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Gil Thorp, 6/26/10

Ought I apologize to you for keeping you criminally out of the loop on happenings in Gil Thorp? Perhaps! (I’m not going to say that I yearn for the day when a lack of basic knowledge of the current Gil Thorp storyline is an offense punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment, but I’m not going to say I don’t yearn for it either.) Anyway, long story short, Milford sports teams continue to play in the final week of June, long after virtually every school in the country has knocked off for summer vacation, and alt-country sensation/fiery pitcher Slim Chance has made a video for his band, which he’s uploaded to YouTube. And now, in a moment that will change both Slim’s life and the face of popular music forever, some chinbearded dude in Chicago is presumably forwarding said amateur YouTube video to some other dude named “Geoff,” because that, apparently, is how the music industry works, in 2010, chinbearded dudes in hipster glasses just stone cold forwarding YouTube clips to each other, all day, every day.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/26/10

Herb desperately hopes for some unimportant daily minutia to distract his friend from his own thoughts, because those thoughts, as is customary for characters in this strip, inevitably turn to death.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/26/10

You know, I can get away with running gags like “Marmaduke is a demon-beast who eats children and torments his supposed ‘owner,’ who is Hitler,” because I can be pretty sure that, no matter how close the subtext is to the surface, the strip will never actually show a child sliding down the dog’s gullet, or depict Phil giving a rousing speech exhorting the invasion of Poland. But trying to make up exaggerated versions of Funky Winkerbean’s next ultra-gloomy plot twist is a more dangerous game. I swear to you that my Friday proposal that Funky is dead and doesn’t know it was meant entirely in jest, but now … I’m not so sure. Either he really is already a specter, or, as the now-classic YouTube montage “No Signal” teaches us, he’s about to be murdered by an ax-wielding maniac.

Oh, and have we been a little short on Rusty-horror lately?

Panel from Mark Trail, 6/26/10

Rusty does not weep saline tears as the humans do; instead, when sad or overjoyed, he cries tears of melting flesh.

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Funky Winkerbean and Gil Thorp, 6/19/10

I do bring up the concept “Chekhov’s Gun” a lot in this space — the Russian playwright once noted that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired” — but only because it works so well conceptually with the the painful plotting of continuity comics, in which you always, always see the horror/delight coming. For instance, every cell in every character in Funky Winkerbean is tiny microscopic Chekhov’s Gun, just waiting to burst into glorious deadly cancer. The title character’s own simmering alcoholism serves a similar role, with the question not being if he would backslide into a hateful downward spiral of boozing but when. And now the answer to that when has been revealed to be “twenty minutes after he put his dad into a nursing home.”

But sometimes you don’t see these things coming, and that’s always a pleasant surprise, even if the results are unpleasant for the characters concerned. For instance, I would never have picked Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp as one to drown her sorrows at her coaching failures in booze (though the booze in question is a nice glass of red wine, because she is classy, and a lady). Still, it makes sense, as her husband is pretty much drunk all the time, which is why he doesn’t care that he hasn’t won a championship in any sport in years. He seems pretty happy, so why wouldn’t she follow his example?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/19/10

Longtime readers of Snuffy Smith know that Parson Tuttle, Hootin’ Holler’s only clergyman, is a fraud who plays upon the simple hill folks’ earnest religious impulses to line his own pockets. Thus it should come as no surprise that the ministership of the local ramshackle church is actually a Tuttle clan sinecure, jealously kept within a single family whose members lost their faith generations ago, but refuse to give up a cushy gig.

Ballard Street, 6/19/10

It’s actually pretty rare for me to discuss Ballard Street, as it usually consists of insane people doing inscrutable things in a more or less amusing fashion, which doesn’t leave much room for commentary. As far as I can remember, it never, ever features talking animals of any sort, which makes today’s horror even harder to explain. The people in the comic sometimes dress up in elaborate costumes; are those meant to be people in cowsuits? If so, the business with the “udder” is even more nightmarish than what a plain reading of the strip would suggest.

Mark Trail, 6/19/10

When ordinary mortals lose a pet, they tape signs announcing the fact and the associated reward to lampposts throughout the area where the poor little critter might be. When Mark Trail loses a pet, the local daily paper runs an enormous picture and a two-column story about it in the A section. Why isn’t this on the front page? Was there a nuclear war or something?

Family Circus, 6/19/10

Big Daddy Keane will be using the crayons to depict himself as a member of a non-white ethnic group, so that he can look at the picture and pretend that he is not related to this gaggle of monsters.

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Gil Thorp, 6/1/10

Oh, hey, look, it’s Gil Thorp, where the alt-country star/weirdo/pitching sensation just tried to bean that jerky rich kid from the NutBoy storyline during practice, because said jerky kid has been picking on said alt-country star’s bandmate. Please don’t ask me to explain in more detail or look up their names, as just typing that sentence caused me to start to twitch; today I’m mostly interested in how the team is taking sides in this epic battle. Robb has shown his hatred of bullying and injustice before, assuming that guy from last summer’s storyline is the same Robb; they don’t appear to look anything alike, but this is Gil Thorp, so that doesn’t mean anything, and how many guys named “Robb” can there be, really. Most fascinating is Team Blaine and Not-Blaine in panel three. Who are these mysterious, handsome young men? Why do they value in-group loyalty over social peace in the larger polity? Did they confer on this point before Not-Blaine spoke for both of them, or are their opinions so in tune that they didn’t feel such consultation was necessary? I look forward to none of these questions being answered, ever, but I’ll always remember the day they looked creepily at the reader and mouthed awkwardly written dialogue to move the plot along.

Ziggy, 6/1/10

Did you know that the parrot in Ziggy is named Josh? I have managed to avoid commenting on this shameful fact over nearly six years of comics blogging, but now that the damn bird is apparently trying to muscle in on my territory, I feel compelled to speak out. Hey, parrot, you appear to be shaking! You’d better be shaking in fear, because comics-mocking is my schtick, got it? There’s only one way a bird ought to be commenting on any printed matter, and that is by defecating on it.

(Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if Dagwood were confronted with a wrap, though? He’d presumably be baffled by any foodstuff introduced to mainstream American palates after 1945. Ha ha! Dagwood eating a wrOH GOD OH GOD DON’T LET THE BIRD GET TO YOU JOSH HOLD YOURSELF TOGETHER)

Mary Worth, 6/1/10

Aw, look, Mary has fixed the hell out of Bonnie and Ernie’s marriage, to the extent that they’re just going to start rutting right there in the hospital waiting room. How sweet! This handsome but obviously lovelorn doctor is so enchanted by Mary’s success that he’s found himself unwittingly falling into her gravity well.