Archive: Gil Thorp

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 4/8/22

Gil Thorp generally hews pretty closely to the holy trinity of football, basketball, and baseball/softball, but every once in a while it tries another sport out for size and I always appreciate it. Today the Milford baseballers are coming out to support tennis star Charis (?) Tompkins, and going on a journey of learning about when and where it’s appropriate to cheer in different sports. A fun fact is that my niece was a pretty high-level gymnast in high school and I went to one of her meets once and very quickly discovered that you are not supposed to loudly boo your team’s opponents, who knew, ha ha! You can’t blame me, my sole experience with competitive gymnastics at the time was a 2006 Gil Thorp storyline where one little girl just starts punching another little girl in the face in the middle of a meet.

Mary Worth, 4/8/22

Ha ha, yes, this dream sequence is shaping up to be exactly as bananas as I’d hoped! Cal looming erotically/threatening over Toby, staring into nothing with dead heart eyes, while the salmon sky burns behind him? The best part is that it’s Friday and we’re really just getting started, which I hope means we have another solid week of this.

Hi and Lois, 4/8/22

The newspaper comics are essentially an art form created by, and mostly for, those middle aged and older, so a lot of it ends being about how the kids today aren’t as cool as the kids used to be. Normally that’s not my jam, but I gotta admit, when they’re right, they’re right.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 4/6/22

Ahh, we’ve come to one of my little pleasures in life: that moment in the Gil Thorp season when someone asks Gil who’s going be on the team this year, and then he just rattles off a bunch of names. I find it soothing, like a white noise machine playing ocean sounds in the background. Will we have to remember some of these people? Probably. But I trust that Coach will say their names again in that case. For now, I’m taking the attitude of the two young men walking outside in the third panel. “Hear that? Can’t quite make it out, but it sounds like some names are bein’ said. Must be baseball season!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/6/22

Rex isn’t so much “soothing” as “boring” here, but I’m willing to wait this strip out. Mmm, a serious injury but not severe enough to merit surgery? It’s going to heal … eventually? Uh huh. Keep it coming. I can do this as long as you can.

Post Content

Slylock Fox, 4/1/22

In the Book of Genesis, there is a moment, immediately after Adam and Eve eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, when their minds shift before their habits: they’re still naked, as they had happily been before, but now they have a moral code that deems that nudity shameful, so they immediately have to lurch into action and create makeshift clothes for themselves. So too did the animals of Slylock Fox move haltingly from their previous, brutish existence into the post-animalpocalypse world we know. In today’s strip, these birds know that the old ways, in which the momma would simply vomit those worms down her child’s throat, are no longer acceptable, but they have yet to realize that their ability to manipulate tools like pails and silverware means that they can simply abandon that nest and forcibly evict the hapless humans from the comfortable house below.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/1/22

Ha ha, the “tin ceiling!” You know, because the video game was located in Montoni’s. And in Montoni’s the ceiling is … made of tin? Oh, you don’t know that? You’ve read Funky Winkerbean daily for years and you would never in your life make that connection? Well, screw you, man, today’s strip is for the real fans, who definitely exist.

Gil Thorp, 4/1/22

Say what you will about Gil Thorp, but the strip always manages to come up with new odd combinations of characters and traits for their storylines. Did any of us have “kid obsessed with baseball trivia with a dad who ghostwrites terrible CEO ‘leadership’ tomes that get sold at airport book stores” on their bingo cards? No, but I for one appreciate that we got here.

Mary Worth, 4/1/22

Speaking of unique new storylines and/or the lack thereof: hey, Toby, remember when your husband had a vague flirtation with a student that boosted his ego but didn’t go anywhere, and when he was given the opportunity he declined to dispute your description of it as an “emotional affair”? Well, I don’t know about your job, but marriage-wise, that’s what we call a “get out of jail free card.”