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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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Mary Worth, 6/17/20

OK, so here’s what’s happened since we last checked in with Mary Worth: Lyle showed up with Madi, who predictably refused to make eye contact with Saul and just kept staring at her phone, and Saul suggested they all have dinner or something, but Lyle was like, no, sorry, gotta run, Venezuela’s not gonna coup itself! Anyway, I am absolutely loving — loving — Saul’s attempt to do a tough-guy face in panel one here. “Welp, I guess you’re just going to leave your daughter [I assume she’s his daughter? I actually don’t think they’ve made that explicit] with me for three months, after having spent less than five minutes here and made no attempt to ease the process of us getting to know each other or giving me, a man who’s never raised children, any kind of advice on what she’ll need or want, and it sounds like you’re not even going to be calling her while you’re away, but know this, Lyle: I will absolutely hold you to your vague promise to come back and collect your daughter [?], eventually.”

Mark Trail, 6/17/20

Good news, everyone! Andy smelled his way home! Also, did you know that Mark lives immediately next door to a whole different compound? Like my parents in suburban Buffalo have more space between their house and their neighbor’s than Mark does with his, and Mark is a weird hermit who lives in a national forest!

Funky Winkerbean, 6/17/20

More than 15 years ago, in a different, gentler age, this blog was called “I Read The Comics So You Don’t Have To.” And for years afterwards, I still saw that as my mission statement. But now, as the open-heartedness of youth has given way to the sourness of middle age, I have revised my thinking, and can best describe this blog’s mission as “If I Have To Think About The Sex Lives Of Funky Winkerbean Characters, Then So Do You.”

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Mary Worth, 6/10/20

Well, it looks like Saul has allowed his … first-cousin-once-removed-in-law? … to browbeat him into serving as Madi’s guardian for the summer. What do you think their first fight is going to be about? Since Saul forced Greta to put on a bow tie to match his own even before he got her home from the shelter, I assume it will be about Madi’s refusal to wear a bow tie. Presumably she’ll eventually put it on, signaling the resolution of this storyline’s conflict, after she’s figured out how to make it “goth.”

Dennis the Menace, 6/10/20

Casually letting Mr. Wilson know that amazing things are happening all around him, but that he’s so steeped in anger and poisonous nostalgia that he’ll never be able to truly appreciate them, is by far the most menacing thing Dennis has ever done.