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Gil Thorp, 12/7/05

Great God and saints in heaven above, if this strip were any whiter, it would belong to a country club and have a whole closet full of pastel golf shirts. Having the words “streetball” and “sweet passes” come out of the eager, post-orthodontia-perfect mouth of überhonkey Steve Luhm is just icing on the cake. (I also can’t read the latter phrase without hearing Napoleon Dynamite saying “sweet jumps.”)

I once knew a guy who had a haircut identical to Mr. Ithaca there; he was a 70-year-old French medieval history professor with a bad hip, and he wasn’t much of a baller. I also went to school in Ithaca, and trust me when I say it’s not really a streetball town. You can now buy t-shirts that spoof the city’s traditional “Ithaca Is Gorges” motto, reading instead “Ithaca Is Gangsta.” That might have thrown the good people at Gil Thorp off. Guys, I know it’s a little late for this but: trust me, they’re ironic.

In the category of Things I’m Going To Draw Your Attention To That You’re Going To Really, Really Wish I Hadn’t: check out the package on the black-sweatshirted dude on the left in the second panel! Them’s some tight sweatpants, and that ain’t right.

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Beetle Bailey, 12/6/05

Curtis, 12/6/05

Egads! Not one, but two comics today revolve around foul aromas arising from the bodies of their title characters — and yet there’s a complete absence of stink lines! Curtis is admittedly emitting visible anger radiation waves and a couple of Cathy-style sweatballs for good measure, but it’s not enough for me. I want stink lines! Give me stink lines!

The trio of uniformed soldiers, their identities effaced by those soulless, dead-eyed gas masks, seem to me to be not so much “jovially teasing Beetle about his smelly feet” but rather “creepy as hell.” They look like they’re part of some surrealist anti-war performance art piece, or possibly back-up singers for Devo. I’m pretty sure the guy on the right is Killer. I was trying to figure out the other two when I suddenly realized that I was spending time and energy determining the identities of gas-masked characters in Beetle Bailey, briefly had a serious moment of contemplation about the direction of my life, and then stopped.

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The Middletons, 12/5/05

Old people … they don’t know anything about the new days … watch. “Hey, granny, pretty soon you’ll need to go on the Web to make sure you get your Social Security checks! What? No, the Web doesn’t have anything to do with spiders! It involves a computer, which you’re terrified of using and can’t afford on your fixed income. Don’t cry, though; I hear the supermarket gives out week-old donuts and damaged cans of dog food after closing time on Thursdays!”

The Middletons have waded into the comedy gold mine that is the generation gap before, though usually in this strip the humor content (such as it is) derives from the elderly lady here being much more hep to modern-day cultural touchstones (like the rock and roll music that’s all the rage these days) than her son. Of course, this joke is so soul-searingly hilarious that it’s totally worth it to throw out this established aspect of her character.