Post Content

Once again, I put off Sunday’s strips till Monday, but I do want to start your week off right with some sweet, sweet comment of the week action. This week’s top comment:

“Near as I can tell, Gil Thorp’s idea of basketball is judo-chopping a ball into a large basket of gingerbread men. Finally, something in this strip that makes sense.” –Rhekarid

And the many funny runners-up:

“A3G makes sense once you realize that everyone’s in eighth grade!” –AppleGirl

“Crankshaft is a lot like those Taco Bell commercials where hip young late-twentysomethings talk about the latest disgusting food offering from Taco Bell in that I hate both of them. The similarities pretty much end there, but I needed to get that off my chest.” –Joe

“Tommie’s outfit is hot … if she’s wearing a skirt with a bustle and high-button shoes and it’s 1892.” –gnome de blog

“Also, that ‘DAYS LATER’ in Gil Thorp really threw me for a loop. It’s a bold insight into the workings of the Thorpiverse. It could have been just minutes after the game, it could have been DAYS LATER, sure; but couldn’t it just as easily be a thousand generations hence, on some distant planetary colony? Apparently, yes, it could. You can’t tell the characters apart, anyways, so this supports my hypothesis.” –Foobar

“Bil Keane on Drawing. Today’s lesson: perspective. ‘When you draw the smug, angry face on your basketball-headed caricature of a son, only give his bulbous pig nose one nostril!'” –Steve S

“If there is justice, then the precipitation in Gil Thorp is nuclear fallout.” –Analyzer

“MW: Until this strip, I never realized how very very hard it is to draw Asian people. I can almost see the tongues sticking out of the artists’ mouths and the sweat beading on their foreheads as they labor over those ever-so-tricky Asian features.” –Poteet

“Of course, who could sleep with Aunt Rachel and Groves going at it hammer-and-tongs with the screams of ‘Here comes the butter for YOUR scones!’ echoing through the apartment. Brrrrrrrrrrrr.” –willethompson

“Of course, [Cedric]’s only working for Rachel for a week. Which means he’ll soon be looking for other temp work. Which will probably involve working as a life model at Neddy’s school, much to her embarrassment and titillation. This being Judge Parker, he’ll turn out to have a physique like the original GI Joes — buff, ripped and lacking a penis.” –cheech wizard

“What’s up with Gina? Disturbing hairdo and tendency to leer mischievously at her friend making out with Timothy Dalton aside, in previous strips she is always depicted as shorter and more petite than Tommy. Now, in today’s installment, she suddenly looms over her Victorian-garbed friend like a pigtailed Colossus of Rhodes. Is she standing on a box or something? Maybe she abruptly put on some platform shoes? Or is she just a woman with freaky hair who has a super-power that enables her to change her size?” –Lyman Returns

“A3G: I know it’s no ‘Theodore,’ but I just like calling Neil ‘Jacuzzi McDude.'” –Red Greenback

“If Bandar medicine is anything like Bandar livery or Bandar haberdashery, I’d say Mozz is in some deep shit.” –SmartPeopleOnIce

“I typically comment about how manly the women are drawn in GT, but it strikes me that Lisa Wyche isn’t only manly here, she also looks like an android. Lil’ Orphan Annie didn’t have pupils, but at least she knew to smile so that she didn’t look like a horrible pod person who had come to destroy us all. I know a few sports fans would argue that Lisa is ‘in the zone,’ but her look says ‘I will destroy you and eat your heart while you sleep.'” –King Folderol

“‘Have you ever seen a Wurlitzer?’ might actually be a great pickup line. Depending on what you want to pick up.” –Old Fogeyette

“In addition to Mary Worth, Judge Parker also features an aged crone nursing a paramour back to health. All the soap comics lately have characters on their deathbed. The metaphor is perfect.” –yellojkt

“Mark is a journalist, not a forest ranger, despite all evidence to the contrary.” –Gabe

“Yes, I’m doing a ‘boy, is the artwork in Gil Thorp terrible’ comment. But it really, really, is!” –HBGlord

“Points are not the only metric for a point guard. Guarding counts too. And, in Gil Thorp, keeping your general appearance from one panel to the next should count for a lot.” –ohyes

And I must thank our advertisers, whose cash helps keep the big comment-posting machine running:

• Pixelgirl Shop Loves You!: Hot gifts for you & the ones you love!
• The Abandoned: She came to Russia for the secret of her past. Now she can’t escape it. In theaters everywhere February 23.

