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Gil Thorp, 12/20/16

One of my very favorite things about Gil Thorp is that when Gil casually says that someone “might be our best center since Trey Davis,” “Trey Davis” isn’t just some random name-combo pulled out of a hat, but an actual character who really was a great center who appeared in the strip at one point. I had managed to purge the name from my memory, but thanks to the glory and pageantry of my advanced archives, I was able to track down his appearances, which took place literally more than a decade ago, and isn’t it funny how time inevitably advances and makes a mockery of all our hopes and dreams? Anyway, great a center as Trey Davis was, he never really seemed to have his own storyline: he was overshadowed in the looks department by Ted Pearse, and later was overshadowed in the plot department by the revelation that Ted Pearse was secretly homeless. Later that spring, even the frenzy surrounding his recruitment was overshadowed by Brent “Rap-Dog” Raptor’s hilariously overbearing mom. I guess we’ll never know if Trey eventually spurned basketball glory to join the army as I predicted, since I never mentioned his post-Milford fate. Will I be sifting through my archives sometime in October of 2027 looking for evidence of the collegiate career of Aaron Aargard? Maybe! If so, I’d just like to say: hi, future Josh! I think it’s extremely cool that you’re 53 and still writing a blog about comics on the Internet, or on whatever they’ve replaced the Internet with.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/20/16

Joke’s on you, Sheriff! Snuffy froze to death inside that snowman hours ago. The coal smile is at this point a cruel, cruel joke.

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Hey, everyone! Before we launch into this week’s comics, I want to draw your attention to the Mary Worth And Me blog, where faithful reader Wanders has this year’s Worthy Awards nominees up! You get to vote in a number of categories, including Best Storyline, Outstanding Performances by Guest and Recurring Characters, Outstanding Panel, and, of course, the most coveted Worthy Statuette of all, Outstanding Performance By A Floating Head. Vote early, vote often!

Beetle Bailey, 12/19/16

One of my less favorite Beetle Bailey running jokes is the “troops dress up in wacky outfits and call it ‘camouflage’” joke that pops up on the regular. Obviously an army has to learn how to blend into the natural environment, but I’m reasonably certain that nobody has gone into either combat or an army training exercise dressed as either a bipedal, armless sheep or a bale of green hay with a visible face and limbs. In this lineup of madness, Beetle’s disguise actually seems most grounded in reality: after all, the history of soliders who have defected to the enemy when expedient — and indeed become their former opponents’ biggest cheerleaders — is as long as the history of warfare.

Shoe, 12/19/16

I spent an entire lifetime of comic reading getting accustomed to a world where sapient bird-people engage in journalism and live in a tree-city where certain architectural elements resemble those developed for human civilization, but today I feel like I’ve had a pretty important additional element — that said bird people are slightly more sophisticated than us technologically, and have access to near-future innovations like self-driving cars — dumped on me with little warning. Anyway, it’s good to have my fundamental pessimism confirmed here: even when the cars drive themselves, the rest of life is still going to suck.

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Slylock Fox, 12/17/16

Today’s Slylock Fox offers an important look at how the world evolved from the sudden, awful moment of the animapocalypse to the mostly organized society we know from the main narrative of Slylock and his mysteries. In the Six Differences panels, we see the early days of animal sapience, where the abruptly intelligent beasts are engaged in a Hobbesian war of all against all: the cat eagerly reaches for the fish, who squirms in terror, unable to escape, while a dog watches on smiling, devouring the stabbed corpse of a bird who was presumably as self-aware as any of these beings about an hour ago. Years (decades?) later in Las Vegas, the lights are still on, and Slylock is on the case, apparently enforcing securities law, making sure these wealthy, tails-and-top-hats beasts aren’t defrauded by one of the few remaining humans. It’s amazing how quickly the systems that protect first life, then property replicate themselves!

Spider-Man, 12/17/16

One of the things about laughing at Newspaper Spider-Man is that the character was always, across all iterations, supposed to be kind of funny, in a hapless teen way, even though the strip depicts him as a hapless twentysomething, which is … less attractive. So anyway, it’s pretty clear that Peter reaching out for help to other, better superheroes but only getting their voice mail is supposed to be funny. And yet I believe that Ronan, The Accuser’s magical conveyor belt of foodstuffs was intended to be entirely straight-faced! Sometimes parsing the levels of irony embedded in newspaper comic strips so I can tell whether I’m laughing with them or at them is exhausting, guys, but this … this is the life I chose.