Post Content

Gil Thorp, 7/11/14

Whoops, it turns out that nothing about the end of Gil Thorp’s spring storyline or the beginning of its summer storyline has been worth bringing to your attention, which means that I haven’t talked about it since … mid-June? Sounds about right! Golf is generally the sport of choice for summer storylines, but this year we’re going for the excitement of seven on seven football!!!!! Which is probably exciting? Anyway, today we formally meet Art and, I guess, assuming the meaty flipper-hand in panel three is meant to be flailing around in an introductory way, True, who have been watching the games and making notes, so I suppose they’re supposed to be seven-on-seven football scouts or something, which maybe is a real thing. What mainly piqued my interest in this sea of baffling half-understood info is the name of this (I think) father-son pair, “Art” and “True”. For isn’t art the purest expression of truth? And isn’t truth the basis of all art? I certainly hope their analysis of the Mudlarks’ roster talent is entirely abstract and philosophical.

Six Chix, 7/11/14

A cool thing about having your own comic is that you can use it as an opportunity to work out your very specific gripes about life. Did the member of the Six Chix consensus-driven collective responsible for today’s strip recently go to a restaurant that didn’t have a bathroom, or a restaurant from which she caught hepatitis? Since hepatitis A is transmitted via fecal matter, is it possible that these two factors are related via a particularly unpleasant method of protesting the no-public-bathrooms policy?

Mary Worth, 7/11/14

Wow, Olive, who has been shown to have future-predicting ability, sure looks scared to see this doctor! Maybe her second sight is giving her a look into her own fate, or maybe she’s just aware that she lives in a heavy-handed over-determined narrative and her doctor is literally named “Kapuht.”

Momma, 7/11/14

Momma readers were surprised when the strip simply became day after day of Momma’s children sitting in an empty void geting reports on the people their mother had killed, but most agreed that it was an improvement.

Post Content

Blog Year Nine was capped off with throwback to the wacky Gil Thorp summer plots of yore, in a story that began when two fast food ruffians met with vigilante justice in the form of a terrified WHO-O-A! and a mighty, meaty WUD:

Our Hawaiian-shirted hero was a senile former pro wrestler who Gil agreed to wrestle for charity or something, despite the fact that he didn’t even know who Gil was and this would be a good way for him to get terribly injured, probably. Sadly, nobody got terribly injured and actually the old guy probably wasn’t all that senile and it was some kind of double-game long-con wrestling angle.

In Rex Morgan, M.D., yet another wacky elderly patient gave the Morgans free stuff — in this case, a free vacation to San Diego! All they had to do was check up on her rental property, which turned out to be full of sexy ladies who turned out to be strippers with hearts of gold, helping out one of their own who was suffering form breast cancer. Obviously, some of the ladies took a liking to Rex and one maybe flashed him a little, to which he reacted in typical theatrically dickish fashion.

But Blog Year Nine undeniably belonged to an epic seven-month saga in Mary Worth. It began with a cry of psychic pain in the Weston household.

Seems that Dawn got dumped by a dude named Dave, and things got worse when she ran into her ex and his new girlfriend and they invited her to a three-way. Dawn spent a lot of time on the couch watching Game of Thrones and repeating what became the summer of 2012’s catchphrase.

Wilbur decided that a trip to Italy would get Dawn’s mind off her ex. Unfortunately, everywhere she went, she kept having reminders of Dave’s sexy abs and/or genitals thrust in her face.

Determined to cheer up his daughter, Wilbur took her on a cruise ship, which immediately ran aground in a ripped-from-the-headlines tragedy. As the ship slowly capsized, Wilbur and Dawn saw human desperation at its worst.

Fortunately, the Westons were rescued via helicopter. Wilbur returned to Santa Royale with a new column idea based on his entirely undeserved good fortune.

Dawn, meanwhile, emerged from the experience with a determination to make a difference in the world, and Mary convinced her to volunteer at the hospital, where she befriended a one-armed fellow named Jim. Jim immediately became fixated on Dawn because she looked uncannily like his sister, who died in the boating accident that claimed his arm, which meant that Dawn was now forbidden to approach any body of water, and also required to have sex with him. Dawn rejected him because he was a possessive, delusional creep, but Jim laid in with the guilt.

Anyway, in her very good psychology class Dawn learned that possessive, delusional creeps just need the love friendship of a good woman and that fixes them, and it totally worked and now Jim can hang out near the water without fear and doesn’t want to murder Dawn at all, even a little. He just wants to be friends! And Dawn enjoys her friendship with him. They say that, if you listen closely, you can hear them continuing to enjoy their friendship, even today.

Tomorrow! Our trip through Soap Opera Past finally reaches the present day. What plots from the past year merit recording in the Book of Eternity?

Post Content

Momma, 7/10/14

For a brief and horrifying moment I was pretty convinced that Momma had descended into full-on nightmare, with its elderly characters’ organs liquifying, leaving them nothing more than wrinkled skin-bags waddling around full of audibly sloshing viscera-slurry. But now I think that maybe this is a pants-wetting joke? Old people have problems with incontinence? Ha … ha? Never have I grasped onto the possibility of an incontinence joke with such desperation.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/10/14

Generic Customer Guy is right to look so dubious about Herb’s dad’s advice. “So … you want me to relentlessly pursue a woman who made her romantic disinterest in me clear not once but twice? Sure, that can only end well for everybody.”

Pluggers, 7/10/14

Sure, most people tune into Pluggers for the lower-middle class exurban cultural resentment, but I think they’re going to like the new creative direction, where it’s just streams of absurdist nonsense, just fine!