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Gil Thorp, 7/5/13

Well, this is it: I am officially allowing myself to get excited about the Gil Thorp storyline, seeing as it’s going to be about the colorful history of professional wrestling! See, Oldguy McFisticuffs is Herk the Mauler, and is a former pro wrestler, as is his son, who apparently has some connection to Gil, so it’s WRESTLEMANIA until football starts! (Not literally.) (WrestleMania is registered trademark of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.) Can you believe we had (I think, I’m not going to bother going back to check because they were soooo boring) two summers in a row about golf when we could have had wacky tales of regional wrestling from back in the day? Pro wrestling is genuinely fascinating, a weird combination of athletics and improvisational theater with a complex vocabulary, and it did indeed emerge from regional scenes in the middle of the 20th century. Anyway, when Herk wasn’t being a heel in whatever the regional wrestling equivalent of the Valley Conference was, he was “Johnny Blaze” “out west” in a wrestling scene that did as little as possible to mask the sport’s homoerotic undertones.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/5/13

You know, if I were going to do a joke about someone who always speaks her mind and has a hard time holding her tongue, I probably wouldn’t have her deliver the punchline in thought balloon form. But Herb and Jamaal chose a different path.

Mark Trail, 7/5/13

Rusty and the Otters: A play in one act

RUSTY: Don’t wander off, adorable otters!

ADORABLE OTTERS: [Immediately wander off]

FIN

Apartment 3-G, 7/5/13

You know, if I were going to do a plotline about one of my soap opera strip characters trying on a bunch of fancy clothes, I probably would actually depict her wearing some of the fancy clothes instead showing her in between bouts of fancy-clothes-trying-on, wearing the same boring clothes she always wears. But Apartment 3-G chose a different path.

Mary Worth, 7/5/13

Oh, man, Toby does not want to go on this vacation with Mary, you guys.

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Mary Worth, 6/21/13

Good news, everybody! Thanks to Mary’s fairly mild scolding and Tom’s ill-advised surprise-proposal, Elinor isn’t opposed to Tom and Beth’s love at all anymore! In fact, she’s in favor of it. Suspiciously strongly in favor of it, actually. Today she lets slip what her real epiphany was: if she lets Tom marry Beth and move into their apartment with him (obviously he’ll be moving into their apartment with them), she’ll have two soft touches to bully and push around, not just one! “I’ll even exceed those standards,” thinks Tom. But you won’t, Tom, you really won’t.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/21/13

Since this is clearly a reference to the bonkers ending of “The Rains of Castamere,” an episode of Game of Thrones that aired a mere 19 days ago, this is probably the most topical and specific Herb and Jamaal ever written. I guess by leaving out the actual name or description of the episode they can reuse it any time the show decides to freak everyone out with insane carnage, which I imagine will be fairly regularly.

Gil Thorp, 6/21/13

Actually, it looks Jimmy is smugly rubbing in the fact that the Foleys are as bad at baseball as they are at suing people. But, you know, Coaches Thorp and Kaz have pretty strict rules about cutting off all contact with their players the moment the season ends, so let’s let them have their little moment of self-delusion.

Judge Parker, 6/21/13

Soooo … I guess we’re done with even the pretense that Judge Parker Senior is a character we’re supposed to like?

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Spider-Man, 6/20/13

Hooray, it’s a new super-person for Spider-Man to fight and/or team up with … the Tarantula! One of the joys of only interacting with Spider-Man in his newspaper comic incarnation is that I have zero background on beloved characters from the comics, so I can accept each new moronic villain on whatever inane terms the strip choses to present him or her. Even in four sentences of exposition here it seems like dashing revolutionary Newspaper Comic Tarantula is nothing like any of the versions of Comic Book Tarantula, who are all employed by death squads working for their nation’s despotic government. So hopefully fanboys everywhere are gnashing their teeth at this change, since fanboy-teeth-gnashing is like the most exquisite music to me.

Anyway, “Far as we know from TV and the Internet, the revolution’s going great!” is the most 21st century American thing I’ve ever heard, and it’s also the most Newspaper Spider-Man I’ve ever heard, which means I guess Newspaper Spider-Man is the hero we deserve. How’s your revolution going? I heard it was going great! I think I read about it on Twitter or something.

Edge City, 6/20/13

Hey, let’s check in with obsessive neurotic Abby Ardin! Today, she’s obsessing neurotically that someone might find out that the cool dress she bought came from a consignment shop. Is this really a thing that anyone does? In my experience — and I’m a guy who buys clothes at thrift/vintage/consignment shops a lot — people who buy clothes at consignment shops generally cannot shut up about it.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/20/13

Does it look lik Sarah’s lucky day? It doesn’t look like Sarah’s feeling very lucky at all. It looks like Sarah just achieved a dream with virtually no effort on her part, again, just had something handed to her by adults who were obsequious towards her supposed budding talent for no reason, and yet can’t feel anything, not triumph or joy or anything else. Why is everything so easy? What’s out there that can truly challenge me? Is this numbness what death feels like?

Herb and Jamaal, 6/20/13

Hey, remember that Herb and Jamaal from years ago where Herb and Jamaal were pretty obviously having sex? Well, the first couple panels have changed, but they’re at it again, if by “it” you mean “having sex with each other without talking about it,” which is pretty clearly what they’re doing.