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Gil Thorp, 5/24/16

Despite having read Gil Thorp on the daily for literally more than a decade, I don’t actually know that much about high school sports! For instance, last week I boldly declared that the girls’ softball team was blatantly repurposed clip art of the girls’ basketball team, given that they were wearing uniforms that consisted of shorts and tank tops. In my experience softball uniforms looked more or less like boys’ baseball uniforms, and also included certain key pieces of equipment, such as hats and gloves. But here they are again, in those same outfits, only now there’s a glove involved? Is this really what softball uniforms looks like? Occasionally yes, according to Google Image Search! Shorts, really! How do you slide in those things?

Meanwhile, Papa Bader is learning that the go-go chemical solvent lifestyle is no place for a guy trying to avoid drunk driving. Jumbo orders means jumbo alcohol! It’s the salesman’s code!

Pluggers, 5/24/16

I’m pretty sure I’ve read at least one version of the marketing copy for Pluggers that contains the word “celebrate.” But the last couple days, man …. whoo. The plugger lifestyle isn’t gonna sell itself, guys, and this certainly isn’t helping.

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/21/16

When I was in DC for my book tour last month, at one point I found myself downtown-ish with time to kill, so I looked up the nearest Starbucks with the intention of parking myself there and soaking up the free wi-fi. It quickly became clear that I had in fact selected the Starbucks closest to the White House, and had to walk right in front of the White House to get there! Anyway, here’s some news if, like me, you haven’t been in that part of town since the mid-’00s: they’ve totally rebuilt Pennsylvania Avenue in that section as a very pleasant pedestrian mall, and you can actually get quite close to the White House now, at least as close as you could get in the ’80s when I was a kid, if not closer. Far be it for me to imply that Funky Winkerbean didn’t do the research here, so I’m instead going to assume that Toque Boy is just being extremely sarcastic, and Les’s look of crushing self-loathing at having just been publicly owned by one of his students is the real punchline.

Gil Thorp, 5/21/16

Hey, so, it looks like the girls softball team has been forced to play their games wearing their basketball uniforms! Clearly better funding is in order, by which I mean both better funding for high school athletic departments so that athletes can wear sport-appropriate uniforms and also better funding for comics so artists don’t just say “Enh fuck it” and drop in some clip art from three months earlier into their strips.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/21/16

Ha ha, it’s funny because the Smiths are so poor that not having the kids at home means they won’t go hungry for once!

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Mary Worth, 5/16/16

You’d think you that once you’ve graduated from high school and gone to college, you’re done with being bullied, you know? But nope, poor Dawn is just over here relaxing under a tree, probably texting fun memes back and forth with her dad or something, and then BAM! Up comes the three meanest girls at UC Santa Royale, ready to tear Dawn to pieces (emotionally). And while the “PC police” would have you believe that bullying is never justified, I think that when you’re a college-age young woman and you try to date your professor and he’s this dude, with this mustache, a certain amount of social opprobrium is fully justified.

Gil Thorp, 5/16/16

Ah, a solid Gil Thorp trope we haven’t seen in a while: “One of the Mudlarks is completely insufferable and everyone hates him but he gets redeemed, somehow.” They did with Andrew Gregory, who was a terrible braggart but then it turned out his parents had abandoned him and his siblings and Marty Moon had to pretend to be his dad so Social Services didn’t put them in a foster home. Anyway, Barry “Darth” Bader, not anywhere emo enough to be graced by the more up-to-date “Kylo” nickname, is really going to test our ability to eventually feel affection, or at least a frisson of empathy, for him.

Judge Parker, 5/16/16

Haha, Abbey has to get back to … what, exactly? Her non-job? Her sham marriage? Her horse farm, where all the actual horse farming is carried out by her absurdly uniformed underlings? I mean, I get it; she’s already put in about twice as much time and energy today on Neddy’s dumb factory and Rocky and Godiva’s sexual banter as I’d want to over the course of my entire life. The real power move is going to be if she just refuses to look up from her phone as she strolls away.