phone in mid-conversation, because landlines, ew, gross.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/15/17

I stand by my assertion from last week that Snuffy Smith’s depiction of the rural poor is fundamentally inauthentic, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t reveal interesting things about the mainstream society that creates and consumes it! For instance, in today’s strip an inhabitant of this isolated, impoverished hamlet discovers that his environment has been strewn with mass-manufactured garbage, and we’re expected to believe that he’d be ecstatic about it because he can extract a few pennies of marginal value from picking through the scrap.