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Gil Thorp, 3/29/21

The Gil Thorp winter basketball storyline is over! Donezo! It was boring and I’m not even going to bother recapping it! We’re cruising right ahead into spring, the new season that smells like freshly mowed baseball diamonds and [sniffs air] [record scratch] musty old books????

Yes, it appears our baseball/softball season is starting in the library — and the boringest part of the library, where they don’t even have any books or anything. Not sure what prospect would be funnier: if Debbie’s trailing spouse here got replaced on the library board by Gil or Coach Kaz or some other Milford-adjacent jock who really shakes things up in the stacks in a way that at first ruffles some feathers but ultimately everyone agrees it’s for the best, or if market research has shown that sports fans stopped reading newspaper comic strips years ago and so Gil Thorp is about to take a hard pivot into the thrilling library governance drama the last few remaining newspaper readers crave.

Hi and Lois, 3/29/21

I love how genuinely shocked Lois looks overhearing Hi’s tale. “Oh, no, he’s telling them about … golf? But we agreed! Not until they’re older!”

Family Circus, 3/29/21

Speaking of ruined innocence, I am very much enjoying Mommy’s expression. “Oh, no, am I going to have to deal with this moron’s thoughts about … his own mortality? At this hour? Absolutely not.”

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Dustin, 3/28/21

I was going to start this post with “Did … did the manufacturer of warfarin write this comic” and then do a whole riff about how this seven year old kid may not need a blood thinner but the geriatrics who represent the biggest cohort among newspaper comics reader just might, but then I checked out warfarin’s Wikipedia article and found out it’s a generic drug, so that doesn’t really work. It’s just funnier if you get to use the actual name of a pharmaceutical conglomerate, you know? Anyway, I also learned that the warfarin was originally developed as a rat poison, its most common side effect is “bleeding,” and it can also cause something called “purple toes syndrome,” so, honestly, it really does need some good press.

Blondie, 3/28/21

The premise of the main gag of this comic is pointless — why would Mr. Dithers need a drone to keep tabs on Dagwood when there’s literally an entire sector of the software industry dedicated to producing spyware that bosses can use to keep tabs on their workers? — but I have to admit I found the throwaway panels, in which Dagwood reacts to a video poker website with more excitement and engagement than he’s ever demonstrated towards his career or his family, haunting enough that today’s strip will stick with me for weeks.

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Dustin, 3/27/21

For a brief moment, I thought today’s Dustin was an example of that lowest form of comic strip humor: a character in a strip being tasked with making a dumb joke more appealing by reacting to it as if it’s funny, which is it isn’t. But then I remembered that Dustin’s dad is a lawyer! Turns out Dustin’s dad isn’t just an asshole; he also hates his son as much as his son hates his children, which is honestly a best case scenario for the next few weeks of this strip as far as I’m concerned. Let’s get beyond passive aggression into pure chaos!

Funky Winkerbean, 3/27/21

You know what would make this strip a lot funnier? If you could see Harry’s face in panel two, and there were, like, tons of blood flowing out of his mouth and down his chin as he cheerfully declared “I got the gig!” And then panel three was cut out entirely. Well, I’m not sure if “funnier” is quite the right word, but I think we can all agree it’d be better.