To find out more about advertising on this site, click here.

Post Content

Curtis, 2/10/07

What a roller-coaster ride this week has been in Curtis: from Philly’s own “Compton Kaheem” to drunk, jiggling, syrup covered ladies to the fantastic dancing Nicholas Brothers to Curtis being savagely mauled by vicious dogs. I will ignore the labored and unnatural “I met … I met … we’d like you to meet” set-up so that I can question “Onion”‘s assertion that he needed to get his stomach pumped after accidentally ingesting a little Meow Mix. Cat food is bland and not very nutritious, but it certainly isn’t poisonous. I mean, I ate a whole bag of dog treats when I was a kid, and I came out fine!

What? It was an accident. Honest!

Still and all, if Curtis is killed or at least horribly disfigured by this pit bull attack, it might be adequate punishment for the horror that was “the syrup chapter.”

Mark Trail, 2/10/07

Speaking of labored and unnatural, I’m beginning to suspect that the real name of this feature is Mark Weg in Verlorenem Wald and that the dialogue is all translated on the cheap. I’m pretty baffled by the sentence “Rusty here is the main member of our family … he keeps us all in shape”; I assume it means that Rusty has near-omnipotent powers, like the little kid in the “Put them in the cornfield” episode of the Twilight Zone, and he forces Mark and Cherry to engage in their various inane adventures for his amusement and benefit. Meanwhile, “Sally, the love of my life” sounds to me like a circumlocution that allows Dan to avoid actually describing the nature of their relationship. Presumably, their prudish hosts wouldn’t allow them to share a bedroom if he said “Sally, my latest assistant grifter/sex buddy” or “Sally, a thirty-dollar-a-day hooker I met at a truck stop an hour before we got here.”

Mary Worth, 2/10/07

I like Mary’s self-righteous assertion that helping others is the exclusive province of the young and impoverished, while middle-aged types like Jeff ought to be instead carefully monitoring their investment portfolio so that he can be sure to be able to afford ever larger powerboats and thrice weekly “dates” at the Bum Boat that don’t result in any action. Still, I’m not entirely sure that 21 is the primary age for selflessness. I’d have been much more amused by Mary’s “You’re not twenty-one anymore” plea if she had discovered Jeff sucking Bud Light out of a keg tap while being held upside down by two guys named Chad and “the Gooch”.

Post Content

Luann, 2/9/07

So, to keep you updated, Bernice’s long-lost brother has returned from the army, and Luann has been one step away from flinging her panties at him ever since, and Brad has, disturbingly — very, very disturbingly — been simmering in a jealous snit. Today, Luann and Bernice speculate that Ben’s military skills translate easily to the bowling alley, which means that either they or I really don’t understand exactly what goes on in the armed forces. I should point out that I was in a bowling league for my entire adolescence (I even had a ball with my name on it!) but teenage girls singularly failed to hurl themselves at me in recognition of my mad bowling skills. Of course, I wasn’t some sort of black ops army dude who looked like Jared from the Subway ads, either.

Gil Thorp, 2/9/07

Man, I’m loving Coach Thorp’s gnomic response to Marty Moon’s badgering in panel two. “We think about a lot of things”? Positively Rumsfeldian. In fact, his face is looking a little like the former defense secretary in that panel, as well; maybe this is Rumsfeld’s new gig. Sure, it’s a step down, but work is work. “You go into the game against Central with the point guard you have, not the point guard you might want.”

Funky Winkerbean, 2/9/07

The hangdog, eye-bagged expression on the face of Darrin’s Mopey Friend Whose Name I Forget pretty much perfectly encapsulates the black hole of bleakness that is Funky Winkerbean. Why exactly does he look like that? Has he been repeatedly punched in the face by bullies? Is he in constant pain because of his inoperable bone cancer? Does he cry himself to sleep every night because his uncle has been molesting him for years? Pretty much any of these possibilities would fit right into this strip.

So, what horrifying tale will the password post-it set into motion? My guess: Someone sneaks in the newspaper office, uses said password to log on, then downloads vast reams of child porn; Darrin’s Mopey Friend is blamed, hijinks ensue.