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Gil Thorp, 7/22/09

You know how sometimes you get wind of the fact that they’re making a sequel to a movie you loved, and you allow yourself to get all excited about it, even though you know, deep in your heart of hearts, that it will probably never live up to the magic of the original? And you go to it and pay good money, hoping that among the Terminator: Salvations and Ghostbuster IIs you’ll have stumbled upon that rare Godfather: Part 2? Well, that’s how I sort of feel about the bubbling storyline here, in which Coach Kaz, P.I., is being urged to reprise his role from the utterly awesome summer of 2007, in which he stopped rock-and-roll legend Gail Martin from being harassed by her Ben Franklin-esque drummer. What Kaz, doesn’t mention, as he and Kelly enjoy their mid-up-scale dinner at Ricoze (called “Rico’s”, back when it was only mid-scale), is that he didn’t crack the Martin case by luck — he cracked it by hiring an actual detective to do the work for him. Perhaps he never admitted this to Gil in all the grandiose tales he told about that fateful summer?

Anyway, if there’s anything that makes me hopeful about a return to ’07-level awesomeness, it’s panel one here, in which Coach Kaz is lounging casually around in his Wayfarers, enjoying summer to its fullest. But remember, back in those heady days, Gil was teaching a kid who had accidentally cut off his own legs to box, and that was only the B-story. It’s going to be a tough act to follow.

Dennis the Menace, 7/22/09

This would be a good time for Mr. Wilson to be portrayed with his archetypical single bead of sweat; instead, his brow is dry and his eyes are thoughtful, if shifty. It’s almost as if he’s broken through years of anxiety and emotional turmoil on the subject of his irritating neighbor, and has reached a place of clarity; now, he’s attempting to apply rationality to the problem, beginning by contemplating the best places to stash the body.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/22/09

While the punchline in today’s Snuffy Smith is easy enough to parse — “Ha ha, the residents of Hootin’ Holler are subsistence farmers living in a pre-industrial economy” — I’m not sure what to make of the visual in the second panel, in which we see that the Smifs’ shack is perched at the end of a rocky, isolated outcropping. Are we meant to understand that relying only on local food sources and cutting ourselves off from the larger industrial food chain is like wobbling precariously at the edge of a cliff of starvation? Or that if these simple hill folk can extract sustenance from their boulder-strewn soil, surely we can too?

Judge Parker, 7/22/09

“I’m also concerned that your life vest is inflating! That shouldn’t happen until you’re out of the plane and in the water!”

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For Better Or For Worse, 7/21/09

Just for the record, I am attempting to maintain, both on general principles and for my own mental health, a moratorium on commenting on retread FBOFW — a foobatorium, if you will. Still, occasionally one of the new strips scattered amongst the reruns demands comment, and this is one of them. I’m not even going to comment on the weird ham-handed acknowledgement of authorial ham-handedness (although notice telling quote marks around “write,” hmmmm); rather I just want to point out that one of these ladies is a lot more enthusiastic about all this deus ex machinaing than the other.

Connie: I moved here specifically because I wanted to be close to you!
Ellie, facial expression carefully neutral: Mmm.
Connie: Lots of people totally lose touch with their college friends and never see them again!
Ellie: Um, yes, that is … what some might expect to happen … with some of their college friends.
Connie: We’re living in a magical storybook!
Ellie: STAY AWAY FROM MY KIDS YOU FEMINIST SINGLE-MOTHER CAREER-WOMAN WHORE.

Apartment 3-G, 7/21/09

Margaret Shulock took over Apartment 3-G writing duties in, I think, late 2005, and when I finally got around to noticing this the following April, I hinted, not even a little subtly, that I should have been given the job. But I can say with some degree of certainty that I would never have come up with a “disgruntled Margo has an audience with the Dalai Lama” scenario. King Features clearly made the correct choice.

Oh, and in that first link, note that Margo is talking about going to law school, a plot thread that clearly has never been heard from again, but how cool would that have been? I’m not sure if she’d be more terrifying as a prosecutor or a defense attorney; I imagine that she’d eventually be the star of her own syndicated judge show, as soon as the prudes at the FCC made it legal to show dismemberments on broadcast TV during the day.

