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Gil Thorp, 3/10/14

Uggg, you guys, Gil Thorp has been so boring this basketball season. One of the Lady Mudlarks used to be a dancer, and there are videos of her dancing on YouTube, including one where she has an unspecified “wardrobe malfunction,” and people are gross to her about it, and that’s it! And that description, I realize now, makes it sound a million times more interesting than it’s been in practice. I mean, this is an Actual Serious Issue facing Kids Today, but it’s been so weirdly linear and repetitive, and so focused on dancer girl’s brother’s attempt to protect her and/or her sexual purity, that I can’t be bothered to take much of an interest. At last, though, we’ve reached the point in the season where the Coaches Thorp have to make a half-assed attempt to solve their kids’ problems, so they’re going to … force everybody to upload embarrassing/sexually explicit videos to YouTube? Sure, why the hell not, nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan vis-à-vis high schoolers’ fragile egos and a series of lawsuits against the Milford school district.

Apartment 3-G, 3/10/14

This “oops, Tommie’s brand-new fiancé is dead” plot is pretty rushed and underbaked, without much for us to get interested in, and Margo is treating it with exactly the amount of emotional investment that it deserves.

Mary Worth, 3/10/14

“I’d invite you in, but Tommy may be asleep. And when I bring paramours back to the apartment for loud, kinky sex, I want him awake to hear it! It’s the only thing that will motivate him to get a job so he can earn enough to get his own place.”

Slylock Fox, 3/10/14

How would you describe the relationship between Max and Slylock? I’d say Max is Sly’s “assistant” or “long-suffering sidekick” or … wait, what? “[Max’s] hero, Slylock Fox”? Oh, man. Oh, that’s … man. Is he even getting paid for all this?

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Beetle Bailey, 3/9/14

Today’s strip is a harrowing tale of what happens to a character stuck for more than 60 years in the highly structured and repetitive world of a peacetime military base/a comic strip. Offered the opportunity to spend some unstructured time without his commanding officer, there’s literally only one concrete idea Beetle can come up with: see how many chocolate milkshakes he can ingest. Panel five, in which he bumps up against the limits both of his stomach volume and his imagination, is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen.

Crankshaft, 3/9/14

Nobody likes Crankshaft or his family, for obvious reasons. Though they still get invited to social functions out of obligation, their hosts generally go out of their way to let them know how unwelcome they actually are.

Six Chix, 3/9/14

Here is today’s Six Chix! It’s about snowman cock.

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Beetle Bailey, 3/8/14

Saturdays in Beetle Bailey are for the grandiosely dysfunctional Halftrack marriage; today’s installment at least has something resembling mean-spirited cheer compared to some of the more frankly traumatizing examples we’ve seen. Anyway, I’m not sure what interpretation here is more unsettling: that Mrs. Halftrack is desperate for sexual validation and doesn’t know what “person of interest” means and, as revenge for everything, the general refuses to tell her, or that Mrs. Halftrack and the local constabulary have some weird erotic roleplay going on and she’s rubbing it in her husband’s face.

Hi and Lois, 3/8/14

Still, today’s Hi and Lois wins the coveted award for Most Chilling Marital Misanthropy In A Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC Strip. I’m genuinely impressed by the attention to detail shown in panel one, in which Irma has the key to her husband’s basement prison casually dangling from her wrist. “She’ll let us out in a few hours!” Thirsty proclaims cheerfully, not realizing the he will never see the sun again.

Judge Parker, 3/8/14

Yes, the invention of armed, remote-controlled unmanned drones raises troubling questions about the future of armed conflict and the ability of hegemonic states to prosecute low-intensity warfare against non-state actors largely in secret, without expending much by way of blood or treasure. But if this technological advance leads to the insufferable Parkers being blown to bits by a remotely launched Predator missile, couldn’t we say that it was all, in the end, worthwhile?