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Gil Thorp, 3/18/14

Wow, here’s some serious narrative compression, nicely mirrored by matching enormous facepalms in the outside panels. Baseball season begins, and the highlight of the Ritual Roster Reading is the need to cover third base using accident-prone “Lucky” Haskins, whom we met yesterday losing an encounter with a kitchen cabinet door. Fast-forward to “Sure, Milford lost the playdowns, but Haskins wasn’t to blame, because baseball takes more than luck! It takes skill, and practice, and dedication, and we have none of those things! Oh yeah, and coaching – how did I even forget that?”

Kaz is going to kill himself if he keeps lifting like that.

Hi and Lois, 3/18/14

Made over, made up, and drowsy with happiness in her new home in the Valley, Irma Thurston tells Lois how she dumped Thirsty for a career in porn, as one of her co-stars wanders through with a prop.

Mark Trail, 3/18/14

Whenever one of his stories gets complicated, Mark calls a real journalist like this guy.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Gil Thorp, 3/10/14

Uggg, you guys, Gil Thorp has been so boring this basketball season. One of the Lady Mudlarks used to be a dancer, and there are videos of her dancing on YouTube, including one where she has an unspecified “wardrobe malfunction,” and people are gross to her about it, and that’s it! And that description, I realize now, makes it sound a million times more interesting than it’s been in practice. I mean, this is an Actual Serious Issue facing Kids Today, but it’s been so weirdly linear and repetitive, and so focused on dancer girl’s brother’s attempt to protect her and/or her sexual purity, that I can’t be bothered to take much of an interest. At last, though, we’ve reached the point in the season where the Coaches Thorp have to make a half-assed attempt to solve their kids’ problems, so they’re going to … force everybody to upload embarrassing/sexually explicit videos to YouTube? Sure, why the hell not, nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan vis-à-vis high schoolers’ fragile egos and a series of lawsuits against the Milford school district.

Apartment 3-G, 3/10/14

This “oops, Tommie’s brand-new fiancé is dead” plot is pretty rushed and underbaked, without much for us to get interested in, and Margo is treating it with exactly the amount of emotional investment that it deserves.

Mary Worth, 3/10/14

“I’d invite you in, but Tommy may be asleep. And when I bring paramours back to the apartment for loud, kinky sex, I want him awake to hear it! It’s the only thing that will motivate him to get a job so he can earn enough to get his own place.”

Slylock Fox, 3/10/14

How would you describe the relationship between Max and Slylock? I’d say Max is Sly’s “assistant” or “long-suffering sidekick” or … wait, what? “[Max’s] hero, Slylock Fox”? Oh, man. Oh, that’s … man. Is he even getting paid for all this?

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Archie, 1/28/14

The setup for today’s Archie is a bit contrived — why is Dilton, a fairly marginal member of the Archie gang, hanging around reading the newspaper in whatever venue is providing this private snuggle couch for Archie and Veronica? — but turns into an effective character piece. Of course poor socially awkward Dilton would immediately latch onto this dubious teleportation article — it combines his two loves, science and the idea of getting as far away from Riverdale and everyone in it as quickly as the laws of physics will allows. Meanwhile, Archie, in the midst of a love haze that he hopes will never end, is vaguely aware that his life is peaking at this precise moment and adulthood and the outside world hold nothing for him but disappointment. And yet it’s Dilton who looks at the happy couple with sadness all over his face: no matter how much he knows intellectually that his future is bright, emotionally he feels like high school will last forever, and the prospect of escape seems like the most unlikely science fiction.

(In other news: having an extra joke in the first panel was definitely a thing in these late ’90s/early ’00s Archie reruns; usually the gags are pretty execrable, but I deem Archie’s “I bet they’re beaming!” a solid pun.)

Gil Thorp, 1/28/14

Meanwhile, this plot where everyone wants to have sex with Wynn Wiley’s sister … is still happening, I guess! In today’s action, Wynn gets mad about it and punches someone in the face in the middle of the basketball game. Wait, did I say “action”? I meant “action that took place off-panel but was helpfully described for us,” more specifically. I understand the artistic choices being made here: Why show us a shocking act of violence in the middle of a high school basketball game when we could look at this referee with a weird little beard instead? That beard is what you get when you think, “I want to have a little mustache right under my nose, but it’s still ‘too soon’ because of Hitler or whatever! But what if … I moved that mustache … below my mouth? Hitler didn’t have a mustache on his chin, did he? Ref, you’re a genius!”