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Nothing really inspired me on Sunday … so how about three quickies from today?

Gil Thorp, 11/21/05

Dear Gil Thorp: All is forgiven. Retroactively and in advance. All of it — the bad hair, crappy art, Brent “Rap Dog” — all of the pain has been washed away by this beautiful moment. It may be that the weeks of the Brick House storyline have entirely existed to set up the exchange in panel three here. If that’s the case, I will testify in a court of law that it has not been time wasted.

The Middletons, 11/21/05

Sweet Christ, The Middletons, what sort of sick sadist are you? To portray these noble birds responding to that call for freedom and life that beats within the heart of every living being, making a desperate bid to escape, only to find the gutted, skinned, and cooked corpses of their unfortunate fellows? Oh, the horror! THE HORROR!

Seriously, though, I’m sure looking forward to Thanksgiving this Thursday, ’cause I like me some gravy and some turkey skin. Mmmm… skin. Sorry fellas!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/21/05

More proof: you can send a man to med school, but you can’t make him care.

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Three for Thursday today, folks:

Gasoline Alley, 11/10/05

Check out the turtle-mouthed death’s-head look that the hateful Lil Skinner is sporting in panel one. You don’t know how much I wanted this to be the harbinger of the horrible truth: that Lil really was dead, and that Slim was carrying on a week’s worth of Norman Bates-style insane conversation with her withered, husk-like corpse. Unfortunately, Clovia seems to see her alive and well in panel three, so I guess we’re stuck with yet more hijinks from the comics pages’ most transparent sociopath.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/10/05

OK, OK, Rex Morgan, we get it, OK? You like to look up Rex’s nose. But why do you have to make us look up his nose so often?

Sheesh.

Curtis, 11/10/05

Now, I mock Curtis a lot. I’m a Curtis-mocker, it’s fair to say. But I do like the art, and it’s growing on me more and more over time. What comic would spend time lovingly detailing a large, late-middle-age woman with a gynormous bosom as she levitates three feet off the ground in wide-eyed panic? Curtis would, that’s who. And I for one salute it.

Speaking of sociopaths, I’m guessing the perpetrator of this arachnoid outrage is none other than “Tuffy,” the kid who brought a gun to school a few weeks ago; it turned out to be a squirt gun, but it still would have gotten him sent to a lock-down facility in any actual school district in twenty-first century America. His capacity for over-the-top mischief seems matched only by his unfounded loyalty to Curtis, which could result in discomfort-causing storylines far more intriguing than that damn invisible lizard’s latest antics.

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I’ve been remiss in thanking our very own Islamorada Girl (who sent it) and our very own Beasley (who appraised it) for a fab wedding gift I received a few days ago: the Sunday comics section from the Baltimore American on April 26, 1942. My reactions?

• “Wow, every comic got, like, half a page each!”
• “Wow, everybody’s in the army!”
• “Wow, the Phantom sure used to be a lot more racist!”

Fortunately, except for the kids being younger, Blondie hasn’t changed much:

There’s a breast-feeding joke here somewhere, but I’m too classy to really go for it.

I’m taking a quick trip back to see the family in Buffalo this weekend. I’d say that it would interrupt the flow of comics, but that flow got interrupted quite nicely this week without any trips, now, didn’t it? So let’s just say that I’m going to take a pass on Saturday and Sunday’s comics, unless something really wacky happens, like more hand-jiving.

Stuff to entertain and/or distract you while I’m gone:

• Dub Not Dubya’s Gil Thorp-Mallard Fillmore mashup
• A deeply weird reimagining of Rex Morgan, M.D.