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Gil Thorp, 9/26/08

Yeah, it’s mostly just you, Trisha, because Jeff doesn’t really interact much with terrifying 11-foot-tall giantesses, which is what you appear to be in the first panel. We appreciate that you have chosen six-foot-nine-Jeff-Ponczak, the one human available who comes even close to your magnificent proportions, for your sexual purposes, but you have to cut him some slack and let him get used to seeing all the way up your nose.

Marmaduke, 9/26/08

Having eaten all of the pedestrians in this damned town, Marmaduke must now actually force his way into cars for sustenance.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/24/08

When I first read this comic, I missed the joke, reading the dialog of the last two panels like this:

“Really? Your dad’s a traveling salesman?”

“No, just kidding! He’s just the regular kind of dad you’d find in this blighted hillbilly shantytown: a toothless, semi-literate chicken thief with no visible means of support and a terrible gambling problem! He’s never home because he’s usually in jail, or at a whorehouse!”

I did get my head around the punchline in short order, obviously, but then, because I’m a fancy east coast urban elitist (if that wasn’t obvious from my initial interpretation), I became resentful about being befuddled by a strip about rustic morons. Damn you, you clever mountain folk!

Gil Thorp, 9/24/08

You know, if Cully Vale had been caught looming menacingly over the shattered form of one of his hapless backyard wrestling victims like monstrously large defensive back (or something?) Jeff Ponczak is doing in panel two here, he’d have been put away for life. But because Jeff’s assault took place in the context of a school-sanctioned athletic competition, he gets the cheers of thousands, and everything is A-OK! Instead, it’s the third panel of today’s Gil Thorp that’s really disturbing. Let’s count the ways!

• Jeff is gazing rapturously heavenward with the sun (or possibly the stadium lights) beaming down on his face, as if he were in a propaganda poster urging the workers and peasants to redouble their efforts to meet the goals of Stalin’s latest Five-Year Plan.
• Some sort of terrifying bandage-wrapped hand is resting on Jeff’s shoulder, as if he were being accosted by a leper or a mummy or, worse, Spider-Man.
• Jeff is being showered with approbation in the form of a series of epithets that reference his quarterback-tackling prowess, all of which will unfortunately force you to contemplate Jeff’s scrotum.

Mark Trail, 9/24/08

And with the arrival of a mustache, we now have this storyline’s sinister villain, in the form of the random white dude attached to the aforementioned mustache. I can’t wait until we find out that the “right people on our side” are the lawyers who have meticulously worked with state and local governments and environmental groups to get the permits necessary to drain the grassland and build something nice on the land legally owned by Mr. Mustache and Mr. Guy He’s Talking On The Phone To Who Probably Also Has A Mustache. “But, Mr. Trail, I think you’ll find that all our paperwork is in order…” “Paperwork does not impress me! You drained a friend of mine’s land’s neighboring wetlands!” *PUNCH*

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Apartment 3-G, 9/18/08

Enjoy this moment of the Apartment 3-G Crazed Dopeheads On Parade storyline. We’re sliding through deliriously wonderful high camp right now, but we’ll no doubt end up in awful kitsch soon enough.

Beetle Bailey, 9/18/08

I find it kind of poignant that Otto is staring at the newspaper in the first panel, despite the fact that his thought balloon implies that he’s illiterate. I find it kind of confusing that he says “astrology forecast” instead of “horoscope.”

Gil Thorp, 9/18/08

“But then I noticed she was wearing some kind of terrifying vest-thing with a skull and crossbones on the front and a heart on the back! So now I’m just hiding behind these bushes until she goes away.”