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Sam and Silo, 3/7/19

I was going to do a kind of dumb “Ho ho, the sequence of noises Sam describes sounds vaguely sexual, which certainly has ribald implications for what the relationship between the two title characters is like!” joke, but, you know what those noises actually sound like? A murder. Like a guy was getting murdered and tried to call the sheriff but never was able to choke out a cry for help before his antagonist shut him up … forever. This certainly has horrifying implications for what the relationship between the two title characters is like!

Shoe, 3/7/19

The deal with the “Wizard” character in Shoe is that he’s the computer repair/tech support guy, because, ha ha, you have to be a darn magician to deal with those computers, am I right people? But the Shoe creative team long ago decided that they’re not going to hand-hold potential new readers of the strip and so no, they’re not going to ever explain why most of these bird-people are dressed like ordinary humans but one of them is wearing a wizard outfit, you just have to get it from context. This exchange is vaguely on-brand for his character because he’s being asked for his tech opinions, but the discussion really falls under the umbrella of thought leadership rather than practical advice. Anyway, I like to imagine that if you came into this cold, you’d think that this wizard-bird, using his magical powers to scry into the future, is looking forward to the day when the primitive ground-dwelling ape creatures develop intelligence and supplant the treetop civilization the birds have created.

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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.