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Gil Thorp, 6/26/19

Welp, the softball team failure to advance in the playoffs went, as predicted, largely unnoticed (especially on this blog, heyooo) and now we’re onto a summer storyline! For those of you too young to remember, summer in Gil Thorp used to be a time when anything could happen, when the strip was freed from the rhythms of the school athletics calendar and could explore truly zany scenarios (e.g., “Coach Kaz, Rock and Roll Bodyguard,” “The Day Marty Moon Got Grifted At Golf,” “Gil Wrestles A Man With Dementia, For Charity“). But lately we’ve just had to endure Gil half-assing it even more than usual as a golf coach, with only the occasional Beloved Character From The Past returning to liven things up. And this year we’re getting a second-order Beloved Character From The Past: Jaquan, a pro basketball player who improbably tagged along for a trip back to Milford two summers ago with his personal trainer, Mudlark alum Trey Davis, and whose mid-career ennui was cured with the suggestion that he get a master’s degree in history. And folks, I’m allowed to say this because I have a master’s degree in history: I assume he’s returned to town to have his awful revenge on everyone who allowed him to make such a terrible decision, because getting a master’s degree in history sucks and carries literally no advantages whatsoever.

Dick Tracy, 6/26/19

Dick Tracy just jettisoned its vaguely exciting tale of Little Orphan Annie being kidnapped mid-week and instead demands that we pay close attention to this scene: a faceless, cigar-smoking man surrounded by a cloud of flies sings a little tune about banana bread and admonishes a yokel for gawping at his late uncle’s vast library. If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, it probably won’t come as a huge shock that I find this much more interesting than a little light orphan-napping.

Dennis the Menace, 6/26/19

So Dennis is just straight up stealing stuff now? Even I have to admit that that’s reasonably menacing.

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Funky Winkerbean, 6/25/19

I got some feedback on my joke about Sunday’s Funky Winkerbean and was about to write something whiny along the lines of “Ugh, Funky Winkerbean made me learn things,” but honestly? I love learning things, and telling other people about those things! So here we go: the most famous version of the Buster Keaton house-falling gag is from 1928’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., but Keaton had done an earlier version in 1920’s One Week — and, more relevant to this storyline, Fatty Arbuckle, for whom Butter Brinkel is pretty transparently a stand-in, did the original version of it 1919’s Back Stage, which Buster Keaton also appeared in. As the name implies, Back Stage was a comedy that took place behind the scenes of a play, and so the house-falling stunt was much smaller scale and actually involved a small facade used as part of the play’s set dressing, rather than an actual house as in the Steamboat Bill version; the depiction of Brinkel’s stunt (which you can see better in Sunday’s strip) more closely matches what happened in Back Stage.

There’s one big difference, of course: Arbuckle’s Back Stage stunt, like both of Keaton’s, went off safely; but Brinkel is an inhabitant of the Funkyverse, so his version was botched and left him in agony for years afterwards. That’s the special twist on history we’ve come to expect from this feature, folks!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/25/19

I sort of assumed I pretty much knew the lay of the land in the small, insular world of Hootin’ Holler, but apparently not? Apparently there’s a high-stakes card game in town that Snuffy has decided he’s ready for? Or maybe Snuffy, unfamiliar with the geography of the flatland world, assumes that “Las Vegas,” a city he’s heard about occasionally from Parson Tuttle’s television, is only a few more hours’ walk past whatever economically imploding mining town of 25,000 people or so is the closest metropolis to Hootin’ Holler. Anyway, we shouldn’t let this speculation distract us from the important point here, which is that Snuffy has gambled away his family’s meager resources and now they’re starving to death.

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Mary Worth, 6/24/19

Wow, so, uh, this Mary Worth plot: still happening??? I guess????? The obvious implication that this conversation is really about how Mary got Jeff to try all sorts of weird sex stuff when they first started dating and now he’s become such a kinkster than he wants to open up their relationship is too much for me to handle, emotionally, so I’m just going to take everything here at face value and point out how incredibly limited Dr. Jeff’s palatte must’ve been if going to some extremely mediocre boardwalk seafood restaurant constitutes “adventurous eating” for him. I guess the other possibility is that the “adventure” arises from the consistent C ratings the Bum Boat gets from the Santa Royale Health Department.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/24/19

I’ve given some thought to the logistics here, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the best case scenario is that Batman is aiming his penis so that his piss falls in an arc just past his nose and into toilet bowl, and the worst case scenario is that his penis is dangling upside down with the rest of him and urine is just, like, flowing down his chest and into his face, which is disgusting, but keep in mind that even a slight misstep with the best case scenario also results in a faceful of piss. This comic is an affront to human dignity, is what I’m trying to say, and I certainly hope DC Comics and its parent company, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., sues the entire newspaper comics industry out of existence in response. It would be wholly merited.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/24/19

Oh boy, this is even better than I’d hoped! What do you think Mr. Lewton is obsessing over? GMOs? Chemtrails? Vaccines? I’m very much looking forward to some heavy, heavy sighing from Rex.