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Gil Thorp, 3/29/22

Ahhh, if it’s spring, it must be time for … the Gil Thorp baseball plot, which will definitely involve these young men and their varying degrees of enthusiasm for baseball trivia! I’m not a “sports guy” but the answer to this question has to be pitching-related, right, since they used to put pitchers in 60 games a year or whatever but now they’ve evolved into delicate, crane-like creatures capable of throwing at superhuman speeds but also they need lots of downtime between starts or their hollow bones will explode? Anyway, mostly what I’m thinking about here is how insulting it must be to be relegated to “and friends…” status behind “Scooter Borden” and “Gregg Hamm”. That’s too many Gs and too many Ms, Gregg!

The Lockhorns, 3/29/22

Someone being present during their spouse’s physical is a little unusual but not unheard of. But I like the way Loretta has her purse slung over her shoulder here. Like she could take off at any minute if this gets boring. C’mon, doc, you gotta keep teeing up the sick burns if you want her to stick around!

Pluggers, 3/29/22

Haha, I love the “lots and lots and LOTS of pluggers” credit for this one. “WE GET IT,” the Chief Plugger is saying, “YOU PEOPLE NEED MASSIVE, COSTLY, AND ONGOING PHARMACEUTICAL INTERVENTIONS IN ORDER TO LIVE”

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Six Chix, 3/23/22

One of those things that I never thought about until I learned it and then I thought about it all the time is that nowhere in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme is it stated that he’s an egg, yet this is, universally, how we envision him. The main theory explaining this is that the rhyme was originally conceived of as a riddle: “humpty dumpty” was a general slang term of abuse for the short and squat, and so the joke was something like “Sure, seems weird that some little fat dude fell off the wall and broke into pieces … but what if we told you that actually, he was an egg? Eh?” Humor, notoriously, does not translate well across eras, and this is a pretty good example of that in play! You know what does play well across eras, though? Body horror! That’s why I’m wholeheartedly endorsing the Six Chix reboot of the Humpty Dumpty mythos, in which the Humpty Dumpty was deliberately taunted into hurling himself to a horrifying death so that his “inner bird” could be set free. Each bird in this grim world must convince other beings to die in order to perpetuate their species. It’s grim stuff!

Crankshaft, 3/23/22

If you “run” Montoni’s pizza through “the pipeline” (of your digestive tract), you’ll experience any number of unpleasant side effects, at both ends and the middle, which might in some sense be interpreted as “saluting”. Sorry you had to visualize that, but the motto of this blog long ago shifted from “I read the comics so you don’t have to” to “I involuntarily contemplated Ed Crankshaft’s pizza-farts so now you’re going to have to as well.”

Gil Thorp, 3/23/22

I know, in theory, that the teens in the first two panels have just finished a practice, and it’s only in the second panel that we’ve zoomed in enough to see that Parnit is sweating as one normally does after such exertion. But what it looks like is that Pranit has been told that he’ll be allowed back in the lineup after being suspended for his little “I accidentally became a bookie and hired an enforcer” oopsie and has immediately broken into a frenzied, manic sweat of excitement. He might have a problem not messing up between now and the game! Looks like he’s gonna mess up right there, to be honest!

Judge Parker and The Phantom, 3/23/22

Sorry I have not been keeping you up to date on Judge Parker and The Phantom, but I did want to point out that they’re both drawn by Mike Manley but written by two different people, and I would like to imagine that Manley enjoyed getting the scripts this week and finding out that he would get to do two explosions on the same day.

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Beetle Bailey, 3/15/22

Guys, I was about to go on a whole smug riff here about how the idea of a “bucket list” — that is, a list of things to do before you “kick the bucket” (i.e., die) — really hit its cultural peak back when the movie of the same title came out in 2007, which is why it’s telling and sad that Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC is only now getting around to making “bucket list” jokes. However, my total commitment to serving up accurate, information to you, the reader, led me to fact check some things and learn some truly mind-blowing stuff.

First off: Far from being a common phrase that was then borrowed as the title of the movie, as I had very strongly assumed, the phrase was actually originally coined by the screenwriter, Justin Zackham, who says he had kept a list like that for himself that he called “List of Things to do Before I Kick the Bucket,” eventually shortened to “Justin’s Bucket List.” Linguist, Wall Street Journal language columnist, and friend of the blog Ben Zimmer wrote a in 2015 column in which he backs Zackham’s claims; somewhat amusingly, a 2011 Slate article written to debunk the idea has an editorial note at the top added in 2015 admitting that they either misinterpreted or misdated supposedly earlier uses of the phrase. This extremely well-documented Reddit comment in a discussion on the topic in /r/etymology does a great job of demonstrating that the phrase was either invented for the movie or was almost unknown at the time it was released, because there are lots of earlier references to the concept but none actually use the phrase (they usually call it a “life list”).

And it’s not just me, a Gen Xer who was a married adult in his early 30s and had been doing this comics blog for three years when the movie came out, whose mind was blown by this: apparently it has similarly blown the minds of all the teens on TikTok, where discourse on the subject went viral last month. Did I know this? Obviously not, I am an old person who, as noted, was fully adult in the year of our lord 2007, I have not downloaded the TikTok app to my phone and I never will, thank you ver much. As the research journey outlined here has made clear, I only got hepped to this whole scene by — that’s right — the comic strip Beetle Bailey. THE WALKER-BROWNE STRIPS ARE MORE HIP TO WHAT THE KIDS ARE TALKING ABOUT THAN I AM, IT DOES NOT MATTER THAT I HAVE MANY ITEMS UNFINISHED ON MY “BUCKET LIST” BECAUSE I AM CLEARLY DEAD AND ALREADY IN THE GRAVE

Gil Thorp, 3/15/22

Speaking of teens, the “Pranit accidentally becomes a bookie” plot ended super boringly (Pranit got narced on and suspended from the team but otherwise seems to be doing fine and learning the appropriate lessons), so I appreciate the fact that today the strip decided to “have a little fun” and just provide some unsettling closeups of food. You ever wonder what it would look like for a hamburger to be pointed at — form the hamburger’s point of view? Then today’s Gil Thorp is for you, friends.

Pluggers, 3/15/22

A lot of comics did “Pi Day” jokes for 3/14 yesterday, and I ignored them because, as a dork who went to a magnet high school with an engineering focus, I can assure you that I have heard enough of those jokes to last me a lifetime. (Get at me when you’re ready to get on my level and celebrate Mole Day.) I guess today’s Pluggers is supposed to be a saying “I may have forgotten to do a Pi Day joke yesterday but every day is pie day, when you think about it”, but honestly I can’t get over how completely joyless this dog-man’s face is as he looks into the fridge. Pluggers are just simple, down-home real Americans who long ago lost the ability to feel pleasure or anything at all, really, even when they see that there’s a delicious slice of pie for them to eat whenever they want.