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Gil Thorp, 7/13/21

It’s summertime in Milford, everybody! Is this the year we’re going to get a wacky summer storyline that isn’t about golf? Maybe! We definitely are going to get a wacky summer storyline about a beloved character from the past: Heather Burns, who you might remember as the girl who convinced a professional basketball player to get a master’s degree in history, possibly one of the worst pieces of advice I’ve ever seen given and I read the Mary Worth where Mary told a woman that if she didn’t like her past she should just remember it differently. Anyway, I can’t wait to see what Heather learned in Iowa (possibly after taking out tens of thousands of dollars in loans to get an MFA in creative writing) that will definitely help her career as a poorly paid writer for a dying small-town daily newspaper.

And in the other plot, we have … well, golf, I guess! At least one guy’s wearing a dumb hat, though. Can’t wait to see what antics this hat dude gets up to!

Hi and Lois, 7/13/21

Speaking of golf, I know it’s a rule that legacy cartoonists have to spend the entirety of each and every workday absolutely consumed with thoughts of all the golf they’re going to play when they’re finally done drawing cartoons for the day, but I think they’re supposed to actually come up with a punchline before they head out to the links, sorry guys.

Shoe, 7/13/21

[don’t get mad don’t get mad don’t get mad] IF YOU THINK HE TALKED FOR TOO LONG WHY ARE YOU MAD THAT HE TALKED SO FAST, WOULDN’T THAT HAVE MADE THE WHOLE THING GO QUICKER?????? [aw crap I got mad]

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Funky Winkerbean, 7/10/21

Hey, do you guys remember Phil Holt, who was (I guess?) a thinly veiled stand-in for Jack Kirby, and who Darrin met at a children’s party once, and then he died and left his valuable comics to Darrin, then took up residence in the same spectral hell-dimension that Lisa haunts? Well, he and Flash Freeman had some bad blood, which I guess is supposed to mirror some real-life comic book drama from the Good Old Days, but one of my constant positions is that I love newspaper comics and am extremely lukewarm on comic books, and that was true in 2004 when I started this blog and remains true today in 2021 when comic book franchises have swallowed all other media, so I refuse to do the research as to what the real-life analogue of the “subterranean” is. The point is that this is setting up the real identity of the figure who’s mysteriously interested in Flash and Ruby’s Hall of Fame induction. Do you think it’s supposed to be Phil Holt? Do you think that everyone involved in making Funky Winkerbean forgot that he was dead, or maybe assumed even ghosts needs some kind of pass to get on the Comic-Con floor?

Mary Worth, 7/10/21

Wait, hold on, I had always assumed that, what with her substance abuse problems and her legal issues, Shauna had in fact been the dumpee in her relationship with Drew, which led her to strut her way back into his life looking her best (?) in an attempt to win back his heart. But no, she left him! This is delicious. No wonder Ashlee is so determined to hold onto Drew, this is a guy who will absolutely stick around while you extract all the emotional and financial value from him that you can.

Gil Thorp, 7/10/21

Ugh, it’s a bad idea because the labor necessary to pull this off represents a huge new expense, and you wouldn’t make the money back because libraries don’t charge people! Honestly, Abel, I know this is (hopefully) the last day of it but it’s like you’ve forgotten what your entire deal in this storyline is.

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Gil Thorp, 7/8/21

Oh, hey, the “spring” storyline in Gil Thorp is still going on [checks notes] several days after the 4th of July, but today’s strip would like you to know that you aren’t going crazy: it’s being deliberately dragged out by the library board, because they’ve discovered how great it is when people pay attention to them and they’re going to ride that high as long as they can. Anyway, it’s pretty clear from the neoliberal detente Zane and Abel achieved at their debate that the library board is going to announce that there’s no rule in the bylaws that would prevent them from appointing two new members. If there’s further conflict between the two, expect the rest of the board to live-stream the meetings in hope of recreating this magic springtime when everyone cared about library governance (it definitely won’t work).

Daddy Daze, 7/8/21

The whole gimmick of Daddy Daze is that the Daddy Daze baby speaks in an unintelligible series of “ba”s, which the Daddy Daze daddy purports to understand as a fully-fledged linguistic system that encodes complex ideas and concepts. I’m a fan of Occam’s Razor, the idea that simpler explanations are usually to be preferred to more complex ones, which may give you an idea of where I come down on the question of “is the Daddy Daze baby actually able to formulate complete sentences in a language of his own design despite his young age that his father understands, or is the Daddy Daze daddy merely in an advanced stage of psychosis?” Strips like today make the question substantially easier to answer, in my opinion.