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Gil Thorp, 8/10/21

I’ve been making lots of jokes about not being able to understand any of the golf lingo in Gil Thorp, but guess what: I’ve been carefully analyzing these strips, trying to squeeze as much meaning out of them as my feeble non-golfing brain can understand, and with today’s strip I have cracked the code: Hendricks is a golf scammer! Specifically, he’s much better at golf than his handicap would indicate, hitting some great shots and then deliberately hitting terrible ones to lull everyone into a false sense of complacency (and keeping his handicap artificially high, or possibly low, however it works in golf). Anyway, I feel a little embarrassed to be as excited as I am about figuring this out, but at least I’m not excited about figuring out how much a golf ball costs after crawling around some field to find it.

Mary Worth, 8/10/21

Remember the time Mary, Jeff’s ostensible girlfriend, picked up a dude at his own mother’s funeral and he never noticed? Remember the time she spent an erotically charged week in New York with a handsome Broadway actor and he never noticed? Drew’s take on his dad’s romantic ineptitude checks out, is what I’m saying. At least he’ll get over it fast when Mary finally does finally leave him, right? (No, absolutely not, he will whine about it endlessly.)

Curtis, 8/10/21

All social media platforms, Tomaura? Even LinkedIn? I don’t think a video of Curtis getting mauled by a polar bear is going to do very good numbers on LinkedIn.

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Hi and Lois, 7/30/21

“Gosh, I wish there were continuing storylines in Hi and Lois,” said … someone? One of you, maybe? Well, here you go, it turns out that one of the defining features of Chip’s teenage years is the conflict between spending time with pretty blondes or redheads and spending time mowing the yard in order to earn money to subsidize the spending associated with the aforementioned time with girls. Riveting stuff from America’s funny pages!

Gil Thorp, 7/30/21

This summer’s Gil Thorp is doing a fascinating experiment: can it weave a plotline out of golf jargon that is 100% opaque to me, a non-golf-fan, and still keep me, a Gil Thorp superfan, involved? I’m gonna hold on for dear life and see what happens! The closest analogue to reading this that I can think of is when I’m watching something on TV that’s in a foreign language with subtitles, and I absent-mindedly start looking at something on my phone and realize I haven’t understood anything anyone’s said for the past minute or two but have been kind of following along just based on the emotional cadence of people’s voices. Today’s panel two is putting an additional degree of difficulty in place by having the golf-jargon-speaker block a big chunk of his face with his hand so I can’t tell if he’s smiling or frowning or what, but I’m up to the challenge!

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/23/21

I don’t mean to tell people how to deal with shocking news, but I feel like this Comic-Con crowd has moved on way too quickly to the part where they’re heaping heartfelt praise on undeserving Funky Winkerbean ancillary characters and haven’t spent enough time dwelling on the part where Phil Holt faked his death. This Q&A in real life would feature fewer questions like “This is more a comment than a question, but in a meaningful sense you two guys were like our parents” and more like “Why did you fake your death?” and “How did you fake your death?” and “What was it like being a ghost?” and “Have you looked into the legal ramifications of faking your death? Because I bet there are legal ramifications.”

Dick Tracy, 7/23/21

Remember when this strip used to be a nonstop symphony of graphic violence? Now it’s just letting its creators work out the most indulgent possible fantasy for a comic strip artist: that if their strip went into reruns, at least one of their readers would care enough to try to figure out what had happened to them.

Gil Thorp, 7/23/21

Ha, not only will Heather definitely be unpaid, but this unpaid job will prevent her from getting any actual jobs! Just perfect. I also have to wonder if the newspaper would consider Heather taking this gig a conflict of interest, seeing as the only newsworthy stuff that happens in this terrible town is inevitably Milford High-related in some way.

Zits, 7/23/21

Oh, nothing much to see here, just the Zits mom humping the TV during a sex scene. Enjoy your weekend, everybody!