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Gil Thorp, 5/17/23

How is Gil’s arch-rival Luke Hernandez dealing with Gil’s secret baseball weapon, a blind pitcher teaching the Mudlarks to open their third eye and achieve cosmic oneness with the universe? Well, he’s flying to Korea with his assistant Coach Kim to try to recruit one of Kim’s relatives, who’s apparently some kind of baseball superstar. I’m assuming he’s going to pull a picture of Gil out of his wallet and show it to Kwan and say “See this man? He deserves death. He must be destroyed. You shall be the instrument of my vengeance.” Kwan doesn’t speak English, but just the power of Luke’s simmering hatred will be enough to get him onboard.

Mary Worth, 5/17/23

God, can you imagine how much Mary wishes she could just stare at her phone rather than listen to Jeff blather on about whatever it is he thinks is interesting or important? She’s just a little too old and polite to do it, but she envies the freedom of the young.

Hi and Lois, 5/17/23

I didn’t think we could get sadder than “Trixie is left on her own for hours on the floor to stare into the sun,” but I think “Trixie is left on her own for hours on the floor to stare at the TV, which is not turned on” might do it.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/17/23

Uh oh! Looks like word’s gotten out that Mud Mountain Murphy is extremely easy to trick. At his next concert, he’ll still be singing “Muddy Boots,” but he’ll also be asking if his fans would be interested in helping him launch MudCoin, his own namesake cryptocurrency, with the help of his new best friend here!

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Gil Thorp, 5/12/23

Gil Thorp is notorious for bringing back beloved characters from years past, and so when I recognized Gregg Hamm’s name I was excited to see how far back in my archives my search for him was going to take me, but it turns out that all the Gil Thorp plots have blurred together into one big timeless smear in my mind, because Gregg’s story was from the summer of 2022, when he managed to pitch while tragically blind thanks to a little light cheating on the part of his teammates. And while I joked about his “tragic blindness” a lot I never really got the impression that he had anything other than just bad vision, but now here he is with a white cane and everything! I’m pretty sure I saw new writer Henry Barajas say that there’s supposed to be a time jump of a few years between Neal Rubin’s last storyline and his first one, but I’d like to believe that he’s fully lost his sight in the past year, and now is going to transform the 2023 Mudlark team by teaching them how to “feel the catcher’s signals.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/12/23

OK, we’ve been joking a lot about how Yvonne has been a little fixated on hearing Mud play “Muddy Boots” one last time, just for her sake, but clearly she cannot hold a candle to these two Mud Mountain Murphy superfans who have presumably spent the last 24 hours or however long it’s been since Fergus’ previous concert in a state of deep depression and/or rage. Those facial expressions tell me that they’re in the midst of near-orgasmic ecstacy at the return of their hero, and probably were planning a suicide attack of some sort on him if he hadn’t returned to form tonight.

Marvin, 5/12/23

Obviously I’m never happy to see or think about Marvin, the character, but I kind of like knowing that even when I don’t see him, he’s busy making the lives of the other characters in the strip miserable, because honestly I’m not a big fan of those people either.

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Hagar the Horrible, 5/4/23

I know it’s a little hypocritical, because I always complain about legacy comics being static and hidebound, but I also am always a little unsettled when a legacy comic introduces a new character out of nowhere. Still, I have high hopes for this new fellow in Hagar the Horrible, Honi’s Friend Who Wears A Beret And Waits For Food With His Fork And Knife At The Ready And His Tongue Hanging Out Like A Dipshit, and I look forward to his future adventures, assuming he’s not about to be disemboweled by Hagar.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/4/23

OK, I take back what I said yesterday: Rene doesn’t need emotional validation to recognize his own inherent good qualities. No, he knows himself quite well as the ultimate soulless scamming machine. He will stop at nothing to hone the skills necessary to pull off his grifts. If he must look deeply into the souls of men and help them set their lives right in the process, so be it, but that cannot be anything more than a means to an end, and that end is to make a few bucks off of people on a cruise who might want to be similarly transformed. I will no longer question his purity of purpose in this space. Too bad he’s probably going to prison for attempted murder now!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/4/23

What kind of elaborate and pricey bachelor party would a resident of Hootin’ Holler envision? Would it involve strippers? Did you read that sentence and then suddenly and involuntarily imagine what the Snuffy Smith version of a strip club would look like? Did the very thought of it make you want to lie down, not in a sexy way, but more in a desperately try to achieve a state of ego death that will allow you to stop imagining it way?