Comment of the Week

My little friend is not so little anymore, Toby! In fact, she's quite large! Enormous, in fact! Nine foot six and getting taller by the day! It's actually quite alarming! We're getting into I'm a Virgo territory here! Did you watch that miniseries, by the way? It was on Amazon Prime a couple of years ago! Jharrel Jerome is a treasure! Some great performances by Elijah Wood and Walton Goggins as well, which reminds me that I need to start my Justified rewatch. Oh, Margo Martindale is another treasure, especially as a voice in BoJack Horseman. Anyway, Olive is a giant, is the point I'm trying to make.

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Gil Thorp, 9/6/19

There’s an old joke/parable about a guy who’s trapped on his roof during a flood. As the waters rose, not once, not twice, but three times rescue boats motored by, but each time the man refused help, saying, “The Lord will provide.” Eventually, the waters rose up over the roof and he drowned, then found himself face-to-face with the Almighty. “I don’t understand!” he said. “You said you would provide for me in times of trouble!” And God replied, “Hey, I sent three boats.”

My point here is that just about every Gil Thorp plot involves Gil and/or his student-athletes and/or the Milford athletic department getting into a big mess, throughout which Gil just smirks smugly and reassures everyone that everything will work out for the best, and it usually does, thanks either to someone else doing most of the work or pure dumb luck. So you could see why Gil is serenely confident at this point that the Lord, or whatever the philosophical equivalent of an omnipotent deity is for a syndicated comic strip, is working tirelessly to rearrange reality in his favor. Unfortunately, when other people who believe they have free will turn out to be part of the Lord’s inscrutable plan, you can see how they might start to feel a little cranky and unappreciated after a while! Anyway, I hope this ends with Marty trying to rent B/Robby’s billboards to say more mean things about Gil, then finding out how much that costs, then just resorting to using WDIG’s photocopier to make a bunch of signs about how Gil is a jerk, which he’ll tape up on utility poles all over town.

Mary Worth, 9/6/19

Oh, man, communicating with a potential beau outside the internal SilverDaters messaging system is not recommended, both because it reduces the time-on-site metric SilverDaters uses to quantify customer engagement and because it reveals your real name and email address, opening you up to identity theft or whatever. I’m guessing that this latter route is where this storyline is going; this is going to make it awkward that Mary herself encouraged this online dating thing, since the final lesson will be that, once again, the internet is only good for desperate loners who deserve all the suffering they get. To counteract this negativity in advance, I would like to praise the SilverDaters user experience engineers who realized that an extra large font would be best for their targeted customer demographic.

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The Phantom, 3/5/19

If you’re one of the 94.74% of my readers who, according to my analytics, aren’t Canadian, you might not have heard that that wintry nation’s twee, adorable Prime Minister got himself into a bit of a spot of bother by allegedly trying to strong-arm his Attorney General into not filing criminal charges against a major Quebec employer for its various illegal dealings with Muammar Gaddafi. And I know what you’re thinking: not Justin! How could this be! Well, what if I told you that what appeared to be dirty dealings with Libya was just a cover for even more top-secret dealings with Bangalla and its immortal protector? Sure, this scandal might bring down Trudeau’s government, but at least he’ll be sent into political obscurity knowing that he helped the innocent, and that’s what really counts.

Spider-Man, 3/5/19

Wow, this strip took a very abrupt turn from the unnecessarily antagonistic to the surprisingly erotic and … I’m not mad? I mean, since today is Saturday, this is probably just the cheesy wrap-up strip before we launch into a new storyline next week and [checks calendar] … oh my.

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Mary Worth, 3/4/19

After Estelle’s cavalcade of awful no-good dates, I was beginning to think that maybe Silverdater profiles just didn’t have pictures? You know, because so many old people believe that cameras capture and imprison your soul or whatever. But, nope, I guess she looked at all those other dudes and said “sure,” or, conversely, was bamboozled by their misleading photos and yet still believes “Arthur Z” is the silver fox she’s seeing on her off-brand tablet. Anyway, “Arthur Z”: not real, right? That’s a model from a denture catalogue badly photoshopped onto a picture downloaded from the Wikipedia article for Tahiti? And “Arthur”’s gonna ask for money, via an international wire transfer? I’m excited!

Gil Thorp, 3/4/19

Hey, can we talk about Marty’s boots? Specifically: what the heck is the deal with Marty’s boots? I mean, I don’t doubt Marty Moon is a man who allows himself the little boost you get from a subtly raised heel, but, like, how far up the leg do they go? Are they cowboy boots? Shiny black leather cowboy boots? Marty has vanquished B/Robby and it’s only Monday, so presumably he’ll spend the rest of the week gloating, possibly while spinning around gleefully in his chair, so maybe we’ll get to see some different angles on them.

Marvin, 3/4/19

Honestly, I don’t think it’s possible for Marvin to be more on-brand than this strip, in which the title character’s exhausted mother stares at her son, eyes heavy-lidded, trying to convince him that, actually, someday he’ll enjoy shitting in a toilet instead of his pants, while he glares back at her in open defiance.

Dennis the Menace, 3/4/19

Truly excellent menacing today, Dennis. Nostalgia is a trap! Wallowing the the idealized “good old days” blinds you to the true scope of history and cuts you off from progress!

Pluggers, 3/4/19

See, Pluggers gets it! (The whole point of Pluggers is that when you relate to one of the panels, that’s how you know you’re dying, right?)