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Judge Parker, 4/7/09

Judge Parker has long been known as the soap opera strip most concerned with land use and planning issues, which is why we were treated to a weeks-long story on water rights a couple of years back. Now, to bide the time while Sophie puts her plans into motion to completely upend junior high’s social hierarchies and emerge as her school’s beautiful and terrifying goddess-queen, our B-team will be keeping everyone posted on the intriguing possibilities of well-planned big box reuse.

Still, I’m uneasy with this whole “Europa Aerospace” company. Does that sound like the sort of company that will happily be producing solar cells to help cut down on our reliance on fossil fuels? Or the sort of company that plans to help Europe conquer outer space? Soon decaying, empty former Wal-Marts and Targets everywhere will be transformed into launch pads for small but stylish rockets. These Euronaut-piloted vehicles will litter Earth orbit with fashionable, smoke-filled zero-G bistros and brasseries, discos housing endless throbbing techno dance parties, and thousand-year-old cathedrals. It’s a damn shame that a genuine American hero like Steve was used to enable Eurotrash’s orbital triumph.

Gil Thorp, 4/7/09

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the greatest Gil Thorp plots are the ones in which one of the characters suffers some form of head trauma. Thus, I’m very excited about the possible directions in which this plot might travel. Will we be treated to a rare but thrilling instance of Thorpian rage? Or will we instead enjoy a comic amnesia plot, in which Gil forgets his whole life to this point and is baffled to find himself in charge of a hideous band of loser teenagers in the worst town imaginable?

Mark Trail, 4/7/09

“Be sure not to tell me, though, because Lord knows I can’t be bothered about things that involve humans. Now, if a bear or a raccoon were lost and in trouble, I might get worked up, but you? Not so much.”

Pluggers, 4/7/09

For pluggers, finding 42 cents worth of loose stamps in a drawer is an “achievement,” I guess.

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Mark Trail, 3/30/09

The tale of Bald Guy And Other Guy, The Dumbest Criminals Around, continues to roll onward in hilarious fashion. Here, Bald Guy, after a failed attempt to buy Rusty’s fancy digital camera and the incriminating photos within, rips the thing out of his hands so vigorously as to send the hapless urchin tumbling backwards. So far so good, but then Bald Guy’s face is mysteriously clouded by terror, and he hurls some cash and what appears to be his wallet at the boy before scampering off on his elevator shoes. It all leads one to wonder what crime this duo might be on the lam for in the first place. Did they rob a bank and then carefully fill out a withdrawal slip?

Gil Thorp, 3/30/09

“Oh, hey,” you almost certainly were not thinking, “Whatever happened with 6-foot-9 Jeff ‘The ’Czak’ Ponczak, and his buddy Matt the Hat, in their new gig running Marty Moon’s old cable access show?” Well, they’re still wearing the exact same stupid clothes and throwing up the exact same stupid fake gang signs as they were five months ago. (Matt appears to have added a stupid vest to his ensemble, but the hat remains his trademark outfit component, which he emphasizes by pointing at it in panel two.) Panel three shows us Coach Thorp and Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp watching their antics and saying coaching-type things in response, which is really too bad, as what we want to see is Marty watching their antics and doing crying-type things in response.

Slylock Fox, 3/30/09

Don’t bother reading the tedious explanatory text, which is just Slylock’s desperate spin after Max caught him changing into his giant rat costume; our favorite detective is actually suiting up for Midwest Furfest ’09, which, when you consider the fact that he’s already an anthropomorphic fox, ought to blow your mind.

The no doubt crotchless fursuits aside, I’m pretty sure that this is the first time we’ve seen Sly in his off-duty clothes. The green plaid jacket, yellow bow tie, and polka-dotted (or possibly just lint-speckled) baby blue slacks make his Sherlock Holmes get-up look positively normal.

Lockhorns, 3/30/09

When I first read this, I thought that this, as backhanded and twisted as it is, might be the first vaguely nice thing I’d ever seen Leroy do for his wife. Then I caught a glimpse of whatever that is in the box, and tried to imagine an item of lingerie that was that particularly barftastic shade of orange. Then I closed my eyes and rested my head on the desk.

I also have my doubts about any store that thinks polo shirts qualify as “lingerie.” At first I thought the puke-green specimen on display behind the counter was some sort of terrible combination of the polo shirt and the belly shirt, but then I realized that it was actually the perfect size for the torso of your typically dwarfish Lockhorns character.

Dick Tracy, 3/30/09

“Worried? Yeah, you might say I’m worried. I’m worried that my chin has sliced open my finger badly enough that I’ll need stitches. I’m worried that your head will soon be so large that your neck won’t be able to hold it up. I’ve got a lot on my mind, Tess.”

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Gil Thorp, 3/28/09

“Hey, Josh,” you’re probably wondering, “How did the winter Gil Thorp story finally play out?” Well, Gil managed to convince the Larkins (who are black) that it would be racist to move back to New York City to take a lucrative job that would help Mr. Larkin get his career back on track, and take the family away from the awful town where the kids are dating juvenile delinquents! Brenda Larkin marked the permanence of her presence in Loserville, USA, by blowing a key shot in the big game, thus keeping the Lady Mudlarks out of the playdowns, again. (The boys’ team’s fate wasn’t even discussed, so presumably they weren’t even in contention.) Then a career criminal, Ted Ex Machina, confessed to the convenience store hold-up that put all this in motion. And today, the one bit of whimsy and joy this plotline has given us — the fact that Ashley got robbed of a case of Nutboys (“It’s Nutty!”) — has been retroactively erased in Orwellian fashion. THEY WERE NUTBOYS, DO YOU HEAR ME? NOT ZAGNUTS! NUTBOYS! Now, for the love of all that’s vaguely wacky, let’s move on to baseball season.

In the final panel, we have confirmed what we’ve known all along: that Milford is a sort of Jerusalem for everyone who’s given up on doing anything with their lives.

Family Circus, 3/29/09

I’m not sure what’s sadder: that the Keanes view representational art as sacrilegious, and thus only decorate their otherwise blank walls with exuberance-restricting commands in terrifying blackletter font, or that said commands are so routinely disobeyed in the Keane Kompound, which is best known for the sounds of morons shrieking malapropisms.

Luann, 3/29/09

“You’ll be making crepes for me. While I wait in bed. Your bed. Which is where I’ll sleep, after I’ve captured and subdued you with my muscular, prehensile head-tail. Even now, it’s curling and uncurling at the tip, in eager anticipation of the moment when it will strike and wrap around you with its anaconda-like strength.”

Apartment 3-G, 3/29/09

“Aunt Carol thinks that being a child of divorce, like pretty much half of everybody in America today, and having a father with a lucrative medical career is the equivalent of growing up in a squalid refugee camp in the middle of a war zone! Aunt Carol has absolutely no God-damned sense of proportion.”