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Gil Thorp, 6/12/18

If there’s one thing Gil Thorp is committed to, it’s the lore, so yeah, I guarantee there was a Gil Thorp plot years back about a star baseball prospect who accidentally lost a finger or three to a grain thresher, and I’m devastated that I missed it. Mostly what I love here is how completely Kevin Pelwecki, a delusional quarterback wannabe who, thanks to obsessively watching YouTube videos, has turned out to be Actually Good at baseball, takes this information in stride. A baseball player with a mutilated hand? A football player who accidentally cut off his leg with a chainsaw? It’s all par for the course around the Milford athletic department!

Six Chix, 6/12/18

So, imagine you have a dog holding other dogs at gunpoint yelling “DROP THE BONES!” Would it be funny? No, not at all. Would you at least be able to parse what’s happening? Yes, for the most part. Now, imagine that the “gun” is drawn so that it might not be a gun, but it still looks kind of like one, and the gun(?)-weilding dog also makes a reference to an “app” of some sort. Would you be able to parse that? Not anymore! But would it be funny now? Not really! Anyway, you don’t have to imagine all this, because it just got printed across America, in several newspapers!

Shoe, 6/12/18

The Tip O’Neil-esque bird-senator in Shoe is named Batson Belfrey (it’s wordplay, get it????) and I guess the bat logo on the front of his podium is part of a personal branding effort. I’d like to imagine that today’s somewhat labored punchline is a result of a new Shoe intern being told to write dialogue for a pre-drawn strip without really being given any background, and they saw the bat and thought, “Well, is he … goth? I guess he’s a goth senator? And goths like the Addams Family, right?”

Hi and Lois, 6/12/18

The two garbage men looked at each other in mounting horror. Irma had worn them down over the period of months, with both carrots and sticks they wouldn’t talk about, even to each other, until they said they’d take her husband’s body to the dump. But when the agreed day arrived, it wasn’t what they had signed up for at all. He was still alive. But they were in too deep now. They had no choice.

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Shoe, 6/3/18

This is, I think, is my favorite Shoe Patented Goggle Eyes Of Horror yet. I’m not sure if the Dates R Us lady is supposed to be an employee, in which case she’s worried about getting fired, or if she’s the owner of this small business, in which case she may be realizing that she’s completely unqualified for her chosen field of endeavor, but either way she just seems genuinely appalled that she’s botched things this badly, possibly because she’s ignorant of the meaning of extremely common English phrases.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/3/18

The restaurant industry? Notoriously forgiving to first-timers. The main qualifications you need? Thinking about running a restaurant a lot, and being good at cooking for you and your girlfriend. The main endorsement you want to get? A wealthy nanny who also owns an aerospace company. This scheme can’t fail!

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Crock, 5/23/18

A “favorite” joke format in Crock is “the troopers are getting so young,” which I guess is supposed to just be about how when you get older people come into the workforce who are themselves adults but who seem like children to you because the age gap between them and you is so big, but has the (I hope) unintentional effect of implying that France, beset by manpower shortages in its horrific and failing colonial war in the Maghreb, has been forced to deploy child soldiers. Fortunately, since e-mail has been a widespread and indeed in some contexts primary means of communication for 20 years, today’s strip is here to let us know that the Legion is now fully manned with adult recruits of prime military age.

Shoe, 5/23/18

“You know, Foster’s has a really effective advertising campaign in the States as ‘Australian for beer,’ but in fact it’s not particularly popular in Australia. No, my parents were really into beers like Carlton Draught and Tooheys New.”

“Is Foster’s a kind of beer? I was saying that the state put you in a foster home, because your parents were drunks.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/23/18

“I dug up his grave in th’ dead of night, cracked open his coffin, and cut off his beard for Jughaid t’ wear. He’s frownin’ on account of th’ smell!”