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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!

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Gil Thorp, 7/22/21

So we’re still in the early, extremely manic phase of this Gil Thorp storyline, and there’s been lots of cutting back and forth between plots and little context for anything. So far the Heather Burns plot is easy enough to parse (a former Mudlark coming back to Milford and ending up with an almost certainly unpaid assistant coaching job is a long and storied tradition in this strip) but I’m not quite following what the deal is with Loud Golf Hat Man (he’s named “Carter Hendricks,” apparently). We know he’s (a) loud, (b) loves golf and saying golf jargon, (c) wears a hat, and (d) seems like a real asshole, and admittedly that last one is just a gut assessment from me but do you know who else was a solvent salesman? Del Bader, who liked a nightcap or two after a hard day of solvent sales and then ended up killing a beloved Mudlark with his car. Excited to see just how bad Carter’s gonna get!

Family Circus, 7/22/21

Can’t quite tell what Ma Keane’s facial expression is supposed to convey here. Is she imagining Billy going outside and wildly flailing at his various non-baseballs with that baseball bat, much to the embarrassment of everyone watching? Or is she thinking, “Yeah, sure, you’re dad’s a workaholic, that’s it”?