Gil Thorp, 7/21/09

“And by ‘make a call,’ I mean ‘crush this cell phone with my mighty fist’! You see that, evil-doing stalkers? You don’t scare me! GIL SMASH!”

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Crankshaft, 7/20/09

Oh ho. Oh HO HO HO. Remember a few years ago, when beloved comic strip Funky Winkerbean killed off one of its main characters and then leapt pell-mell a decade into the future (of internal narrative space, not of absolute time)? Of course you do, because you’re all comics obsessives, but even if you weren’t, chances are you might have heard of it because there was actual coverage of this event by the legitimate media. And here today, in Funkyverse sister strip Crankshaft, we appear to have the exact same chronological discontinuity happening, which, as near as the Google can tell, has been mentioned exactly nowhere. Ha ha, Crankshaft, nobody likes you, just like nobody likes your title character!

You’ll forgive me for chortling just a little at the sight of Crankshaft’s slumped, broken form slouching semi-consciously in a wheelchair, kept alive by machines and underpaid but still perky nurse’s aides. Normally I’d only have the deepest sympathy for someone whose body and mind have been ravaged by time until they’re only a shell of their former self, but since Crankshaft is (a) a fictional character and (b) a colossal dick, I’m not feeling too guilty about my terrible glee.

Anyway, in the absence of any sort of Big Event-style coverage, I’m guessing that this is a temporary thing, a brief glimpse into the ’Shaft’s terrible future — or, if the middle panel is any indication, his future and his past, like Slaughterhouse Five with less firebombing and more groan-inducing puns. Eventually we’ll settle back on the present, in which Crankshaft is old and cranky but not senile or wheelchair-ridden. The journey will have made him more sympathetic to us, right up to the first time that he opens his mouth.

Gil Thorp, 7/20/09

Wait, are we sure that Shep Trumbo isn’t behind this? Because the sinister message on that baseball appears to be written in text-speak, and if there’s one thing I remember about the Shep Trumbo storyline despite my best efforts to purge it from my memory, it’s that it involved texting in some way. (Though I guess a full-on text-stalker-ball would read “U O M3.”)

Anyway, I just thought of someone else from the past who could be sinisterly stalking Gil: Brent Raptor! Or, better yet, Brent Raptor’s mom! Brent was a pudgy white kid who played baseball for Gil a few years ago and loved the rap music, thus earning the nickname “Rap-Dog,” which was probably meant to be insulting and/or ironic but he adopted it because it was the only affection anyone ever showed him. Brent’s life was made a living hell by his trashy, overbearing mother, out from under whose thumb Gil tried very hard to extract Brent, eventually succeeding by arranging for her to take a trip to Phoenix (really!). Anyway, since obviously nobody has ever done anything in return for a trip to Phoenix, I’m guessing Gil made a dark, secret promise to Mrs. Raptor, and now she’s come to collect … in blood. Or in off-brand corn chips and menthol cigarettes, which would seem more her style.

Mark Trail, 7/20/09

Jack Elrod knew he’d come under fire from religious and cultural conservatives for his latest work, Virgin Mar(k/y): Pieta. Fortunately, his editors at the syndicate knew that the newspaper comics were the last venue where uncompromising art like this could be showcased, and published it without fear of the consequences.

Archie, 7/20/09

The funniest thing about this Archie — other than Reggie getting punched in the face, obviously — is the lava lamp decorating the floor of Archie’s makeshift ashram in the first panel. Because meditation = the ’70s = lava lamps, obviously! Ha ha, the AJGLU 3000 has no idea what year it is.

Slylock Fox, 7/20/09

More proof that Shady Shrew is an unlovable loser: as his yellow bandana indicates, he was considered insufficiently cool to join either the Bloods or the Crips, and instead had to affiliate himself with a lesser gang, the “7th Avenue Insectivore Crew.”

Beetle Bailey, 7/20/09

Oh, Beetle, we know you yearn for Sarge’s abusive attentions, but you should really try being at least a little subtle about it.