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Gil Thorp, 7/1/22

I guess we’re finally finding out why Gregg’s dad was so keen to hide his literary crimes: not because he feared the wrath and contempt of normies, who as Gil noted definitely do not care, but because he knew eventually his family’s fleeting fame would attract the attention of his erstwhile compatriots in the literary fraternity, who would deal with him in the way of their tribe, which is to say live, on-camera evisceration. “Do what you have to do!” he snarls. “I swore an oath, and the soil has hungered for my blood long enough!”

Blondie, 7/1/22

Man, this guys looks exactly like a dude that a legacy comic artist in 2004 would have had working behind the counter at their thinly veiled Best Buy analogue. You know, like a nerd, but the aggressive, vaguely cool kind. It’s real sad that retail trends have shifted and he’s been forced to find work at the novelty mug store, but he seems to have a good attitude about it.

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Gil Thorp, 6/27/22

It’s that time of year again: the time when the baseball season plot keeps rolling ahead in Gil Thorp and you look at the calendar and think “Uh, hey, isn’t school over for the year … pretty much everywhere in the country? Shouldn’t some of these kids have graduated by now?” Instead, we have at least a week left until we get the possibility of a wacky summer storyline, and I guess we need that week to get Marty Moon involved in this somehow. He’s been MIA for months, but now that a questionable Coach Thorp coaching decision has resulted in a media circus (read: one guy with a camera), Marty’s hoping to cash in on that (read: he’s hoping whoever’s filming this will record some b-roll of him doing play-by-play inside his wooden crate that he can use on the page for the GoFundMe campaign he’s launching to buy a bigger crate).

Slylock Fox, 6/27/22

The old Hayes Code had strict rules about depicting criminals as enjoying the fruits of their ill deeds, and today’s Slylock Fox really shows why. Look at Shady Shrew! Who wouldn’t want to live this lifestyle: just chilling out, cooling off your feet in a swift-moving river that appears to be not terribly polluted despite being only a few feet from a major thoroughfare, enjoying a book, an ice-cold soda pop, and a couple of (ALLEGEDLY) stolen chocolate bars. This is what being “shady” gets you, and yet being an upstanding citizen and grocery clerk just results in you being stone cold furious all day. I know which option I’d pick!

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Gil Thorp, 6/22/22

As a certified coastal elitist, I usually take umbrage when someone says “Nobody cares about this outside your liberal bubble, poindexter,” but in this case, Gil is absolutely right: literally nobody cares about some years-ago plagiarism scandal from Gregg’s dad’s days writing for magazines, and in fact if you brought it up to most people, the most common response would be “What’s a magazine?” But Gil is also wrong about Gregg, whose main deal is that he’s going blind and has to wear a weird mask and occasionally pretend he has less control over his pitches than he actually does, which is … unusual, I guess, but certainly not special. I usually also take umbrage when someone says “Well, both sides are at fault, really,” but absolutely both these doofuses are incorrect in this conversation and I’m not afraid to say it.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/22/22

Speaking of being a coastal elitist, I’m always a little wary of declaring some phrase I encounter in the comics pages to be meaningless gibberish, because maybe it actually describes some well known cultural practice in “real America” that I’ve been too busy eating takeout Indian food and worshipping Satan to get hip to, and when it comes to things like a “unification display” I also have to keep in mind that, as someone in his middle age with no kids, I haven’t been to a big blow-out young person wedding in years, so who’s to say that “unification displays” aren’t a thing now? Well, a little Googling shows that they aren’t — the top hit for the phrase is a 2015 press release from the British Museum about four original Magna Carta manuscripts being displayed together for the first time, and it goes downhill from there — so this phrase actually belongs in same contemptible non-word zone as solo car date and vendo, except it has even less pizzaz. Anyway, ha ha, comic books! The characters in this strip simply cannot get enough of comic books, everybody! I’m not sure who the lady at the far right of this panel is, but it really tracks that even one-off characters who we’re never going to see again are willing to ooh and ahh over comic book-themed romantic gestures.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/22/22

Helga’s mother appears in this strip all the time so that the cast can perform tired mother-in-law jokes transposed to the Viking era, but I’m pretty sure we’ve never actually seen Hagar’s mother? Based on today’s strip, I’m guessing that Helga probably killed her, just like she’s about to kill Lute’s mother.