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Dick Tracy, 9/2/22

Moon citizens have no choice whether or not to live under fascism, but they do get to pick their preferred flavor. Enjoy the wholesale militarization of society in service of external conquest? Line up behind Ro-Zan over there! Prefer the quiet suffocation of human rights under an all-powerful domestic security state? Team Thorin for you!

No matter to Dick: he’s just a cop, you guys do the executions! After all, “He who wins the war writes the history.” Or maybe, “History is written by the victors?” Dick doesn’t care; he’s just a cop: leave the quotation-mangling to Mary Worth.

Gil Thorp, 9/2/22

Speaking of mangling, remember when Gil Thorp was famous for bizarre jump-cuts between panels? No more! Now the unsettling breaks come within the panels themselves. Consider Panel 1—”They got coffee for us” : “Shouldn’t we get coffee?” : [“Uh, yeah Dad, that’s why they got it?”]. Or take Panel 2’s confusion of sarcasm with trolling. Trolling would be, “You’re bringing that nose-wart into my high school?” Panel 3 is just routine recruitment of your kid as a divorce-ally; I’ll permit it.

Mary Worth, 9/2/22

Say, it’s been over a week; let’s drop in on Jared and Jess! Guilt no longer lives in his heart! Apparently it leads to suffering or something, not sure if I’ve got that quite right? Anyway, Jess, now that Jared has discovered the joys of dumping people, guess what? No bad blood though, OK? Hate that stuff, we do.

Just a reminder that there are no Comment of the Week posts on my watch. Josh will be back Sept. 10^th; take it up with him!

–Uncle Lumpy

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Crankshaft, 9/1/22

“With no access to our XOR drive, we have to transcode the online IP to the optic matrix—injecting the form factor won’t scale unless we hack the primary FTP antenna, and our bandwidth visibility is sub-optimal. So our only choice is to connect the back-end mainframe unless you can tap dance. Seriously, we’re going live, grab a top hat and cane!”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/1/22

Oh, c’mon—you guys were literally the entire high school back in the day. No amount of “acting like that” could “exclude you from things,” much as that would have been a better outcome for everybody.

Sherman’s Lagoon, 9/1/22

“Hairless” aside, I really enjoy when Sherman‘s artist exports a character model to a different species: Megan’s pearls, nose, and belligerence are a perfect match.

Gil Thorp, 9/1/22

Hoho, Gil Thorp is going all-in with “Gil and Mimi’s marriage is on the rocks,” and Gil better watch out. First, Mimi challenges her son to an escalating round of Love Declarations (“More than Dad—Say it!“), then deftly sets him up to ally with the younger son of Gil’s hated Valley Tech rival. Soon Gil, separated and jobless, will survey his sad motel room and wonder where it all went wrong. Right here, Gil, while you were sitting on your butt hoping it would all work out. The same way you coach.

–Uncle Lumpy

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Gil Thorp, 8/29/22

Seems its new author is transforming Gil Thorp from one of newspaper comics’ few remaining sports strips into a full-blown soaper, and at breakneck speed.

In just five weeks, we’ve seen Gil ambiguously flirt with Barkeep Bethany and mysterious blonde “Ms. Holmes,” and Coach Ms. Coach Thorp disappear with the kids on the one weekend Gil would be in town, explaining (?) that “I need Coach Gil to be more at home sometimes.” Luke Martinez, new coach at Valley Tech, is a thoroughgoing jackass who drunkenly insults Gil in a bar, libels him in a Marty Moon podcast, compulsively brags about his own athletic, coaching, and intellectual prowess, and here humiliates his teenage son (“Haha! Dad! Haha! You asshole!”). His wife Francesca humblebrags about being “just a heart surgeon” and subtly negs Mimi about being a “stay-at-home mom.” All the ingredients of an explosive melodrama!

Hey, maybe instead of the Homecoming celebration we’ll get an emotional bonfire this fall!

Crankshaft, 8/29/22

Let me save you a couple brain cells looking for a joke here: searching “kids play servers” will get you mostly family-friendly Minecraft sites, and “restaurants where the waitstaff also babysits” are very rare, imagine that.

My real interest here is Max and Hannah’s car. I get a strong “1996 Hyundai Accent” vibe, which fits their “failed movie theater entrepreneurs living with his parents” demographic. The odd thing is, everybody in Centerville and Westview seems to drive the exact same car. Check out Crankshaft himself, Ralph Meckler, and the Winkerbeans:

Crankshaft, 7/10/22 and 7/9/18; Funky Winkerbean, 8/24/22 (panels)

Did they get some sort of group discount? Was it part of Hyundai’s Rust-Belt marketing strategy? Do they pass cars back and forth between the strips? Does the Ohio UAW’s “Buy American” office know about this? Maybe they all just share one car? That last one wouldn’t surprise me; I mean none of them is going anywhere.

Curtis, 8/29/22

Free availability of an essential good mitigates absolute poverty but ruins local suppliers and distorts unrelated markets as families reallocate spending. Next up: “Ma, the rent is too damn high for no good reason,” brought to you by Ray Billingsley and Thomas Sowell.

9 Chickweed Lane, 8/29/22

When these two aren’t talking about sex, they’re talking about nothing. It’s an improvement!

–Uncle Lumpy