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Gil Thorp, 12/19/14

There’s a great Gil Thorp plot storytelling tradition that’s been ignored for the past few plots, in which random non-Gil, non-Kaz people end up taking over coaching duties, allowing our heroes to do even less work than usual. It’s been so long since we’ve seen this that I’m down with seeing it play out in this case, even though Robert “Bobby” Howry is the team manager and thus on the border of being an official coach! He’s also on the border of several potential DSM-IV diagnoses, if his obsessive nickname fixation is any indication.

Mary Worth, 12/19/14

Oh, man, Hanna’s glare is just lasering into the side of Sean’s head in panel two! He’s not interested in a private two-person flute concert at all; he wants to assemble an cultish harem of sexy ladies of a certain age. Somerset? More like Allareset, as in all the women who live there are set up as Sean’s sex thralls, amiright?

Funky Winkerbean, 12/19/14

Oh, look, Funky has one of those “smart” phones, as in it’s smart enough to know that any email from a doctor has grim plot significance and needs to be put in a larger font than an email from a wife or a loved one or whatever. The good (?) news is that Dr. C. Hill wasn’t the one who picked up Funky’s prostate cancer, so maybe this is just about his impending heart attack. It sure must be “chill” being a doctor in the Funkyverse, in the sense that your soul is icy and numb after years of constant failure to keep your patients out of death’s clutches!

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Family Circus, 12/18/14

There’s a lot of things about this world that Billy doesn’t understand, because he’s too young or naive or aggressively ignorant, and one of them is, to quote Matthew McConaughey’s character in True Detective, that time is a flat circle. Billy still sees this Christmas season of forced morality in a linear fashion, as an obstacle to be overcome and then forgotten about. Jeffy wears a look of world-weariness that indicates that despite being younger he is the wiser sibling. There’s no end in sight. Santa is always coming again, sometime in the future, and is always watching, always weighing us against his system of mysterious and arbitrary ethics. All of us have to be good, forever.

Mary Worth, 12/18/14

Look, Mary, Hanna appreciates how you’ve helped bring her and Sean together, but she is not interested in you listening in on their duet, OK? It’s for Hanna’s pleasure, not yours. It’s for fun. She’s uncomfortable performing for third parties. Maybe someday, but for now, all her flute-playing will be happening behind closed doors.

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The Lockhorns, 12/17/14

Kudos to the Lockhorns for occasionally giving us another angle on their “Leroy and Loretta passive-aggressively try to emotionally destroy one another in a mostly featureless hell-dimension” shtick. By another angle, I don’t mean thematically, of course; I mean a literal viewing angle. Today, for instance, Leroy responds to Loretta’s basic need for reassurance on her appearance with a cruel wisecrack while the two of them stand next to a doorframe and a mirror floating in an otherwise featureless-hell dimension, as you’d expect, but we’re looking up at the whole scenario from about knee height, which gives us both a close up on Loretta’s ass (demonstrating what gave rise to the conversation) and also a great look at Leroy’s looming gut spilling over his belt (demonstrating the lack of self-awareness that’s going hand in hand with his lack of tact).

Gil Thorp, 12/17/14

How is Gil following up his state football championship? Why, by keeping all the good players off the basketball team, that’s how! “I only do a half-assed job at coaching most years, so shouldn’t I be able to rest on my championship laurels and literally not even field a basketball team this year? Let’s see how many people I can convince to quit!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/17/14

Oh whoops it looks like Becka’s husband didn’t actually leave her for the sexy nutritionist co-worker he flirted with in 2009; that was just to establish his untrustworthy character in the very long chess game Rex Morgan has apparently been playing with us all this time. Anyhoo, I know Becka’s in a low emotional state, but she also appears to be in the 25-40 demographic, and therefore shouldn’t go around affixing the “cyber” prefix to whatever slur she’s applying to people just because they came into her life via the Internet, satisfying though it no doubt is.

Dennis the Menace, 12/17/14

“Cheer up, Mr. Wilson! All of us are on a one-way road with no exits, and its final destination is death!”