The Comics Curmudgeon

Main Menu

Social Media

Archive: Gil Thorp

Comments are closed

You have to pay a real professional for Cryptkeeper-style scary puns

Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/29/21

Today’s “punchline” is some seriously low-rent “The real scary clowns are those clowns in Congress, amiright people” BS. But you have to admit it would be pretty fun if national TV news bureaus hired some half-assed Bela Lugosi imitator to do a “spooky” intro to each broadcast, and even more fun if they just made the anchors do it.

Gil Thorp, 10/29/21

A few years back, Gil Thorp did a pretty great storyline where the team student-manager was giving one of their players fake Adderall in order to boost his confidence and thereby his play, which is sort of like what we’re seeing here, where Boyd Spiller is using his YouTube-derived bogus hypnosis skills to convince everyone that he can improve their football and other talents. The difference, I guess, is that the student-manager knew the Adderall he was handing out was fake, whereas Boyd is probably going to convince himself that he really is a master of hypnosis, with hopefully extremely hilarious results.

Zits, 10/29/21

I don’t really care much about the content of this Zits, but I do want to point out that in the span of time it takes Walt and his son to utter four sentences, he’s removed a bone-in ham from the refrigerator, used it to assemble a large, sloppy sandwich, and completely consumed it and licked the remaining mustard off his fingers, a sequence terrifyingly dagwoodian in its efficiency.

Comments are closed

Wilbur has definitely ordered this restaurant’s trademark “Royale With Cheese”

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 10/19/21

Much as I make fun of Gil Thorp, I do think it puts in slightly more of an effort at keeping up with trends young people might be into than you’d expect for a long running soap opera strip. And sure, sometimes it results in strips where the Milford principal sternly intones that “sexting” is a hot new craze that’s been in Time and Newsweek, but in general our dumb teens do some recognizable dumb teen things. And that means that strip also takes account of the ways those dumb teen things evolve over time! For instance, back in 2009 when the strip did a YouTube storyline, it was about teen boys uploading videos of wacky plays and going viral, whereas 2021’s YouTube storyline is about teen boys getting redpilled into some weird scammy bullshit. Looking forward to the playdowns getting thrown into chaos when the kids all become obsessed with the idea that the Federal Reserve is run by “lizard men.”

Hi and Lois, 10/19/21

What really sells this to me how bummed out Hi looks by the reception to his dinner. “But … I made overboiled buttery noodles! Kids love this crap!”

Mary Worth, 10/19/21

How is Wilbur’s date with Carol going? Well, he starts this portion of the conversation with “As a someone with a column in a newspaper that nobody reads, I sometimes go to cities I don’t live in!” and yet manages to get even more insufferable after that.

Comments are closed

Did his body cannibalize all his cartilage to survive in hibernation?

Post Content

Between Friends, 9/22/21

I’ve been reading and very occasionally commenting on Between Friends for a while now, and I absolutely get and accept that the titular “friends” are all women, and their jobs are extremely ill-defined white collar work of some kind, so I definitely shouldn’t expect to know what their husbands/boyfriends, who are definitely the strip’s supporting characters, do for a living. And yet I could not help but be very intrigued by what appears very much to be a coffin behind Susan’s husband in the background of panel one. That looks a lot like a coffin, right? Or, it could be something else (a closed grill, maybe?) and the colorist just thought it looked like a coffin, possibly because Susan’s husband is wearing a black suit with a pocket square and if he’s not an undertaker but just some guy standing near a grill outside during the workday, well, why is he dressed like that? Anyway, I certainly hope there’s a grieving family standing just out of frame, staring at him in increasing agitation as he loudly makes his evening plans.

Gil Thorp, 9/22/21

Good lord, Heather, reporting on Milford games on Twitter so that people can read about them as they happen instead of waiting for tomorrow’s afternoon edition to arrive on their doorstep is one thing, but are you really walking away from Coach Thorp while he’s mid-sentence to talk to one of the children who play for him? Looks like you’re about to make a powerful enemy (Coach Thorp), and just as the Hapsburgs made the seemingly unthinkable decision to ally with Bourbon France in the aftermath of the War of the Austrian Succession, so to will Gil make peace with his hereditary enemy (Marty Moon) to restore the high school sports-local media balance of power.

Barney Google, 9/22/21

Just a reminder that, canonically, Snuffy’s dad was asleep for decades (?) in the woods in a comical Rip Van Winkle-style situation, so who even knows what’s going on inside his body! Pretty weird stuff, I bet!