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Gil Thorp, 5/15/17

OK, finally, after much dramatic wheel-spinning, we have this spring’s Gil Thorp storyline coming into shape: everyone loves muckraking investigative journalist Dafne when her reporting is bringing down fat-cat school board members, but when she starts nosing around the past of transfer student/rage maniac Ryan van Auken, she’s going to find out that her fellow teens aren’t that jazzed about a free and independent press after all! The last couple weeks have mostly been about a couple of boys’ track team members engaging in some extremely mild flirting with Dafne and one of her softball friends, so that will presumably work its way into the drama somehow, though honestly I’d rather it didn’t because it was frankly pretty boring.

Also, Dafne jokes about phone conversations being totally ’90s, but note that she’s apparently switched to her cell phone in mid-conversation, because landlines, ew, gross.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/15/17

I stand by my assertion from last week that Snuffy Smith’s depiction of the rural poor is fundamentally inauthentic, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t reveal interesting things about the mainstream society that creates and consumes it! For instance, in today’s strip an inhabitant of this isolated, impoverished hamlet discovers that his environment has been strewn with mass-manufactured garbage, and we’re expected to believe that he’d be ecstatic about it because he can extract a few pennies of marginal value from picking through the scrap.

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Rhymes With Orange, 5/14/17

I was originally puzzled by what appears to be the 17th century New England setting for this panel, but apparently the reputed African origins of the “it takes a village” proverb are a bunch of hooey, so colonial Massachusetts is as likely a place as anywhere else for this joke to play out. Anyway, kid, let me remind you that mouthing off to your elders is an extremely good way to get condemned to death for witchcraft.

Mary Worth, 5/14/17

Today’s Mary Worth just recaps the last few daily strips, so in a sense it doesn’t provide anything new, but in a larger, more important sense, it provides something incredible: this strip, which has featured dubiously sourced quotes from Albert Camus and St. Augustine in the past, now offers us an epigram from Mr. T. God bless this perfect day!

Spider-Man, 5/14/17

OK, Mole-Man, you’ve been dragging out a whole series of “final glimpses” of your beloved, for real. Still, I offer you today’s final panel to enjoy, in which our lovestruck villain clings to the back of a limosine with the relative limosine-clinging power of a mole.

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The Lockhorns, 5/13/17

You know how it works: with worms, you catch a little fish. With a fish, you catch a much, much bigger fish. One big enough to swallow you whole, you and your entire boat, and end your hated life with your hated spouse forever. Look at Leroy’s faraway smile, just thinking about how death, blessed death, will finally come for him, deep in a friendly fish’s warm, snug belly.

Mark Trail, 5/13/17

Oh, hey, uh, are these guys still talking? Apparently! The hairlines are continuing to retreat at a rapid pace. Look at the dude in panel one! He’s just got a hair island left in the middle of his head! For a gruff cop, that is an extremely avant-garde hairstyle.

Mary Worth, 5/13/17

OH MY GOD IT REALLY WAS A TRAP

AND NOW KATIE’S BEEN LEFT TO DIE IN A FILTHY ACTUALLY PRETTY CLEAN HAITIAN BATHROOM

LEAVING ENTERTAINER ESMÉ FREE TO SEDUCE DEREK, AND THEN SMOKE CIGARETTES WITH HIM AFTERWARDS

THIS IS AMAZING