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Gil Thorp, 4/6/17

I guess the Gil Thorp baseball season non-FOIA storyline is going to be about the mysterious history between Ryan Van Auken and Pete De Windt, but for my money it’d be a lot more fun if they just decided to create a marketing blitz around their shared Dutch heritage. You know, posing for pictures wearing wooden shoes and sticking their fingers into holes in the local water-control infrastructure, that sort of thing. Think of the nicknames! The “Dutch Connection!” The “Erasmuslijn!” The “Flemish Block!” [Gil calls a press conference] “Look, guys, these are kids, and I’m not sure how we were supposed to know that was the name of a far-right Flemish nationalist party in the ’80s and ’90s.” [Gil calls another press conference after a Marty Moon investigation finds extensive posts from mudlark_van_auk3n and petedeWIN on neo-nazi and Dutch supremacist message boards] “Look, guys…” [Gil closes his eyes and holds the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger for a long time without saying anything]

Mark Trail, 4/6/17

Wouldn’t it be great if Mark walked away from this kidnapper’s attempt to rope Mark into his crimes and we just never heard from him or his victim ever again? “What a strange man I met at the airport, Johnny!” [They spend the next eight to twelve weeks taking a census of black-footed ferrets]

Mary Worth, 4/6/17

Look how incredibly jazzed Mary and Toby are about the cruise ship crew not immediately losing their luggage within hours of their coming aboard! Their expectations are set extremely low, and which is always the best way to approach a vacation experience. They’ll almost certainly be pleasantly surprised when a norovirus fails to kill them!

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/5/17

The extremely slo-mo amnesia-driven retconning of Sarah Morgan, which is so very slo-mo that it only serves to highlight the fact that the retconning is happening, continues apace, and I guess we’re going to keep discovering how far back a year of comic strip time actually goes. Say, remember like three years ago in real-world time, when Sarah caught her babysitter Kelly fooling around with her boyfriend, and used that discovery to blackmail her into servitude? Sarah doesn’t! Sarah doesn’t remember it at all! Sarah can’t understand why all the adults around her treat her with mingled fear and disgust!

Gasoline Alley, 4/5/17

If I had to say what Gasoline Alley’s mission is, I guess it would be to relentlessly promote folksiness in all its forms, including folksy expressions that nobody ever says, like “It takes 50¢ to get you started and $5.00 to make you stop!” But the lady at the far right of the second panel is taking this far too literally. Reg hasn’t even started yet but she’s already implying that she would pay a handsome sum just to get him to shut up! It’s like tipping a stripper, only instead of showing appreciation for Reg’s dancing prowess and hot body, the only thing she “appreciates” is Reg not talking any more! Seems kind of rude, in my opinion.

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Pluggers, 4/4/17

Sometimes the point of Pluggers just seems to be “pluggers are old,” which, you know, nothing wrong with that, we’re all going to be old someday, if all goes to plan. These gags generally take the form of “Old pluggers have assumptions and cultural references that are now forgotten by younger people.” Today’s panel takes a somewhat different tack: this plugger looks just as baffled at the concept of “5 ¢ Milky Ways” as any indie-rock-addled hipster youth. The difference, I suppose, is that a young person would’ve downloaded their recipe from a fancy website to their iPhone or whatever, whereas the plugger is in touch with the long, unbroken chain of knowledge that goes back generations, preserving and copying these manuscripts dutifully like a medieval monk, even if they don’t fully understand it.

Six Chix, 4/4/17

Who says there’s nothing new under the sun? I would’ve thought sci-fi writers over the past century or so had already rather exhaustively detailed all the problems with time travel: you step on a butterfly and turn America fascist, you go back to meet Jesus and accidentally become Jesus, you have sex with some lady and become your own grandfather, etc. But nope, Six Chix has discovered something new: don’t you hate it when you think you’re going to the Renaissance or to our spacefaring future, but you just end up in some lady’s uterus, leaving her torso grotesquely distorted? We never should’ve meddled in the mysteries of the timestream!

Family Circus, 4/4/17

Look at those impossibly cheery faces! Definitely, definitely this involves murder somehow.