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Gil Thorp, 4/12/16

Welp, this year’s long and fairly dull basketball season is now over in Gil Thorp, which means we’ve moved on to … baseball/softball season! And after a single day of red-hot spring training action, watching teenagers run out grounders while their bored coaches shout “good hustle” in their general direction, we now jump to Central City, where an avuncular gentleman wants to get amiably blotto after a hard day working the phones to keep his big triethylene glycol buyers happy. Would I be pleased if we just followed this guy around for the next six to eight weeks and didn’t spend any time with high school jocks at all? I’m willing to find out!

Mary Worth, 4/12/16

Whoa whoa whoa, sexy substitute art history lecturer Harlan Jones, who has gone from zero to private home yoga session with Dawn in about 72 hours, lives with a man … named Alfie … in a possibly romantic way???? [comical B-O-I-O-I-O-I-O-I-N-G sound effect] This explains why he suddenly looks like Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury in that last panel. It is fairly shocking to think that Mary Worth might acknowledge that heterosexuality isn’t the only romantic configuration available, so we may just be in for a lecture about how contingent faculty are paid so little that they have to live with roommates in grim orange-painted concrete apartment buildings that make Charterstone look like an Architectural Digest cover, but either way it seems like we’re not going to get a prof/student forbidden love plot after all.

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Panel from Mary Worth, 4/10/16

Guys, when we started on this journey together with Harlan Jones, the Sensual, Bendy, Spiritually Advanced Substitute Art History Professor, I made a joke about how eventually he would make a pass at Dawn. I did this not because I thought it was going to happen, but because I thought it wasn’t. Coming up with absurd counterfactuals for the soap opera strips is basically like at least 75% of why this blog exists, and I figured a forbidden student-professor romance and/or a faculty member making a gross sexual advance on one of his students would be a little too hot for Mary Worth. It’s starting to look like I was wrong, though! It’s starting to look like the most unlikely seduction in human history — a guy who looks like the guy in a 1950s movie whose girlfriend Cary Grant steals gives a half-assed art history lecture about how awesome Leonardo da Vinci was instead of actually talking about art history, inspiring his class’s drippiest student to come talk to him, and then he shifts the topic to yoga, and then she comes and does one yoga class with him, and then she gets invited to a private yoga session at his house, and then probably sex — is about to happen. God have mercy on us all.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/10/16

The desperately impoverished residents of Hootin’ Holler are of course almost completely cut off from the mainstream American economy, but they keep in tenuous touch with the outside world via radio and thus have an extremely tenuous idea of what it’s like out there, with heartbreaking results.

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Dennis the Menace, 4/8/16

I’m really enjoying this young couple’s facial expressions as Dennis regales them with tales of his family’s casual and profitable lies. The woman seems flabbergasted, horrified to learn that the Mitchells have taught their child that it’s OK to speak untruths, as long as you can save a little money by doing so. The man, however, is steeped in ennui, as if this is totally in line with what he knows about the deceitful nature of humanity. “Mmm, the child doesn’t seem to even resist spinning this web of falsehoods, and why should he? People need to be taught to be good, and we as a society haven’t been teaching them very well for a very long time.”

Funky Winkerbean, 4/8/16

Cliff Anger’s name is very appropriate — not because of the cliffhangers that were the most prominent features of the Starbuck Jones serials in which he starred, but rather because he’s angry, so very, very angry, about a world that passed him by and the young people who now inhabit it. Fun! Anyway, I dearly hope those ellipses in his word balloon in the final panel represent significantly long pauses. “I … D … I know you know what’s coming next but you’re still gonna have to wait around for me to finish, you little fucks … L …”

Judge Parker, 4/8/16

Oh hey everybody, the non-old-people-sweatshop plot in Judge Parker just resolved itself off-panel, in case you were worried! Rocky! You gotta love that guy, if by “love” you mean “worry about him constantly, in ways that you may or may not be paid to do!”

Mary Worth, 4/8/16

Harlan Jones’s defense before the ethics board will be an intriguing one. “But I made sure to keep my conversation with the undergraduates extremely stilted and square! How could I have possibly known she’d find the phrase ‘This is an informal college atmosphere, and I’m an informal guy’ erotic?”