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Gil Thorp, 1/7/08

One of my favorite terrible things about Gil Thorp is the way its narration boxes and exposition characters just hurl the full (and almost invariably WASPy) names of characters at you willy-nilly. I guess it’s supposed to keep you up on who’s doing what, but for me it has the opposite effect, as anyone who isn’t the main thrust of the storyline invariably gets lost in a sea of badly drawn faces. Was Grant Sanders an important player in the recently concluded football storyline? Has Bill Hawkins ever appeared in the strip before? Who the hell knows? I’m not very good with names in real life, and generally the people I encounter there don’t have facial features that move around and change shape from moment to moment. The only thing I’m sure of is that the dude at left in panel three was a prominent member of the Lollypop Guild.

Five bucks says that “Let’s get the A-Train involved here” also features prominently in Andrew Gregory’s foreplay banter.

Hi and Lois, 1/7/08

Hi is regarding his son with goggle-eyed horror not because they actually had some kind of upcoming vacation to St. Moritz — after all, this is the family whose idea of a dream trip was a week in cheesy faux Old West mining town, and even that apparently drove them to the verge of bankruptcy. No, the Flagston patriarch is stunned that Chip can actually summon up a phrase in a foreign language. For obvious reasons, they had always pegged him as the dumb one, and long ago spent his college fund on trips to cheesy faux tourist attractions.

Slylock Fox, 1/7/08

I hate to sound like I’m kissing up, but today’s Slylock is really a perfect little noir vignette — and while Reynard Noir is on vacation, too! I love the look into the Rats’ depressing home, with crumbling plaster covered over with Reeky’s wanted posters. The neat stack of photocopied bill sheets on the stool and the paper cutter in the foreground remind us that counterfeiting is exactly the sort of crime that fits the manic, obsessive energy of a meth fiend like Reeky. And I love the way Mrs. Rat is sitting at her vanity in a sexy slip (no doubt it’s 95 degrees and they don’t have AC), while her loutish hubby bellows commands from the other room. If only it ran in my newspaper, I could see it in black and white as it was clearly intended to be.

Funky Winkerbean, 1/7/08

Ha! It’s Funky Winkerbean! Even the exposition is cruel!

Judge Parker, 1/8/07

“So, I masturbated into your underwear drawer. Hope you don’t mind!”

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Curtis, 1/2/08

The Curtis annual Kwayzee Kwanzaa digression never disappoints. Never. This year, we have the tale of a master thief, who stole a water buffalo’s hide while she was bathing (did you know that water buffalos are people inside their hides? It’s true!), then married and impregnated her, only to earn the wrath of a two-headed poisonous snake by stealing its eggs. Really! And now the snake has done something awful to the buffalo lady, probably changed her unborn buffalo-human hybrid baby into some kind of three-way buffalo-human-two-headed-snake hybrid, and a valuable lesson will be learned, namely: don’t do mescaline, kids. I hate to say it, but the whole thing make Hanukkah look kind of boring. Did the Maccabees ever transform into animals, or marry animals, or anything? Can we get a deuterocanonical rewrite here?

Gil Thorp, 1/2/08

We saw last week that Andrew is exactly the sort of quick-witted sharpie who might actually recognize a double-entendre like “We’re not huge — but you don’t have to be if you’re talented” when he sees it, and might enjoy trying to slip it past an obviously hungover Marty Moon. We’ll be looking forward to hearing more ribald quips from this hatchet-faced wunderkind once he starts talking about “the Bucket.”

Marvin, 1/2/08

His medicine cabinet … and his bloodstream. Those heavy lids and eyebags indicate that Grandpa has been so doped up by the pharmaceutical-industrial complex that he can barely stand up straight. The saddest thing is that this strip is taking place at two in the afternoon, and he’s just managed to lift his head off of his drool-soaked pillow long enough to shamble into the bathroom and get another fix.

They’ll Do It Every Time, 1/2/08

If my record-keeping is on track, then “Bob Bennett” is actually faithful reader benro, who apparently goes to a doctor’s office frequented by vomiting fetishists. Bonus Scadutoism: “Woopee”.

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I know I said I was going to gloss over the strips that ran during my vacation, but, you know, I had to read them, at least the ones that have continuing storylines, if I didn’t want to be totally lost, and once I started reading them, well, some of them just were really calling out for the treatment and … I know, it’s a sickness. Anyway, here, quickly, are the high points of December 23 through January 1!

Judge Parker, 12/24/07

A very gratuitous Christmas came a day early for Abbey Spencer fans. I know that when most of you ladies have a sudden, drug-induced urge to paint your study, you want to slip into something more comfortable — like a halter top and a pair of Daisy Dukes so tight that you’re actually incapable of standing up straight.

Mary Worth, 12/24/07

Chester’s real owner apparently stole him away and, unbeknownst to Mary, replaced him with a plastic replica, if his weird sitting-in-midair position in panel one is any indication.

Spider-Man, 12/24/07

Peter Parker, meanwhile, got the best gift a boy could get: A trip to prison! Oh boy!

Christmas Day usually sees some variously awkward greetings shoehorned into different strips. My two favorites from 2007 were Dick Tracy, which heralded the birth of Our Savior with a scene of a collapsing building and an excitable workingman blathering about being pelted with corpses:

…and Gil Thorp, which proudly featured a set of cramped, noseless horrors that made last year’s Christmas card look museum-worthy:

For Better Or For Worse, 12/26/07

Meanwhile, Anthony has figured out a way to make little Francie accept her new mommy: force her to watch their bland, noodly sexual congress.

Gil Thorp, 12/28/07

Gil Thorp promises to break new dramatic ground in the new year by featuring a high school-aged student-athlete who is arrogant and unpleasant! (And yet how can we hate anyone who throws around put-downs like “climb down off your dinosaur”?)

Mark Trail, 12/29/07

A terminally ill Luke Wilson said, “Don’t waste your time, Trail,” by which he obviously means “Let’s not over-stimulate your readers with any kind of action or excitement when I can just tell them all what happened and then expire quietly.” No word yet on whether Mark will punch his corpse.

Panels from Apartment 3-G, 12/30/07

Margo added another bullet point to her résumé of personal destruction: enabler!

Panel from Judge Parker, 12/30/07

Sam proved, as if we need any more evidence, that he has no intention of having sex with his wife ever again.

For Better Or For Worse, 1/1/08

And, in the first moments of 2008, April took a good, long look at Gerald’s penis. She looks troubled by what she sees.