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Gil Thorp, 6/15/11

Do you guys realize that we’re halfway through June and aren’t even close to finding out how the Milford baseball or softball teams are doing, let alone getting ramped up for the Gil Thorp summer insanity that we’ve been denied for the past few years but that’s going to happen this year, I just know it? Instead, the predictable teachers vs. sinister budget-slashing school-board lunatic storyline is rumbling to a predictable conclusion, with protest singer Al-Jo finally discovering that she’s got something to protest. What I find much more interesting is the fact that the strip creators are themselves apparently so bored with the proceedings that they’ve turned to a fractured narrative chronology to liven things up a bit. How did the dude who’s crushing on Al-Jo and whose name I refuse to even try to remember secure that stage and PA system? Let’s have a lightning-fast one-panel flashback to find out! Aaaand then back to the present. This is art, people.

Pluggers, 6/15/11

Pluggers take their mistresses to shitty fast food restaurants, so you can imagine how cheap and depressing their nights out with their wives are.

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Momma, 5/26/11

Momma is routinely awful to her children, and all of them are fairly unpleasant to her in return. It’s not clear which was the cause of the other, or if it’s just a sort of continuous feedback loop situation, but today we seem to have reached the inevitable moment when the Hobbes boys move from passive-aggressive comments to outright elder abuse. Still, it’s interesting to note that Thomas has shed his usual preppy garb for zubaz pants, a Charlie Brown-style t-shirt, and — horrors — a baseball cap, worn backwards. It’s almost as if he was unable to become a true monster like Francis unless he dressed the part.

Spider-Man, 5/26/11

Anyone who wants an introduction to the glory and pageantry that is the Spider-Man newspaper strip would do well to review the last couple weeks’ worth of action, which has consisted entirely of people arguing and then almost falling off of the roof before being saved at the last minute. Since Spidey only has enough web to save half of our bickering vampire couple, the fun might end soon. But wait, wasn’t the whole reason Spider-Man needed rescuing in the first place because his web-slinging was on the fritz? And can’t one of these vampire clowns fly, or at least glide? Is it really that hard to keep track of the continuity in this strip?

Mark Trail, 5/26/11

Yes, you can tell this emporium for expensive merchandise is quite popular with the kids. Just look who’s haunting the store: hip young people like the guy who modeled for The Scream (panel one) and the mayor of the Munchkin City (panel two).

Pluggers, 5/26/11

Whole teams of dedicated medical personnel are working around the clock just to keep pluggers alive. And why?

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Pluggers, 4/26/11

“Recession” — pluggers hear that word on the TV news or talk radio, sometimes. Seems like it has something to do with the fact that there aren’t any good jobs around here, they guess, not that there were any good jobs for years before the news people started saying the word so much. Anyway, there’s something about the word — or maybe it’s just the way people say it — that makes pluggers think about their own lives, and how none of it worked out the way they should have. “Recession” rolls through their heads every morning, as they stand in their crappy little bathroom and stare into their dingy little mirror and think about how they had hoped not to live in this town anymore by the time they grew up but they still do and every time they see one of the laughing morons they went to high school with at the 7 Eleven or the Arby’s or whatever they die a little inside. They think about how the people on the radio said that they should be grateful for their shitty job, because of the recession, but really they’d be pretty happy if they got to work and found that the place had burned to the ground, or even that they had been just been fired for no good reason. Their little ritual in front of that dingy mirror gets a little bit longer every day. Those radio people will stop talking about the recession someday, but pluggers will keep staring into the mirror and thinking all these terrible things, every day, until they die.

(Wait, this is some joke involving “recession” and “receding,” about the dog-man’s baldness? Ha ha, come on, pluggers don’t know any of the parts of speech of Latin verbs!)

Dick Tracy, 4/26/11

How I’m interpreting Special Officer Pencil Mustache’s comments in the first couple panels here: “Dick, based on your bizarre story and your well-known penchant for brutality, I’m going to guess that you just summarily executed Flyface and the Fifth, but acknowledging that would lead to a lot of paperwork for me, so, eh.”

Mary Worth, 4/26/11

Oh, boy, it turns out the “Dawn is a technology addict” plot didn’t end abruptly — it didn’t end at all! Instead, Mary Worth is tackling its most ambitious project yet: a sprawling, multi-character arc all based around the theme that technology is the Devil’s work. Liza, your patient could have died while you were playing Scrabulous on your unusually large smartphone! I can’t wait until Wilbur is called in to implement kite-based therapy.

Momma, 4/26/11

Has anyone ever wanted to see a real bedroom love scene in Momma? No? Well, too bad, this happened anyway.