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Gil Thorp, 7/8/10

“Oh, hey,” you are almost certainly saying, “What’s going in Gil Thorp?” (Yes, you are definitely saying this, in your minds, don’t try to deny it to me, I know you too well.) Well, Milford’s star pitcher Slim Chance’s band got the “chance” to open for their alt-country heroes, Backyard Tire Fire (they are a real band who actually exists, and who apparently have spent some extremely ill-conceived product placement money), which gig happened the day before Slim was supposed to start in the team’s opening game of the playdowns, but the team van broke down on the way home, and Slim had to take a cab the last 150 miles, and he arrived just as the third inning was starting, ready to be the hero…

…and he lost, terribly. This is one of the reasons why I like Gil Thorp. It isn’t afraid to have plots that fly in the face of the sort of narrative arcs you’d expect! This is especially the case when such contrarian plotting ends with the Mudlarks having their hopes and dreams ground to dust.

Beetle Bailey, 7/8/10

The soldiers at Camp Swampy have any number of good reasons to hate and loathe Sgt. Snorkel (mostly involving their relentless physical abuse at his hands), but it does seem kind of cruel of them to mock the broken shell of a man that he’s become, thanks to his harrowing food addiction. “Oh, God, a delicious brown blob of some sort, right there on my tie … uh, it doesn’t count if I don’t use my hands, right? Come on, tongue…”

B.C., 7/8/10

There are a lot of puzzling concepts in today’s B.C., but let’s start with the most obvious: the phone, built into the tree. I guess much of the visual humor of the strip comes from putting modern things in ancient settings, but the tree-phone is a really baffling mishmosh. I mean, I get why you have to build it into a natural feature, I suppose, but why do the phone-parts look like they’re from the early 20th century? “Oh, they’re in caveman times, so it would make much more sense to have a phone that’s from 9,900 years in the future rather than 10,000 years in the future.”

Then there’s the question of whose phone-tree this is. The Cute Chick and the Fat Broad (gah, I know their names, their terrible, offensive names) just seem to be casually strolling by it when it rings. In this primitive era, did people not “own” phones per se, but rather just answer the ones that were scattered around the landscape, or, if they were feeling sassy, pick one up and dial a number at random, then start talking dirty to whoever picks up at the other end?

Mark Trail, 7/8/10

In addition to having a mustache and threatening cute animals, our current Mark Trail villain appears to be a dirty communist, or at least that’s my assumption based on his complete inability to understand basic market economics. Sassy only has value as a beloved pet to a lonely, malformed orphan boy; but the baddie’s “What he’s offering may not be enough” implies, wrongly, that there is some kind of market demand for this irritating, mewling pup. Someone is about to be very disappointed by the results of an eBay auction.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/8/10

With Toots and Brook’s problems solved by a little TLC and karate, we can at last move on to the next plot, which should be hilarious, as we find out how Rex’s “be a supercilious dick to everyone” bedside manner works out when he has to drop the c-bomb on the mayor. Whether you’re powerful and influential, or have a serious illness, or both, Rex will be a jerk about it, and by “it” I mean “pretty much everything.”

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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.