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Archive: Gil Thorp

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Also, the patient very much is uncrustable, so the whole premise is faulty

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Six Chix, 12/12/24

OK, I get the impulse to turn a bitten-out semicircle on this pastry-shrink into his mouth, but the execution is very uncanny. Like I don’t buy that it opens or closes like a regular mouth, it just seems like it’d be open forever, an endless scream, a wound bleeding purple. Not really the most reassuring thing you’d want to see during therapy, in my opinion! Anyway, I’d like to imagine that the genesis of this strip was the writer being told by a therapist “You are loveless but not unloveable!” and instead of applying this insight towards solving her various emotional problems she decided to draw a cartoon about talking Uncurstables® sandwiches instead.

Gil Thorp, 12/12/24

“The catch is made by … Milford?” really makes it sound like Marty Moon has never heard of an “interception” before. “Goshen threw it … but Milford caught it? Is that legal?” [desperately paging through the rulebook]

Shoe, 12/12/24

We all know, of course, that women be shopping. But what if I told you … that in the year 2024 … they be shopping … on the computer.

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Love a newspaper headline that eschews proper nouns

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Crock, 12/5/24

If these two guys have names, I don’t know what they are — the Wikipedia Crock article just calls them “the men of Outpost 5,” and they don’t merit a mention on the official King Features Crock character list — but their deal basically is that the guy on the right is always reading letters aloud about life in his hillbilly home town back in France (?). Anyway, I find today’s bit actually kind of heartening. The guy on the left generally looks uninterested during these recitations, but it’s clear he’s been paying attention. He knows the lore!

Gil Thorp, 12/5/24

“Coach, let me rephrase that. It’s cool that you decided to come back from your extended sick leave and all, but I get the feeling you’re only doing it to engage in psychological gamesmanship against your hated rival and not because you’re interested in molding a new generation of student-athletes or anything like that. I’m just a teenager who wants to play football! I don’t think I should be going out there! I’m not equipped for the emotional complexity of this whole scene!”

Gearhead Gertie, 12/5/24

Some might say that having two near-identical drawings in this cartoon is “lazy,” but I think it really hammers home Gertie’s emotional state. Her beloved NASCAR is in danger due to internal conflict, and she’s not exactly sure who to blame or how it’s going to end — maybe if she stays very still and just vaguely shit-talks the legal system, everything will work out for the best.

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Hat Ghost: The Ghost Who Wore A Hat

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Blondie, 11/25/24

A common development in all sorts of open-ended narratives (comic strips, TV shows, what have you) is that ancillary characters are introduced to fill a specific purpose, like being the main character’s barber, but then you have a lot of strips/episodes to fill, and sometimes you use them to flesh out the backstories of those ancillary characters, and sometimes that process (when done well) reveals that these characters have full, rich lives beyond the specific purpose they were originally created for, but other times that process (when done poorly) simply tells you that the barber’s off-panel life consists of more barber, endless barber, barber all the way down, barber (as revealed today) that stretches back in time across generations. The one non-barber aspect that peeks through is Italianness, which is why our guy is allowed, as a member of that fiery and emotional race, to shed a single tear in panel two.

Mary Worth, 11/25/24

Haha, yes, it begins, and by “it” I mean Mary’s friends bailing on her now that she’s too sick to put a piping hot turkey dinner in front of their face on Thursday. A normal person would hear “I’m too tired to even make my homemade chicken soup for myself!” and ask “Oh, Mary, what can I do to step up and help,” but instead Toby is all “Don’t worry, I forgive you! You just lie there on the couch in your own sick while I use this adorable tiny easel I bought on Etsy to paint a cat with fetal alcohol syndrome that I hope someone will buy on Etsy ironically.”

Gil Thorp, 11/25/24

Big news! With Gil steadfastly refusing to return to work and the Mudlarks doing even worse than usual in his absence, Coach Hernandez is consulting … a pipe-smoking ghost??? Who doesn’t really seem to have any specific football knowledge? More on this important story as it develops.