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Gil Thorp, 9/2/08

Wait … in panel two … is that … YES! COACH KAZ’S EARRINGS ARE BACK! COACH KAZ’S EARRINGS ARE BACK! This, along with the shadowy figure lurking in the back of the equipment shed (no doubt with an axe) has me so excited that I’m willing to forgive the fact that in panel three we’re being shown word balloons emerging randomly out of GYM rather than some kind of crazy homoerotic mass “group physical” featuring dozens of teenage boys and the author of I Know This Much Is True.

By the way, any guesses on the Very Special Affliction that is keeping some player to be named later off of this year’s gridiron squad? Scabies? Testicular cancer? Bighandulism?

Funky Winkerbean, 9/2/08

Thank goodness for my faithful commentors, who informed us all that Susan Smith Westbrook was the student who pre-time-jump fell in love with mopey Les for some reason and tried to kill herself when he didn’t return her mopey advances. Naturally this strip will be completely baffling to anyone who isn’t privy to this information, even if, like me, they’ve been following Funky Winkerbean faithfully for the last three years. Anyway, Susan’s thousand-mile stare in panel three promises more psychotic hijinks to come. She looks like she’s spent most of her life fleeing across Darfur one step ahead of genocidal militias — or, you know, like she’s a character in Funky Winkerbean.

Archie, 9/2/08

At first I was going to guess that “SHOOOM! KA-BLAM!” represented Archie ka-blamming in his pants as he finally gets to first base with Veronica. But on closer inspection of panel three, I think that’s a transcription of the noises his spine makes as he attempts to twist around for optimal out-making while keeping his crotch pointed firmly away from his partner, as the strict puritan movie theater rules demand.

Mary Worth, 9/2/08

“Easy for you to say … since you’re sitting in front of a computer … and can just do exactly what you described with the touch of a button … oh, God, this so so horrible!” [uncontrollable sobbing, etc.]

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/2/08

“Yes, she’s a desperate, lonely old woman, possibly in the early stages of dementia! Better cash that check before someone responsible gets wind of it!”

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Gil Thorp, 9/1/08

Hey everyone! The incredibly long long boring long non-exciting long story of Elmer appears to have finally ended, with Elmer getting to stay in America because he has a new job doing bilingual outreach for the Kalamazoo Kings, even though it was repeatedly established that Elmer is entirely monolingual. But whatever! Don’t question it, or they’ll drag him back and try to explain away his happy ending some more.

Anyway, it’s September, which means it’s football season, which means that we get to see Matt Rogers and Jeff Ponczak head off to Central City to get a “football physical”, for some reason. Matt and Jeff (which sounds just like Mutt and Jeff — one’s short and one’s tall, get it) are a couple of nattily dressed buds who are no doubt destined to be this strip’s most lovable pair of totally platonic dude friends since Bill Ritter and Stormy Hicks. I’m sure there will be delightful antics, with more hilarious malapropisms from the Widow Ponczak, the batty Bratislavan!

Apartment 3-G and Blondie, 9/1/08

Since the harrowing real-life effects of drug abuse — the violence, the terrible mood swings, the neglect for hygiene and the resulting oozing open sores — are considered too intense to depict on the comics page, there’s only one way left to depict Alan as the desperate addict we all know he is: by establishing via a narration box and dialog that he was asleep in the middle of the afternoon! Damn you, demon dope! (Of course, we can’t actually show him sleeping, as that would be simply too shocking.)

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that I think Dagwood has been a junkie for quite a while now.

Gasoline Alley, 9/1/08

I was going to make fun of Gasoline Alley for taking a day off, but then I realized that the chain link fence depicted here has had more work put into it than a week’s worth of this strip’s usual hillbilly antics.

Pluggers, 9/1/08

You know, if you’ve gotta repeat a joke every four months or so, pluggers ain’t gonna hold it against you or nothin’.

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For Better Or For Worse, 8/22/08

A lot of my readers have been appalled by Ellie and Phil yukking it up as their father lies dying, but I think you’re missing some vital context here. This is For Better Or For Worse, where all emotions are expressed over three to five panels in the form of puns and wordplay. Making a little verbal jest, as our worried siblings do here, is the highest form of concern that anyone can express in this universe’s culture.

Ha ha, just kidding, they’re obviously terrible heartless monsters. Phil would probably be angry, but as his eyes in the final panel indicate, he’s completely baked. It’s a good thing he had time to freshen up his mustache wax before he got there.

Gil Thorp, 8/22/08

I feel like every time we see Jimmy (like here and here), he’s impossibly wide-eyed, intoxicated by either absolute power or angel dust. Today is no exception, and this comes after sitting through Elmer’s attempt to produce some kind of interminable Midwestern tribute to the work of Bela Tarr. The only way he should look like that after seeing nine hours of roadsides is if this is the kind of “roadsides” we’re talking about, and even then only because of the chafing.

The payoff here — that Jimmy will go to college because an older has-been never-was also went to college before embarking on a poverty-level semi-professional sports career — makes absolutely no sense, and is therefore the perfect capper to yet another Gil Thorp plot.

Mary Worth, 8/22/08

You may ask yourself: Why would a sexy, naturally hirsute man like Ian Cameron go through the discomfort and expense of waxing his prodigious belly so it’s all ultra-smooth? So that his wife can rub her be-swimcapped head all over it, naturally! These kids like to get freaky.

The only way my brain can accommodate the sentence “It’s never boring with you around, Ian” without exploding is to imagine that Toby is saying it an extremely sarcastic tone of voice. Or perhaps she’s pretending that she’s talking to someone interesting named Ian, like Booker Prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan or deceased Joy Division vocalist Ian Curtis.

Archie, 8/22/08

Though the dialogue is ludicrous, I think the Riverdale gang’s expressions of stunned horror pretty accurately display the reaction you’d get if you brought a severed human head into a beloved teen hangout.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/22/08

This comic didn’t make me want to gouge out my own eyes at all, right up until the part where I saw the look of coquettish satisfaction on the cow’s face.