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Gil Thorp, 8/23/21

Say what you will about Gil Thorp, and I’ve said a lot, but at least it has a certain level of realism that other strips lack, in the sense that it’s about a high school sports program and the teams have mediocre seasons more often than not, like most high school teams do. This realism even extends to its characters’ everyday non-sports lives! Did you know that proving your mettle with some cool detective work isn’t going to secure you a journalism career? It really isn’t! Sorry, Heather! I guess you’ll be breaking the glass ceiling and becoming the first woman to get an unpaid “job” coaching high school football in Milford, I’m sure that will open up all sorts of opportunities for you.

Dick Tracy, 8/23/21

One of my favorite sci-fi short stories is Isaac Asimov’s “The Dead Past,” about a near-future society where technology that can view the past has been invented but its nature is kept secret and its use is heavily restricted by the government, and a group of heroic historians and scientists manage to reinvent it and publish the plans worldwide, only to realize too late that a machine that can see 1,000 years into the past can also see 30 seconds into the past and they’ve just eliminated privacy for everyone, everywhere, forever. Dick is going to be thrilled to hear about this invention, in other words.

Rex Mogan, M.D., 8/23/21

“Plus, uh, remember all that stolen valor I did? Probably for the best not to invite those guys, is what I’m saying. I’m all about the future, not the past!”

Curtis, 8/23/21

You can put your dad’s face on your social media accounts, Curtis, but his butt? That’s reserved for paying subscribers to big_ass_greg’s OnlyFans account.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/22/21

Continuity comic strips are actually a great example of how you can have a long-running narrative art form with very little narrative tension. Nevertheless, Funky Winkerbean does have one primary source of narrative friction: namely, that Les is a sainted figure who everyone has to acknowledge as a good guy and work to make good things happen for him, but also the universe is a fundamentally dark and hostile place and nothing truly good ever happens to anyone. I guess today’s strip is showing us how we’ll navigate between those two poles: Lisa’s Story: The Movie will be mostly ignored by the yammering, moronic masses who don’t understand how moving it is when a man’s wife dies of cancer but he finds the strength to move on, but the right kind of people will watch it at America’s few remaining art house theaters and be moved, and won’t that be the most important thing? Not from the perspective of the people who invested in this movie, or for anyone’s career who worked on it, but from it is from Les’s perspective, which is the correct one.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/22/21

Speaking of the absence of narrative tension, there’s a lot you could say about the last few years of Rex Morgan and its absence of narrative tension, but one thing you can’t say is that it skimps on good reaction faces. Today Michelle moves from “carefully neutral as she worries what she’s gotten herself into,” “real genuine horror as she sees something the Facebook moderators should’ve removed immediately,” “bone-weary disgust at someone posting a picture of themselves wearing a t-shirt adorned with grotesque sex slang or maybe a racial slur,” and “grudging admiration for what hairspray can do.” We salute you, Michelle, and certainly hope your animated visage helps the seven or so people at your wedding maintain interest in the proceedings.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/20/21

The residents Hootin’ Holler were vaguely aware that some catastrophe had caused the collapse of the flatlanders’ Newnited States government, but in truth they had been isolated so long that it made little difference when they were cut off from the outside world altogether. But the older folks did have some poignant and unsettling moments, like when they realized that their entertainers were now doing performances based on their vague memory of an earlier generation of entertainers who were in turn imitating someone else who had been forgotten entirely.

Crankshaft, 8/20/21

As if living in a city devastated by war weren’t bad enough, imagine how awful it must feel to pick through the shattered ruins of your home, looking for prized possessions or maybe your even your loved ones, and knowing that somewhere, thousands of miles away, Crankshaft is doing wordplay about it.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/20/21

“Oh yeah. I’m going to have to invite Buck, aren’t I? I can’t even remember if he and I have ever met in this strip, but this is a Rex Morgan plot so I guess I have to pretend I find him tolerable or interesting.”

Mary Worth, 8/20/21

YES LIBBY

RISE UP

KILL

KILL

DESTROY