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Gil Thorp, 1/9/21

So what’s going in with Gil Thorp, literally several of you are wondering? Well, it turns out that Vic Doucette is killing it at P.A. announcing during the basketball games, thanks to his wordplay that dazzles the Mudlark players, whose prowess lies in the physical rather than the verbal realm. Also, it turns out that, like Vic, Doug Guthrie is a nerd, and in fact is the one kind of nerd that jocks truly respect: a car nerd, who may drive a sweet classic Pontiac but is fascinated by automobiles in all their forms, even utilitarian GM vans from the ’00s. It also came up that Vic has cerebral palsy, not that you can really tell from the art, and Chevy Astros are apparently commonly converted for wheelchair use, but Vic doesn’t use a wheelchair so this may or may not be relevant? Maybe Doug is a car monomaniac and literally has to ask about the make and model of every single vehicle he sees. He’s just another brightly colored piece of glass in the rich mosaic of Milford High.

Family Circus, 1/9/21

Jeffy is a simple child, and looks smug because he thinks he’s about to get a cookie. But Billy? Billy, for all his faults (and there are many), plays a longer game, and has realized that even the guy who graduates bottom of his class from the easiest medical school to get into has access to a prescription pad, which will open up a lot of opportunities for a guy with frankly not much of a moral compass.

Pluggers, 1/9/21

Hey, Pluggers, a more succinct and better caption here would’ve been “Plugger CSI,” you’re welcome

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Mary Worth, 1/6/20

Good lord, these two unmarried persons are loitering together … within touching distance … at the mall … without their dogs being there as chaperones? Like a pair of whores? I certainly hope Mary doesn’t hear about this, or they’ll return to Charterstone to find their pathetical belongings piled up on the curb!

Pluggers, 1/6/20

In big cities and small villages, most elderly people can walk to the store for basic errands, or take public transportation, so they can live independently even when they’re no longer able to drive a car. But in modern America’s increasingly socially atomized and sprawling suburbs, many must resort to offering sexual favors just so they can leave their subdivision and access basic services. Sad!

Beetle Bailey, 1/6/20

My initial thought reading this was that there’s no circumstance where you get a phone call saying “We have detected a problem with your computer, send us your password and we’ll fix it” and the caller isn’t a scam artist, but then I realized that this strip still falls under today’s “eldersex” heading, because the reason nobody can fix the General’s computer is all the extremely dodgy porn sites he looks at.

Curtis, 1/6/20

I judge this year’s Kwanzaa storyline to be pretty good based on the freaky animal factor alone, though it has wrapped up with the somewhat banal conclusion of “the real magic is friendship, and also listening to good advice.” It’s also wrapped up on a … Wednesday? … so I hope that we at least get a few days of Curtis complaining about the story’s initial premise failing to pay off in truly weird fashion.

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Gil Thorp, 12/10/20

Well, it looked like Gil’s little stunt — benching his feuding #1 and #2 QBs and putting his #3 QB in at the helm of a wacky offense — worked! It didn’t work in the sense that it brought the team a championship (they’re playing for conference runner up here in their last game) but it worked in the sense that it taught his fractious starters a lesson, a lesson they learned so well that neither of them has much interest in playing football at all anymore. I assume in panel three we’re meant to understand that they’re doing “No, after you” pantomime gestures down on the sideline that are so exaggerated that they can easily be interpreted by their wide-eyed classmates sitting up in the stands.

Pluggers, 12/10/20

Reed Hoover may have passed away more than a year ago, but his utter dominance of Pluggers will never end. Like longtime and recently retired artist Gary Brookins before him, new guy Rich McKee isn’t afraid to turn a cold eye on the pathetic, eager suggestions clogging the pluggermail@aol.com inbox and say sneeringly “Sorry, folks, none of you can hold a candle to Reed.” Then he selects one of Reed’s banked Pluggers pitches at random, which I assume he keeps in an ornate wooden box.

Crock, 12/10/20

I never think the jokes in Crock are any good, so it’s kind of a relief to see a strip where they didn’t bother to include one! Just a little vignette about an incompetent military officer and his men, who are about to murder him.