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Gil Thorp, 7/8/10

“Oh, hey,” you are almost certainly saying, “What’s going in Gil Thorp?” (Yes, you are definitely saying this, in your minds, don’t try to deny it to me, I know you too well.) Well, Milford’s star pitcher Slim Chance’s band got the “chance” to open for their alt-country heroes, Backyard Tire Fire (they are a real band who actually exists, and who apparently have spent some extremely ill-conceived product placement money), which gig happened the day before Slim was supposed to start in the team’s opening game of the playdowns, but the team van broke down on the way home, and Slim had to take a cab the last 150 miles, and he arrived just as the third inning was starting, ready to be the hero…

…and he lost, terribly. This is one of the reasons why I like Gil Thorp. It isn’t afraid to have plots that fly in the face of the sort of narrative arcs you’d expect! This is especially the case when such contrarian plotting ends with the Mudlarks having their hopes and dreams ground to dust.

Beetle Bailey, 7/8/10

The soldiers at Camp Swampy have any number of good reasons to hate and loathe Sgt. Snorkel (mostly involving their relentless physical abuse at his hands), but it does seem kind of cruel of them to mock the broken shell of a man that he’s become, thanks to his harrowing food addiction. “Oh, God, a delicious brown blob of some sort, right there on my tie … uh, it doesn’t count if I don’t use my hands, right? Come on, tongue…”

B.C., 7/8/10

There are a lot of puzzling concepts in today’s B.C., but let’s start with the most obvious: the phone, built into the tree. I guess much of the visual humor of the strip comes from putting modern things in ancient settings, but the tree-phone is a really baffling mishmosh. I mean, I get why you have to build it into a natural feature, I suppose, but why do the phone-parts look like they’re from the early 20th century? “Oh, they’re in caveman times, so it would make much more sense to have a phone that’s from 9,900 years in the future rather than 10,000 years in the future.”

Then there’s the question of whose phone-tree this is. The Cute Chick and the Fat Broad (gah, I know their names, their terrible, offensive names) just seem to be casually strolling by it when it rings. In this primitive era, did people not “own” phones per se, but rather just answer the ones that were scattered around the landscape, or, if they were feeling sassy, pick one up and dial a number at random, then start talking dirty to whoever picks up at the other end?

Mark Trail, 7/8/10

In addition to having a mustache and threatening cute animals, our current Mark Trail villain appears to be a dirty communist, or at least that’s my assumption based on his complete inability to understand basic market economics. Sassy only has value as a beloved pet to a lonely, malformed orphan boy; but the baddie’s “What he’s offering may not be enough” implies, wrongly, that there is some kind of market demand for this irritating, mewling pup. Someone is about to be very disappointed by the results of an eBay auction.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/8/10

With Toots and Brook’s problems solved by a little TLC and karate, we can at last move on to the next plot, which should be hilarious, as we find out how Rex’s “be a supercilious dick to everyone” bedside manner works out when he has to drop the c-bomb on the mayor. Whether you’re powerful and influential, or have a serious illness, or both, Rex will be a jerk about it, and by “it” I mean “pretty much everything.”

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Mark Trail, 7/7/10

Mark Trail’s drawings of wildlife are generally quite good, if dubiously colored, but domestic animals are often depicted as mutants almost as bizarre-looking as some of the people. Still, by the standards of the strip that dog in the foreground of panel two is pretty good. His expression has been well captured, assuming that expression is meant to indicate something along the lines of “Oh, yeah, that ‘sweet little thing’ you brought home? I ate it. I’m not particularly sorry about it, either.”

Spider-Man, 7/7/10

Is this entire storyline going to consist of Iron Man’s rampages interrupting Peter Parker’s naps? I guess the writers have finally hit upon the thing that would most spur Spider-Man to action.

Family Circus, 7/7/10

Ha, ha! Jeffy thinks he’s capable of learning how to read!

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Dick Tracy, 7/6/10

Two men have already died by gunfire in this Dick Tracy storyline, but any hardcore fan of the strip will tell you that such mundane deaths are totally inadequate. Today the villainous Anja Nu meets her end in a fashion that, if not grimly ironic (unless it turns out that she’s unhinged because she was raised by her grandfather, a Nazi fighter pilot/war criminal), is at least gruesome. One might have hoped that Dick would have found some reason to start the plane’s motor so that Nu’s body would be ground to hamburger by the spinning propeller, rather than just crushed to pulp, but I think we’ve achieved the acceptable bare minimum for Dick Tracy carnage.

Apartment 3-G, 7/6/10

Ha ha, Tommie’s pit of embarrassment just keeps getting deeper and deeper. Who are the mysterious Ted and Lucy? Well, they were the “perfect couple” who started the Margo finger-quoting craze four years ago. Then Tommie caught Lucy making out with some dude from her poetry group (with “poetry group” obviously meaning “a Craigslist casual encounters ad”), and Tommie and Ted decided to try out this adultery thing to see what all the fuss was about, with hilariously awkward results. Last we heard they had reconciled, and now we see that they’re still together; apparently they’ve come to this makeover ambush to reinforce the mutual contempt for Tommie that now keeps their marriage together.

Tommie doesn’t have a choice; her answer has to be yes. Tommie never chooses anything. Tommie just lets what happens to her happen.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/6/10

Rev. Croom’s congregation, which all the Herb and Jamaal characters seem to attend, is always thinking obsessively about the afterlife, all the time. We know that the Reverend has told Herb in confidence that his unredeemably sinful soul is destined for eternal and fiery torment, and today we see that the cycle of theological cruelty is perpetuated through the family. (Herb probably doesn’t realize that his mother-in-law already knows she is damned, though that just makes his jibe all the crueler.)