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Gil Thorp, 7/12/24

The beloved Gil Thorp bonfire tradition has been cancelled forever due to a nationwide wood shortage, which means we must console ourselves with a somewhat more recent and less beloved tradition, the Coach of the Year awards banquet (or “COTY,” as insiders call it). Two years ago Gil won it, and last year he won it again. This year the “most improved” award has gone to Gil’s former nemesis/current assistant, so all signs point to our hero taking the COTY home for a third year in a row. I think it’s nice that they’re letting him give it to himself this year.

Gasoline Alley, 7/12/24

I forgot to mention, there’s a new cute cat in Gasoline Alley that Gertie found and brought to Walt! You can see he’s already getting adjusted to his role in this strip (coquetteishly mugging to the reader as the human characters make extremely uninteristing wordplay at one another).

Marvin, 7/12/24

Sorry my intrusive thoughts about toilets yesterday got me distracted from the important thing here, which is that Marvin is doing a very depressing series of strips where dogs talk about all the things they’ve done wrong in their lives and can’t stop thinking about.

Shoe, 7/12/24

Do birds eat cicadas? Well, according to a post called “Circada Bird Feast Protocol” on the friendtocicadas dot org blog, which seems like an extremely reputable source, yes! So, sadly, this conversation is actually about how this boring little town will soon be beset by famine.

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Rex Morgan, M.D, 6/29/24

Like most observers of Rex Morgan, M.D., I assumed this plot was going to amble on interminably with some low-stakes, low-violence bullying and a lot of philosophical questions about what bullying is and what causes it, but instead our bully has managed to incapacitate and possibly hospitalize poor Parker with a single punch to the gut. At least this will give Rex something to do in this plot, possibly by shaking his head and announcing, stone-faced, “This is the worst case of being punched in the stomach that I’ve ever seen.”

Beetle Bailey, 6/29/24

Whenever we get these “in the field” Beetle Bailey strips, I assume that our characters are in the midst of some kind of war games exercise and haven’t been issued weapons with live ammo. Which means Rocky is probably going to murder Beetle with his bare hands! He looks fuckin’ pissed.

Shoe, 6/29/24

I guess I have to be the keeper of the Shoe knowledge here and make it clear to all that this strip is not in line with established strip lore. Specifically, the Perfesser never smells good. I don’t care if he changes his socks. I’ve seen how he lives. He smells like something died, possibly him.

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Marvin, 6/23/24

Not to brag or anything, but after nearly 20 years of my doing this blog, my archives page has become a valuable historical resource that anyone can use to explore the history of newspaper comic strips in the 21st century, assuming that the strip you’re looking for was something I thought was interesting or particularly bad or that I could turn into a weird riff on whatever day it was published. I myself cannot keep all this history in my head and frequently turn to the archives for answers to questions like “Have we ever actually seen Marvin’s aunt in the strip before?” It turns out that in 2006 there was a plotline involving his aunt adopting a baby from China named “Ming Ming” whose appearance is extremely off-putting because she looks exactly like a Funko Pop, something I wasn’t able to articulate at the time because, as I discovered after a little research, Funko Pops would not be invented for another five years. I am a wizened old man and I hope that you, my faithful readers, are preparing yourselves to be mummified and entombed with me in the spectacular pyramid of comics jokes I’ve been building over the past two decades.

Wait, where was I? Oh, right, what I’m saying is that I assume the Marvin creative team long ago forgot about poor Ming Ming, just like I had, and presumably they don’t use my archives page for research because they don’t want to read all the mean things I say about their work. It’s not even clear to me that this is supposed to be the same aunt, or if we can even say that there’s a fixed set of Marvin’s relatives that have continuously existed in some sense over the past 20 years. I also don’t know if being part of the neo-rockabilly lifestyle is an established bit of lore about Marvin’s dad’s terrible coworker. I could go back into my archives to find out but, you know what? I’ve already spent enough time digging through the depths of Marvin for one day. Gotta limit my exposure, for my own good.

Shoe, 6/23/24

For reasons unclear to me, Shoe recently decided to bring back Muffy Hollandaise, the Treetops Tattler’s former intern, who stopped appearing in the strip so long ago that my archives would be of no help in learning her secrets. I say the reasons are unclear to me because they reintroduced her as an avowed enemy of her former boss and a successful journalist in an industry that is, if not thriving, then at least doing better than print media; but, despite that set-up, she’s mostly being used like every other character in the strip, which is to say she delivers cruel, wordplay-adjacent zingers. I do have to say that I enjoy the way she leans in to deliver her line here. Lets you know there’s real venom in it.