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Gil Thorp, 2/5/21

“Oh hey! What’s going on in Gil Thorp?” is the question that’s on the mind of a number of people that’s probably literally in the single digits, but all of those people read this blog, so I will do my best to keep them in the loop! Well, it turns out that Corina has a beef with Tessi Milton because Tessi never plays defense, and also is a shallow cool popular girl who probably doesn’t even notice that Corina has a beef with her; also, like all shallow cool popular girls everywhere, Tessi is a whiz at social media and such, and by extension has good ideas for raising the girls’ basketball team’s profile, and one of those ideas is getting Vic Doucette and his wacky antics on the PA system for the girls’ team too. But this has set up a dilemma! Should Vic take on the extra duties and impress a pretty girl? Or should he spend more time with his real friends, his “go-tos”, who are so important to him that they haven’t been seen or mentioned in this entire storyline so far? Once we’ve settled this, we can talk about how root bear should not cause severe jaundice, no matter how much of it you drink.

Hagar the Horrible, 2/5/21

So Helga thinks Hamlet needs to learn about … having sex with plants? I don’t want to judge about this foreign culture, but I’m not so sure about this one.

Marvin, 2/5/21

Ha ha, ladies be shopping, amiright fellas? And fellas … fellas be eating! Ladies presumably gain access to the nutrients they need via some other process. Is it shopping, maybe? We have our best fella scientists working on this and will report back when we know more.

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Six Chix, 2/4/21

Everyone of us, of course, it absolutely goes without saying, is familiar with the phrase “your house is so warm and fuzzy,” the completely normal and indeed beloved English-language idiom that we all know and love. But what if — and stay with me here for this one — what if we took this phrase, whose metaphorical meaning we all understand, and treated it literally? And what literal scenario springs to mind more quickly when you think of a warm, fuzzy house than a nightmarish tangle of enormous caterpillars, writhing in great piles on top of your furniture and yourself! That would indeed be delightfully droll, as their chitinous legs scramble for purchase on your flesh!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/4/21

Speaking of taking metaphorical phrases literally, here’s today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, which I actually enjoyed quite a bit. The key, for me, is that Grimm doesn’t live on a farm at all in the everyday world of the strip. It’s as if he was wandering through the countryside, spotted an open barn door, and thought to himself, “Oh ho, the perfect opportunity to really blow some poor farmer’s mind.” Then he leaned up against the barn and waited, sipping from the cup of coffee he brought with him for just such an occasion.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/4/21

Like every character in the strip that bears his name, Funky long ago learned to deal with the utter misery that permeates his world by suppressing all feelings other than smugness and whatever prompts the endless smirks (also smugness, I guess, though occasionally it’s also pun-recognition). But now that he’s about to go under the knife, he needs to experience a real emotion, for what might be the last time. He’s begging everyone to help him, but neither he nor anyone else knows how to even begin.

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Shoe, 2/3/21

The “punchline” here isn’t a new joke; I’m reasonably sure I said this more than a decade ago about Michael Phelps, who owned the pool where I swam in Baltimore and who I therefore saw in the locker room multiple times, and I certainly didn’t make it up. In fact, I’d argue it’s barely a joke at all, more just a funny turn of phrase, really. But I do appreciate that they’ve given this cliche that special Shoe twist, which is to say they’ve put it in the context of one of the main characters’ devastatingly depressing personal lives. “I’m tellin’ ya, Shoe, he had muscles in places I don’t even have places! No wonder she left me. I hate my body and myself.”

Pluggers, 2/3/21

Pluggers, like all comic strips, must evolve to survive, and it could go in any number of ways. But I think I speak for all of us when I say that I sincerely did not want or expect it to go with [late middle-aged dog-man doing a sexy baby voice] “Hey, it’s a shiny quarter. Oopsie, did my pants fall down again?”