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Gil Thorp, 12/1/08

Good lord, what … what is that that Gil’s wearing in panel one? It looks to me an awful lot like part of one of the uniforms from the earlier Star Trek movies, which suddenly throws the whole insanity of this strip into a whole new light. See, Gil was really a big sci-fi nerd in high school, relentlessly persecuted by jocks, until his mind snapped and he hatched a terrible plan of revenge: he’d take a job as a high school athletics director, and subject the next generation of jocks to a hellish regime of incompetent coaching that always resulted in either total failure on the field — or, worse, a glimpse of victory snatched away by cruel defeat in the playdowns. Then, secure in the knowledge that the dozens of student athletes in his care have had their little hearts broken, he goes home to his hot blonde wife and engages in his real first love: Star Trek cosplay.

Meanwhile, Marty Moon’s producers are plotting to put known fraudster Jeff Ponczak on the air to provide a counterpoint to Marty’s drunken, anti-Thorp diatribes. I love the way they’re plotting all this so carefully behind his back, as if he’s a brilliant but insane dictator with a hair-trigger temper and a platoon of fanatically devoted bodyguards who will kill on his command, when in fact he’s their employee. They can just say “Hey, Marty, your ratings are dropping because your shows are meandering and pointless, so we’re hiring that high school kid that lied about his heart condition to be on the show with you, and if you don’t like it, you’re fired.” And then he’d go and cry in his car.

Apartment 3-G, 12/1/08

Note: Starting tomorrow, the “Comics Curmudgeon” blog will be replaced at this URL with a new site, entitled “Margo Magee Says Hilarious Things That Make You Laugh.” Installment one will be entitled “Ya think?!” We thank you for your continued patronage.

Momma, 12/1/08

“Get it? Get it? ‘Correspondence’? Get it? Will you get it if I emphasize the first syllable even harder? ‘Correspondence’? Get it? Of course not, because it makes no fucking sense, you know? Correspondence? Hengh?”

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Apartment 3-G, 11/26/08

I know that this is going to come as something of a shock, but it turns out that Margo is a terrible art gallery manager, who put all her energy into insulting, belittling, and sneering at the help when she should have been micromanaging them, or at least requesting occasional progress updates. This failure is all the more hilarious because she essentially abandoned her event organizing business to run the Mills Gallery, leaving open the question of what exactly she’s been doing all day (my guess: rifling through Eric’s papers for evidence of infidelity). So now we can add “incompetent gallery impresario” to her list of resume bullet points, along with “incompetent party planner,” “incompetent publicist,” and “incompetent entry-level garment industry employee.”

This show still might not be a total disaster, though: her boss is missing or dead, her curator is dead, her artist left town in a haze of grief, and probably nobody was going to come to the exhibition anyway. She and Doris ought to just slap all that crap that’s in the storage room up on the wall (not worrying about whether it’s right-side up or even whether it’s art), send out a press release to Time Out New York touting “a bold new exhibition that questions the very notion that art can be ‘curated,'” and then start drinking.

Gil Thorp, 11/26/08

I’m pretty sure that it was Marty’s skeptical bosses who suggested this new shock-journalism tactic: bringing the hulking and emotionally unstable Jeff Ponczak onto the show and then insulting his mother. The thinking no doubt is that the ’Czak would either keel over from a rage-induced heart attack or (as the clenched fist in panel three suggests) punch Marty in the face; either event on camera would obviously be ratings gold.

Mark Trail, 11/26/08

“Say, why don’t we just set that old gator loose at that investors meeting? That’s likely to solve all of our problems, sure enough!”

Hey everybody! As is my wont, I’ll be taking off for Thanksgiving — comics return Sunday, or Monday, or something. Enjoy your Thanksgiving, if you live in the US and/or celebrate Thanksgiving; the rest of you, enjoy your next four days of Comics Curmudgeon-less hell.

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Apartment 3-G, 11/22/08

Tommie’s long period of non-dating is showing, I’m afraid. I don’t consider Gary’s baffling panic at the prospect of his love for Tommie going public to be typically male or typically anything other than typically baffling. Still, I’m glad Tommie has reached this emotional point, because it means that we get to see her delightful rage in the third panel of today’s strip. Tommie’s fist wobbling menacingly at the end of her skinny forearm must be just one manifestation of the anger radiating out through the neighborhood; her foul mood is also causing the temperature in the air to drop, prompting Margo to clutch her collar closed, lest she catch a chill.

Gil Thorp, 11/22/08

Marty Moon is right! People keep tuning in when I tee off on Gil Thorp, so I don’t see why things should be any different for his crappy basement-studio TV sports show. Just a word of advice, Marty: you probably don’t want to focus on Gil every day, as that territory is already well-covered for the Thorp fanatics by the superb This Week In Milford.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/22/08

“No, really! My new marriage is already a joyless hell! Why … why do you keep laughing? For the love of God, why?”