Skippy to Steve: “I am your father!”

…and so goes Steve: Into the vast darkness of the world of the janitor. Soon he will be embraced and mentored by the best of the dark custodial artists: Skippy the Angry Janitor! What turned Skippy to the dark side, you ask? More than likely it was Gil’s smug dickishness towards the service industry:

“The kid is taking out my empties. Must have family problems…Mom on crack? Molesting uncle? Who knows…But whatever it is, he’s clearly a failure like Skippy. And none of it’s my fault this time!”
“Will you stop talking when I’m trying to seduce you?”
“Hey babe, this empty aint removing itself. Can you take care of it like a good wife, or do I need to call Steve over here?”

Speaking of  something unrelated:

“Hey Cassie, you fell asleep mid-coitus again, so I went and dyed my hair blond.”
“Coitus?”
“It’s what we mature folks in the pizza-flipping industry call ‘banging a minor’. It sounds less skeezy that way.”

Return of the Helmet!

12/24/09

What’s that I said about updating more frequently? Oops, that was before I remembered the holidays were coming up, meaning nobody ever does anything useful for a couple weeks. At least we learned on Christmas Eve that Cassie was not in fact secretly dating Gil, but a deadbeat 22-year-old pizza flipper. (You can tell he’s a deadbeat ’cause of that Dylan Bauza soul-patch thing.) Despite the awkward expositional dialogue, this is sorta close to promising as far as plot set-up goes, I guess. But no time to discuss further, because it’s just about time for….

12/25/09

…the annual Thorp Christmas greeting! Last year this was the only proof that the Thorp children still existed. But this year, thanks to their notable absence (and Gil and Mimi seeming particularly happy to have the house to themselves), I’m convinced that over the summer they sold their offspring to Marty DeJong for a couple of six packs and a bag of crack.

12/26/09

Do you think December 26th is the least-read comic day of the year? Perhaps Neal does, as Gil and Kaz pondering their line-up for three straight panels is even more boring than a usual daily episode. And Gil clearly hates us if his plan is to feature the two annoying characters of Jam-Jar and Bryce as starters over the probably extremely boring Micah and Paul. Annoying is worse than boring, right? Luckily something slightly interesting is about to happen…

12/28/09

…Another blast from the past, Steve Luhm! Steve pre-dates this blog, but only by a short bit…The two things I recall about Steve from his high school years were his enormous hair helmet (sweeeeet!), and the fact that he clocked a guy dressed as a hobo during a basketball game. (Presumably to stand up for homeless teammate Ted Pearse, but maybe secretly because he was deathly afraid of hobos.) I imagine he has to constantly hold his neck steady…Now that the giant hair helmet is gone, it’s thrown his entire head off-balance.

I’m ignoring the nonsensical dialogue and pretending that instead they’re discussing the upcoming hobo-punching tournament that has brought Steve back to town.

Everyone here should be committed

Panel 1: Boring
Panel 2: I think Mimi is smothering one of her never-seen children under a blanket.
Panel 3: Is this happening about 3 seconds before some good old-fashioned Ralph Kramden-style domestic violence? Let’s hope the commitment is for the boyfriend, to our favorite North Carolina prison.

What a moustache-whitening twist!

12/15/09

Yep, I wanted to wait ’til something happened before I posted again. Despite football “action” here, I don’t see anything happening yet. Two drunk fans trying to start the wave while everyone else dozes doesn’t count.

12/16/09

Gil still there with four minutes to play? Yeah, that’s definitely unusual (maybe he locked his keys in his car?) but it’s still nothing happening. