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Curtis, 12/14/16

Curtis is a strip that I have many, many soft spots for, even when it comes to its eternal running gags, and since I admitted that I basically found this hemorrhoid joke in Crankshaft funny, I will admit this: I always laugh when Barry does something childishly disgusting to annoy Curtis. Panel three, with its extremely vivid nose-picking sound effects and motion lines, is all the more a marvel in that it managed to get past whatever remains of the comics pages’ editorial oversight.

Mark Trail, 12/14/16

Oh, in case you’re wondering, Mark and Abbey successfully leapt off that exploding island, into the ocean! Probably they’re about to be rescued by Cal, in Abbey’s stolen borrowed boat, but Abbey is taking no chances, and is clearly attempting to evolve into a magnificent cetacean, adapted to permanent life at sea, in the final panel.

Gil Thorp, 12/14/16

Ah, at last we get to the meat of the Gil Thorp basketball season storyline: the trial and tribulations of Aaron Aagard, who’s always first in alphabetical order for everything! Riveting stuff, I’m very excited.

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Gil Thorp, 12/12/16

Whoops, looks like I almost completely failed to talk about Gil Thorp’s football season plot this year, didn’t I? In my defense, it was super boring, and here’s the quick summary: Heather Burns became a third-string tight end in addition to a unpaid coach, a potentially interesting development that resulted in no real conflict or drama whatsoever, and also Kevin Pelwecki got to live out his dream by becoming like the fifth-string quarterback or something, while obviously never taking a single snap all season. Then the team didn’t make the playdowns. Personally, I blame the failure to have a bonfire this year, which is why I’m very excited to see that basketball plot is starting with a warehouse rave! Let’s start a new orgiastic tradition to bring good luck and extra fertility for the coming season!

Judge Parker, 12/12/16

I’ve also been neglecting Judge Parker, mostly because the pieces of the plot have been slowly moved into place over the past few weeks and I’ve sort of been waiting for action and drama. But now: action! Drama! Sophie, after mysteriously disappearing from the car wreck, just as mysteriously reappeared! And finally, with this press conference, the Spencer-Drivers really get some use out of the ludicrous faux-classical columns they wedged onto the front of their exurban shitbox to “class it up a little,” as they provide a nice visual frame for the news cameras.

I’m glad I hunted down that old Gil Thorp strip I linked to above, because it reminds me that the dude glowering behind Sam and Abbey is the detective working the case, and not, as I first assumed, Spencer Farm’s hired muscle, there to hustle journalists off the property if they ask too many nosey questions. The green jacket, in my mind, indicated that he had won the Masters Tournament at least once. The Spender-Driver family only hires retainers of distinction.

Funky Winkerbean, 12/12/16

Welp, considering that she’s been written as cartoonishly jealous throughout this dumb plot about Mason and Marianne’s non-romance, Cindy actually bounced back from the publication of shocking photos of her kissing him on the cheek outside her parents’ house pretty quickly! Not so Marianne, it seems. I assume that we’ve once again switched to black and white to emphasize the noir-esque nature of this story, which has absolutely no resemblance to a noir film in any way except that it might involve an innocent woman trapped in a web of lies having a fatal car accident on the twisting roads in the Hollywood Hills.

Slylock Fox, 12/12/16

So hey, if you were wondering what happened to Australia after the animapocalypse: it became a massive slave compound in which sapient sheep are kept captive, generation after generation, and forcibly sheared to earn export dollars for the dominant species, which appear to be wolves. Slylock makes sure that when one of these wolf-slavers steals from another, he faces justice — but when will justice come for the uncounted enslaved sheep? These carnivores need to watch out for the revolution that will put them in the same ash-bin of history with Homo sapiens.

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Hagar the Horrible, 10/14/16

You know I’m fascinated by Hagar strips about the transition from Norse paganism to Christianity, but today’s strip is a particularly unsettling entry it that canon. Traditionally, Scandinavians believed in a sort of vaguely defined afterlife that resembled Greek and Roman versions of the underworld; the idea that there was a distinction between Hel and Valhalla, with only the latter allotted to brave warriors, comes from a late, post-pagan source, and is now widely discredited. So the idea that death might be followed by some kind of divinely ordained reward for virtue — or, in this case, awful, eternal punishment for inadequacy — is a new one, and one that some are apparently embracing with more gusto than others.

Gil Thorp, 10/14/16

Speaking of things that displease the gods: I had been holding out that we hadn’t yet seen the ritualistic season-kickoff bonfire in Gil Thorp because it precedes our heroes’ home opener. But here we are, with Milford playing its first game at Mudlark Field (note: may not be actual name of stadium) without having received the ordained benediction by fire. Already we can see the divine punishment beginning: that pouring rain will not cease until Coaches Gil and Kaz, the entire Mudlark team, and the heretical Milford school board that nixed the bonfire as a cost-cutting and public safety measure are wiped from existence in an awful cleansing flood.

Beetle Bailey, 10/14/16

One of the running bits I did in the early years of this blog was that the secret subtext of Beetle Bailey was that Sarge and Beetle were lovers, which I eventually dropped because, with changing mainstream mores and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the idea got a lot less transgressive. It’s good to see that the strip agrees with me and is upping its game when it comes to these two. I’m not sure what exactly is happening here today, but it’s definitely unspeakably perverse.