Post Content

Gil Thorp, 5/3/14

Gil Thorp’s baseball-season storyline continues to be super boring, to the extent that today’s panel three got me thinking about how great it would be to see the Gil Thorp creative team take a few weeks off from high school sports action to give us a recap of the Battle of Stalingrad. It’d be all big flappy hands and confusing jumps back and forth to different indistinguishable soldiers in the various battle zones and occasional appearances by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein dispensing vague platitudes while wearing a shit-eating smirk. It would definitely be more interesting than whatever’s going on with Lucky Haskins’s academic problems, I tell you what.

Apartment 3-G, 5/3/14

Tommie has been under Jack’s Svengali-like sway for three whole weeks, which is plenty of time to get her into a routine, work her to exhaustion, and separate her from all desire to go back to her previous life. But he hasn’t stopped his scheming there, and frankly I approve of his plan to ply the formerly bearish Professor with carbs and cheese, as his new character design is far too emaciated for my taste.

Herb and Jamaal, 5/3/14

Yes, why would you solve a math problem with some dumb old “equation” when you could just use common sense instead? That … that would be a super power, honestly.

Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 4/24/14

Did Sarge just claim that our nation’s military is nothing more than a bunch of clowns? I’m sure I’m wildly misconstruing whatever baffling joke the strip is attempting here, but if slanderously asserting that America’s only military-themed comic strip just insulted our heroes is what it takes to get it pulled from newspapers nationwide and finally putting an end to its penchant for horrifying clown depictions, then I’m not going to feel any shame about it.

Herb and Jamaal, 4/24/14

You know, auditory hallucinations get a bad rap! You only hear about them when they do awful things, like order their sufferers to kill. But sometimes they only make whimsical suggestions, like “Hey, wouldn’t it be a pretty good idea to sleep in a laundromat?”

Post Content

Click the banner to contribute to the Comics Curmudgeon. Details here.

It’s the Comics Curmudgeon Spring 2014 Fundraiser! Spring into the new season with an official CC tote bag or refrigerator magnet — act now!

Judge Parker, 3/20/14

The Bowers/Abbotts père et fille share a private moment and a little shop talk. The thought of simply declaring her Dad’s gift and paying import duties and taxes on it never crossed April’s mind. “Can money even move in that direction — ‘away’?”, she muses. Somehow it doesn’t seem physically possible!

Welcome to the family, girlfriend – a true Parker at last!

Or maybe not? Long-running strips need to be really careful about irrevocable steps like marriages, graduations, and deaths. They upset a strip’s balance, limiting the ways characters can contribute. And if there’s one constant in Judge Parker over the last fifty years, it’s that Randy Parker is a clueless, self-satisfied tool, perpetually used and discarded by women. This principle is so much a part of the strip’s bedrock that even on the eve of his wedding, I can’t believe they’ll go through with it. I fully expect that April will die in a hail of gunfire or (more likely) disappear into the jungle at the last possible moment. Anyway, stay tuned — we’ll know in mere months!

Luann, 3/20/14

That said, what on earth is going on in Luann? Everybody’s been moving through middle-school and high school over the strip’s 29 years, and now they’re seniors announcing college plans for the fall. Ethnic ciphers Rosa and Delta are off to Yale and Howard, most of the cast to nearby “Moony Uni” (OK sure, some kind of Unification Church outfit, I guess), and Luann to the local Community College.

Is Luann really just six months away from becoming a “college hijinks” strip, or a soaper about declining academic standards and unsustainable student debt? Is inert, self-absorbed, academically dishonest Luann even remotely plausible as a college student? All these questions will have to wait, because: OMG YOU GUYS PROM!

Herb and Jamaal, 3/20/14

Yet another newspaper drops Herb and Jamaal, and Herb blames his son for it.

Spider-Man, 3/20/14

“I was going to save those men — but their plight has flushed Spider-Man out of hiding! Now they can just die for all I care, for putting that stink on my beloved city!”

You’ll breeze through Customs when you hide those conflict diamonds in a fashionable Comics Curmudgeon tote bag, Send your generous contribution today!

— Uncle Lumpy