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Gil Thorp, 6/11/21

I guess what’s going on here is that each of the Coaches Thorp is sitting with their own student-athlete in the teen vs. teen’s girlfriend’s dad library board interview competition, and “we’re all rooting for the library” is some kind of statement of neutrality, like “We may disagree on the details but I’m sure whoever wins will do a great job for this institution that we all respect, so let’s all just go out there do our best.” That’d be a lot more believable if Katy’s dad’s whole platform wasn’t literally defunding the library. Anyway, I assume that weird hand position in panel three is Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp getting ready to throw up some really exaggerated chef’s kiss gestures when Katy’s dad loses.

Pluggers, 6/11/21

You know what hour a plugger is happiest? When they manage to doze off, their troubles and cares briefly annihilated by blessed unconsciousness. It’s only an hour, though, when they pass out in their chair from pure exhaustion; presumably they spend the night tossing and turning in bed due to their various anxieties and disappointments. “Lots of pluggers everywhere” wrote in with this one!

Mary Worth, 6/11/21

God damn it, Ashlee, don’t you dare go soft on me, returning sad Drew’s precious Rolex from his dead mom! The only acceptable thing happening here is that you’ve realized the Coreys have generational wealth and you need to be working on a much more ambitious grift.

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Hi and Lois, 6/10/21

I was going to go on a riff here about how women are forced to do this carefully calibrated gender performance where if they don’t get into to male-coded pursuits they’re too “girly” and not worth paying attention to, and if they get too into them then they’re scorned as “not feminine enough,” but you know what? Diane is definitely taking things too far, by dressing in a baseball uniform and wearing a hat and eye black to school, a thing that nobody of any gender should do.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/10/21

Ahh, looks like Rex Morgan might be getting a little sexy…

[everyone’s interest is piqued]

…in a character’s childhood bedroom, while he goes on and on about all the nerd shit he used to have in there…

[everyone clicks away in disgust]

Mary Worth, 6/10/21

Gotta love how Ashlee is settling in on the couch with a snack to really dig into the most reading she’s done in months.

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Crankshaft, 6/9/21

Congratulations to Crankshaft for delivering a strip whose meaning isn’t immediately obvious, but in a way that makes it feel like maybe there’s going to be some character development in the next few days rather than just “oh no, the wordplay is too opaque, we need to ratchet it back by two or three notches.” Anyway, who wants to guess what exactly the ‘Shaft is going on about here? Did he watch the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic and how it caused so many younger people to put their dreams for the future on hold, and it made him realize that he had done that for himself long ago, without even realizing it? Or did he just get bored one night and watched a bad basic cable documentary about REM sleep or something and thought “Huh, I never remember my dreams. Does that mean my brain doesn’t work right? Is that COVID-related? Can I sue someone over this?”

Dustin and Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/9/21

Because human beings are capable of abstract thought, we’ve managed to turn the genetic impulse to look for mates who are physically strong and instead map that onto more abstract signifiers, like the ability to use physical strength for useful purposes, or the acquisition of stored labor value in the form of money. That’s what you’d think based on these strips, anyway, though keep in mind that the message is coming from comics artists, who generally don’t have any of the above qualities to recommend them.