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Beetle Bailey, 4/14/16

You might not believe it based on the nonstop stream of cruel vitriol I heap upon comics creators daily, but writing this blog over the years has actually given me a lot of sympathy for the people who write these things. Coming up with a joke a day within the same little world, every day, for years and years is hard, man, even for the team of people they have down at ol’ Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC. I mean, I get it. Some days you’re just staring at a blank panel and are trying to figure out how you can wring a few laughs out of it, and clearly, as the deadline loomed, today’s jokesmith could think of nothing except for falling off a cliff into the sweet embrace of death, which might be something they should talk to a trained therapist about. But anyway, I’d argue that the second panel here is wholly unnecessary. Beetle and Killer dully contemplating the fact that their fellow soldiers just can’t stop falling off cliffs, while staring at a handwritten note on a bulletin board that, in a plea for sanity that will surely go unheeded, urges everyone to “AVOID CLIFF”, is the funniest thing in the comics today, and probably the funniest thing to happen in Beetle Bailey ever.

Gil Thorp, 4/14/16

Boy, the softball action in Gil Thorp sure is a lot more exciting when it’s drawn like an German expressionist film, right? Pitcher and catcher stand at opposite ends of some long corridor, then suddenly are practically on top of one another, representing the way the emotional space between us can sometimes collapse into sudden moments of terrifying intimacy.

Pluggers, 4/14/16

The look of profound shame on those he-pluggers’ faces makes me think that the caption to this panel should actually be “plugger moms seem to be the only ones in the house who actually use toilet paper.”

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Gil Thorp, 4/12/16

Welp, this year’s long and fairly dull basketball season is now over in Gil Thorp, which means we’ve moved on to … baseball/softball season! And after a single day of red-hot spring training action, watching teenagers run out grounders while their bored coaches shout “good hustle” in their general direction, we now jump to Central City, where an avuncular gentleman wants to get amiably blotto after a hard day working the phones to keep his big triethylene glycol buyers happy. Would I be pleased if we just followed this guy around for the next six to eight weeks and didn’t spend any time with high school jocks at all? I’m willing to find out!

Mary Worth, 4/12/16

Whoa whoa whoa, sexy substitute art history lecturer Harlan Jones, who has gone from zero to private home yoga session with Dawn in about 72 hours, lives with a man … named Alfie … in a possibly romantic way???? [comical B-O-I-O-I-O-I-O-I-N-G sound effect] This explains why he suddenly looks like Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury in that last panel. It is fairly shocking to think that Mary Worth might acknowledge that heterosexuality isn’t the only romantic configuration available, so we may just be in for a lecture about how contingent faculty are paid so little that they have to live with roommates in grim orange-painted concrete apartment buildings that make Charterstone look like an Architectural Digest cover, but either way it seems like we’re not going to get a prof/student forbidden love plot after all.

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/26/16

Proof positive that Funky Winkerbean takes place ten years in the future: Everyone, even people going to see classic films in retro movie theaters that cater specifically to cinephiles, just talks at full volume right through the movie now. This is basically my nightmare scenario for the future, frankly. I’d rather have the killer robots take over. At least that’d be faster.

Judge Parker, 3/26/16

“Look, I don’t actually care about this arbitrary rule you broke! Why don’t you call someone over my head? Why don’t you hire my sister? Why don’t you contemplate how small my hourly rate is compared to your vast resources? DO I HAVE TO SPELL THIS OUT FOR YOU?”

Gil Thorp, 3/26/16

Oh, yeah, right, so this confrontation ended with rugby star Kenzie breaking one of the bad kid’s jaws, and now everyone feels bad and weird because you shouldn’t resolve your disputes through violence men should be violently protecting women, not vice versa. Now Coach Thorp is going to rouse himself from his usual torpor to Fix Things With The Teens, by use of clever thought experiments that definitely aren’t going give rise to lawsuits and/or lifelong emotional scars, no sir.

Hagar the Horrible, 3/26/16

OR MAYBE SHE JUST DOESN’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU GUYS, JESUS