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Gil Thorp, 2/21/20

I know I’ve been “letting you down” when it comes to the Gil Thorp updates this basketball season, but I think I’ve built up a lot of trust over the years as the guy who reads the comics so you don’t have to, so please believe me when I say that it’s because the strip has been extremely dull. Alexa Watson is very smart and competitive and has to learn to be moderately more aggressive on the court, and so has been trying to shift her everyday mindset a bit to get her there and that’s been … it? Sports? Sports action? In Gil Thorp, the comic strip about sports? I know, nobody is more disappointed than I am.

Dennis the Menace, 2/21/20

One duty I will never shirk is the fulfillment of my ongoing mission to keep you appraised of Dennis Mitchell’s wild oscillations between menacing and non-menacing, and I don’t think I need to tell you where “extremely excited about the possibility of electronic correspondence” falls on the spectrum.

Pluggers, 2/21/20

Pluggers will grab onto any possible human connection, even if it’s tenuous and accidental, as tightly as possible. All their friends are dying and they’re terribly, terribly lonely!

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Hi and Lois, 1/28/20

True story: When I was a kid and my mom first got an answering machine, her mother did not know how to deal with it, and would leave messages like she was talking to a person who wasn’t us, e.g., “[long awkward pause, then speaking very slowly] Tell Carol that mother called.” Anyway, this is just to say that Lois clearly has a physical answering machine attached to a landline, not “voice mail,” and you can’t listen to the latter in real time, so I question when this strip was actually written, or at least when the joke was conceived. I also don’t think we’ve ever seen Lois’s mother appear in the strip, so maybe she’s running to the phone to turn down the volume, because she doesn’t want her kids to know they have grandparents.

Mark Trail, 1/28/20

So, uh, the Mark Trail art is continuing to shift and change even outside the context of Dr. Camel’s flashback? Not sure if this is meant to represent everyone slowly losing their mind due to oxygen deprivation or if new-ish artist James Allen is trying to put his own visual stamp on the strip rather than hewing to the models established by his predecessors, but the important thing is that Mark and Harvey are going to snipe at each other until they freeze to death.

Gil Thorp, 1/28/20

Finally, something interesting is happening in Gil Thorp: the bully clique is going to mess with the aspiring valedictorian by playing what I firmly expect to be a series of escalating fart noises during his oral report. I hope this goes on for weeks.

Dick Tracy, 1/28/20

Mister Roboto acts like he’s mad that he has to mansplain Styx’s concept album Kilroy Is Here to a sexy part-alien lady dressed as a robot who he’s tied to a chair, but let’s be clear: he’s very excited that he gets to mansplain Styx’s concept album Kilroy Is Here to a sexy part-alien lady dressed as a robot who he’s tied to a chair.

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Gil Thorp, 1/23/20

Man, I know it’s early, but this Gil Thorp spring storyline has been extremely snoresville so far, involving competition between two student-athletes for valedictorian, plus some actual basketball stuff that I can’t really follow and resent as a result. But I am mesmerized by today’s panel two, in which Marcell Irby controls the glass (I assume “Marcell Irby Controls The Glass” is the name of his avant-garde dance piece where he spins a basketball around on his head in front of a complex, abstract geometric background that he personally designed).

Dennis the Menace, 1/23/20

Pretty sure the real menace here is Alice, who apparently forced her son to sit in his punishment corner for so long that he was in danger of soiling himself? Or maybe it’s the whole Mitchell clan, for constantly getting Joey involved in their internal psychodrama. Look at him! He’s very, very nervous! He just wants everyone to be happy!