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Gil Thorp, 6/24/20

Just as it’s easy for a fish to forget that it lives in water, it’s easy for readers of Gil Thorp to forget that Gil Thorp takes place in a community/universe where interest in high school athletics is unusually intense. Like, an unsanctioned baseball game between the local high school and the local alternative school? I can see families and maybe friends showing up for this. But sun-seekers? The idle curious? Watching teens play baseball? There actually could have been a whole plot about Mike “The Mayor” using his extreme extroversion to promote interest in this game amongst the citizenry, but there hasn’t been and without it I feel like my ability to suspend disbelief has been stretched to its breaking point, no matter how much admire the new spiffy t-shirts.

Mary Worth, 6/24/20

If you want a strip that shits on millennials, you of course have Dustin. But Mary Worth is proving itself on the cutting edge by taking on the scourge of zoomers, the next up-and-coming generation of terrible young people. We all of course remember the brazen Jannie, the college student who heartlessly took advantage of Ian’s kind nature by trying to flirt her way out of an assignment and then reacting with vile profanity when he refused to play along. Now we have Madi, who’s younger (and therefore worse), and she not only cusses like a sailor herself but she left her clothes strewn all over Saul’s apartment. Man, this whole generation is a lost cause! We didn’t even know how good we had it with the millennials, even though we made fun of them for looking at their phones all the time. I wish Madi were looking at her phone, instead of rolling her eyes in that extremely aggresive way!

Mark Trail, 6/24/20

Most Hollywood celebs with lousy personalities have bad reputations in private, but their teams of managers and publicists work hard to make sure their public reputation is at least neutral or “exciting bad boy who doesn’t play by the Man’s rules.” If this Jeremy Cartwright is unable to be contained by such professional image-scrubbing then I am very excited to see the sparks fly when he and Mark meet up in LoFo! Will we finally get to see Mark punch … himself, or at least his Hollywood doppelgänger?

Funky Winkerbean, 6/24/20

Oh, haha, were you tired of “no actress is good enough to play Les’s blessed dead wife Lisa“? Well, good news, because we’re going to start alternating with “Cindy gets extremely jealous when her husband, an actor, kisses a lady in an acting role.” You know, a little something for the ladies (?).

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Gil Thorp, 6/19/20

Good news from Gil Thorp, everyone! Mike “The Mayor” didn’t just slink off to the bad kid school and give up on his hopes and dreams after being expelled for bringing a butter knife into class; instead, he’s training the other bad kids at his bad kid school for an epic slobs vs. snobs baseball battle against his old Mudlark teammates. And he just found his secret weapon Corina Karenna (named, I assume, after the beloved (?) 1994 Ray Liotta/Whoopi Goldberg vehicle Corrina, Corrina), who’s very good at baseball and is a total anarchist. The infield fly rule? The “unwritten rules of baseball”? Corina will be ignoring all of them as the misfits roll over the Mudlarks in an unauthorized game played “thunderdome-style,” i.e., with no umpires, parents, or sense of decency.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/19/20

Today’s Funky Winkerbean made me realize that despite having read about the glory and pageantry of Lisa’s Story for years and years and years, I don’t actually … know what exactly Lisa’s Story is about? I mean, I know Lisa’s actual life story, but does the book/movie treatment cover the whole arc of her life, or just the cancer stuff or what? And, like, she died pretty young — Darrin, who was born when she was in high school, was in high school when she passed away, so she couldn’t have been older than her mid-30s. And she had two cancer bouts, over several years! I have no idea how young or old this actress is who Les just hate-masturbated to on the plane, and it’s true that Hollywood casts actresses young, but I’m pretty sure Les would only be satisfied without someone the age he is now, and here’s the thing, Les: Lisa stopped aging when she died.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/19/20

Ha ha, that got kind of dark, didn’t it? Well, suck it up, times are dark. Look, here’s the grimmest, realest Hagar the Horrible ever written!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/27/20

As you may know (and if you don’t buckle up because you are about to find out), I love etymologies. So, here’s a fun fact! In German, the word for “prince” (in the sense of “a sovereign ruler regardless of other title” rather than the sense of “the son of a king”) is “fürst.” Etymologically, this word means, quite literally, “the first,” as in the foremost person in the state; “fürst” and “first” also have the same etymological root, and are basically pronounced the same way, but because English always has to be fancy, we imported our word for the noble title from French, which in turn got it from the Latin word “princeps,” which also literally means “first.”

Anyway, I’m pointing this out mostly because of Jughaid’s “furst” in panel two, which is a prime example of the eye dialect used in this strip, designed to make the characters look like they’re speaking non-standard English even though the difference between “furst” and how anyone would pronounce “first” is negligible. And honestly, I’d like to believe that Jughaid is announcing that the Holy Roman Emperor had invested him in a small alpine principality with the status of imperial immediacy, and that he’ll be leaving the Holler behind to take possession of his new realm post-haste.

Beetle Bailey, 5/27/20

I woman I dated briefly years ago once said that it always made her cringe to see a couple both sitting on the same side of a table at a restaurant because she took it as a sign that the passion had gone out of their relationship, and while I definitely think that’s a sweeping overgeneralization, I admit I always think about it whenever I see people sitting like that. Anyway, I wonder what she’d think about a couple who’s sitting together on one side of the table at a restaurant and also one of them has fallen asleep face first onto their plate.

Gil Thorp, 5/27/20

Good news, everyone! Mike “The Mayor” has resigned himself to having his life destroyed for no good reason and has now come on down to see his old friends continue to play team sports, like he used to do. Anyway, would it be an appropriate response if he just whipped out a butter knife and started stabbling everyone to death with it? Well, no, no it wouldn’t. But would it work as narrative? Yeah, sure, probably.

The Lockhorns, 5/27/20

I know this isn’t the intended reading, but I am absolutely cackling at the thought of Leroy diligently printing out the “How To Fake Your Own Death” WikiHow article, which he’s now studying with more determination than we’ve ever seen him demonstrate in his entire life to this point.