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Gil Thorp, 3/6/25

Damn, Gil Thorp really has become a playground for amoral narrative outcomes. First Marty falls off the wagon and improves his drip immeasurably, then Coach Gerads bounces back from being beaten up by his own students to become the insouciant antihero of the Valley Conference. Goshen’s defeat of Milford on the football field presumably drove a local car dealership out of business, but Coach Gerads clearly doesn’t care who he drags down to hell with him.

Wizard of Id, 3/6/25

You guys know how I’ve been adding some old reliables into my rotation again? Well, Wizard of Id is on the list, but I haven’t really talked about it here because it’s frankly even more dire (in a boring, non-fun way) than I remembered. But a strip where the title character attempts to bend the cost curve of his avian-flu-stricken kingdom by shitting out a bunch of eggs? Well, I admit that one caught my attention. Not sure if the stars floating around his hindquarters are supposed to represent pain or magic or maybe both.

Luann, 3/6/25

“Sounds like you need to kiss?”

“What? Kiss?”.

“Yeah. Komfortabler Innovativer Spurtstarker S-Bahn-Zug. It’s a family of bilevel electric multiple unit trains built by the Swiss company Stadler Rail. I think taking a train ride through the European countryside could really help you focus on what’s important in your life.”

“Wow, this is a pretty strange way to flirt.”

“Flirt? You mean Flinker Leichter Intercity- und Regional-Triebzug?”

Heathcliff, 3/6/25

Heathcliff’s father is out of jail now, but after years of incarceration, he still has psychic scars. In a twisted way, prison feels like a safe place to him. His soul will never be free, and I think that’s sad.

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Gil Thorp, 2/19/25

Gil Thorp of course always deals with teen issues both of-the-moment and timeless, and there’s one of the latter type that I don’t think we’ve seen before, which is the phenomenon of the Horse Girl. We’ve actually been in the middle of a wrestling-themed story for the past few days so I’m not sure if this is a classic Thorp-style abrupt transition to the spring B-plot, which will involve the intensely competitive and hitherto undocumented Valley Conference equestrian tournament, or if Valley Conference wrestling follows WWE rules and allows unorthodox techniques like riding a horse into the ring. Either way, I’m looking forward to learning more about this young athlete who loves Silver in a way that the Lone Ranger never could.

Heathcliff, 2/19/25

It’s very true that you can’t judge a book by its cover. There really are people out there who appear to be ordinary, solid citizens — collared shirts, flattop haircuts, the whole nine yards — and yet behind closed doors full-on bathe in meat, like absolute freaks. Only animals with powerful noses can identify these sickos!

Dick Tracy, 2/19/25

Today’s Dick Tracy really has a lot to say about contemporary journalism. Sam reacts with irritation and impatience to Dick’s attempt to explain the corpsenapping background to him: “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says, thrusting a broadsheet into Dick’s face. “I know all that, I read about it in our constitutionally protected free press, ever heard of it?” But in the final panel, a local citizen refers to “tottering Tribune towers,” a reference to the fact that Chicago’s largest newspaper was forced into bankruptcy by vulture capitalists and is now part of a hedge-fund-owned chain that’s increasingly starved of resources. (The tower in this case is metaphorical, as the real one was sold and converted to condos in 2018.)

The Lockhorns, 2/19/25

Cases in divorce court almost never involve jury trials, of course, which means that Leroy lied to Loretta about having jury duty and convinced her to accompany him to the courthouse just so he could do this bit. Ironically, this just shows that he’s willing to put in the work to keep their dysfunctional marriage fresh and interesting.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/15/25

Hey, here’s a fun fact for you: did you know that ventriloquists don’t “throw” their voices anywhere? They just learn to speak with their mouths closed while working a puppet to match their speech, which creates the illusion that the voice is coming from elsewhere, because our sense of vision is much more precise than our sense of hearing and we tend to lock on to the moving puppet and assume that’s where the sound is coming from (and it’s generally not too far from the puppeteer anyway). Advanced practitioners can alter their voice to be softer so it seems to be coming from far away, but nobody can actually make it sound like it’s coming from a completely different direction. And yet there are so many comics and cartoons that imply otherwise! Much like this one! I attribute it to comics and ventriloquism emerging from the same milieu of popular entertainment and so cartoonists felt they would be violating kayfabe if they let on how it worked, but it’s also possible they didn’t know either because you couldn’t just look stuff up on Wikipedia back then, and now we’re stuck with the tropes. Anyway, my point is that as a child, I, like I assume many of you, had wildly incorrect ideas about ventriloquism, so thanks a lot, comics. And don’t even get me started on quicksand!

Heathcliff, 2/15/25

Oh, are you saying a robot and a cat can’t be friends, Grandpa Nutmeg??? I guess this really is the last acceptable prejudice, huh. (Not going into the details of what “this” might refer to, please write some fanfic about it if it interests you.)

Dennis the Menace, 2/15/25

I’m not sure what exactly Dennis is blathering on about — like is he saying that he did a bunch of sins over the past week because he hadn’t heard the good news about how he shouldn’t or something, maybe? — but I don’t actually think that’s important, because he’s only talking to distract the minister so he can get close enough to deliver a solid punch to the nuts. And the minister knows it! That’s good defensive use of the Holy Bible there, rev, I know they don’t teach that at seminary, you learned it from hard experience.