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Gil Thorp, 8/31/15

Not to be one of those people who keep saying “The good old days were good and the present day is bad” all the time, because those people are wrong, but there was one specific way in which the good old days were good, and that is that we use to get totally bonkers summer storylines in Gil Thorp. Those were the days when Coach Kaz spent his vacation serving as a security guard for an aging rocker, or when Marty Moon got golf-grifted by a Ben Franklin lookalike in a dumb hat. There was a brief return to form in 2013 with a zany senile pro wrestler plot but mostly the last few summers have been an uninterrupted run of dumb golf storylines; this year we didn’t even get that, with the focus mostly being on True Standish convincing his fellow big-time high school football prospects to ease up on having press conferences to announce their college choices, which was so dull that I’ve only mentioned the strip twice since the beginning of June.

But! That could change fast if the strip’s football-season plot proves to center on the long neglected Marty Moon, and change real fast if centers on a Marty Moon who mingles self-aggrandizement and self-loathing while day drinking alone and talking to nobody in particular. Throw in some sort of terrible “reality series for braniacs” B-plot and my expectations are suddenly so high that they’re guaranteed to be dashed in short order!

Crankshaft, 8/31/15

I’m pretty impressed by the rapid cycling from manic glee to abject horror between panels two and three here. “Seriously? You’re … participating in the democratic process? Oh, God, guess it’s finally time to throw the Constitution in the garbage and admit that this country’s centuries-long experiment in self-government is an abject failure.”

Funky Winkerbean, 8/31/15

Remember when you were young, and each additional year gained you social status and physical might that you could use to impose your violent will on your inferiors? Now the passage of time just brings you closer to the blessed end of your current suffering.

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Gil Thorp, 7/16/15

Huh, for some reason I had thought football phenom True Standish was a senior, and had just blown into town to help Milford win the Valley Conference title trophy, aka “the Golden Cock,” before graduating to become a backup quarterback at a second-tier Big Ten school for the next three years. But it looks like we’ve got another year of his laid-back, good-natured antics to go! Today I mostly like the way True’s less-talented teammates are laughing it up in panel two. “Ha ha, you’ll be courted by important people who can advance your career, while we’ll hang out here drinking off-brand soda and watching other people jet-ski! High five!”

B.C., 7/16/15

The idea that our beloved (?) B.C. characters comprise the entirety of a tiny, isolated band of hunter-gatherers is probably the most accurate depiction of paleolithic humanity in this strip to date. Here’s hoping the accuracy continues and we get a good look at what happens when power relations in a society without organized political structures shift: fratricidal violence.

Mary Worth, 7/16/15

Oh, OK, maybe this will be the drama behind this mysteriously still ongoing Mary Worth storyline: Adam is psyched to be working with Terry, while Terry is only kind of enh about it! This strip can squeeze another three to five weeks out of that for sure.

The Lockhorns, 7/16/15

One of the main appeals of zombie apocalypse fiction — of apocalypse fiction of all types, really — is this: that though the world depicted is one suffering from terrible trauma, it’s also one where the constraints of our current lives have suddenly been swept away. In all likelihood you’d be killed in the opening hours of the plague or uprising, of course, but there’s a visceral thrill in imagining yourself in a new situation, with your boring money troubles and domestic squabbles vanished along with the restraints of traditional social morality. But the Lockhorns are so dead inside that even this mental escape is impossible for them. They know they live in the worst of all possible worlds, and that this is the only one there is.

Pluggers, 7/16/15

You’re a plugger if you’re extremely careful to respect the trademark rights of patriotic American companies like Johnson & Johnson, but the French communists who run Chanel can go fuck themselves.

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Beetle Bailey, 6/3/15

Hey, remember back in the ’90s, when General Halftrack got sent to sensitivity training due to his nonstop sexual harassment of Miss Buxley? Well, you’d think they would’ve covered the fact that inviting an underling who you want to sleep with to a social “group outing” that when she shows up turns out to just be for the two of you is a classic harasser move.

Phantom, 6/3/15

The Phantom seems to have some interesting priorities when it comes to stealth. He cares enough about it to hang around in full Phantom disguise gear in friend’s dark apartment; on the other hand, he’s just going to casually pick up his friend’s landline and make a call to his kids’ satellite jungle phone, which will presumably (a) be quite expensive and (b) leave a paper trail on his friend’s phone bill. (Also, I’m assuming that “friend” here is a euphemism for “criminal I plan to intimidate by lurking in his darkened apartment until he arrives home,” which is all the more reason he shouldn’t be gabbing on the phone when the dude gets there, probably.)

Gil Thorp, 6/3/15

“Did I know what with the who now? C’mon, I thought I had weeks until the part of the season where I had to pay attention to things!”