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Spider-Man, 1/13/05

When I did my first Spider-Man comic, almost a month ago now, I said, “Presumably the ass-kicking will begin in due time.” Oh, how naive I was! How, bitterly, bitterly wrong I have been proved to be! In that time we’ve had marital spats, a little aimless Web slinging, a press conference to announce the opening of new theme restaurant, and the firing of an incompetent waiter. The closest we came to ass-kicking was when Kraven brushed aside some no-doubt trained crocodiles. And now … this! “Cage of loneliness?” I have to sit through some camped-up supervillain’s attempts to flirt via ham-handed metaphors?

I tell you, there’d better be some damn ass-kicking soon, or Stan Lee will be getting a very nasty note.

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Gil Thorp, 1/12/05

I’ve done a lot of diligent reading over the past few weeks, but I still can’t say for sure that I can tell you exactly what’s going on in Gil Thorp. I’d heard that the strip was a hotbed of conservative agitation, and it seems to be living up that reputation: one of the two (or possibly three) plots going on right now involves Hadley, a player for the girls’ basketball team, who’s outraged that nobody pays attention to the girls’ basketball team. This results not in an onslaught of sisterhood and feminist agitation on the part of the other team members, but rather a lot of eye-rolling and belittling. In a classic move used against feminazis everywhere, Hadley’s teammates have decided that what she needs to shut her yap is a boyfriend. Unfortunately, as we see here, they’ve set her up with Steve Luhm, an effeminate poindexter who’s every bit as determined to smash the patriarchy as she is.

Which brings me to the thing that actually interests me most about Gil Thorp, which is the hair. The barbers in the blighted, high-school-sports-obsessed burg where the strip takes place seem to have never met a flattop that they didn’t like, but Steve’s puffy, floofy ‘do may be the weirdest featured in this space since good ol’ Tommy went back to the clink. Panel one looks like what they used to call a “flattop with fenders”; panel two looks like he stuffed his hair into pantyhose and let it fall over his forehead. It makes the weird, Susan Sontag-ish white streak in Hadley’s hair look kind of normal.

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My fiancée is in the sex ed biz, and this week she returned from a visit to a health center north of the Mason-Dixon line with this intriguing artifact.

OK, so I understand that there are very few male characters in Luann who aren’t either related to Luann or involved in some sort of tiresome romantic situation with her. And obviously her make-out session with Aaron marks all this as outside the continuity of the strip. But still, she’s talking about dealing with sexual pressure with … TJ? TJ the schemer? TJ the scammer? TJ, whose every appearance in the strip heralds the inevitable entanglement of Brad in some awful web of deceit? The TJ I know would be turning this situation to his advantage and be attempting to shepherd Luann into the back seat of his car by the end of the pamphlet.

On the other hand, the TJ I know is also white. At first, I thought that perhaps I had never seen him in a Sunday strip before; but you know, it’s pretty obvious that Delta is black even in the dailies. Maybe it’s one of those parallel universe things: evil Spock has a beard, good Spock is clean shaven; evil TJ is white, good TJ is black.

My only comment on the content of this handout is that I think a “Waiting Is Sexy” t-shirt may send out some mixed messages. Waiting is many things, many of them positive, but “sexy” is not one of them, particularly if you’re a teenager. I can barely handle the three minutes of waiting involved in microwaving a frozen pizza pocket, and I’m 30. Also, I find it interesting that Greg Evans borrowed a trope from Mark Trail and featured some animal-closeup panels while humans converse offstage. Presumably this is because the only thing duller than drawing two people walking and talking is drawing two people walking and talking about not having sex.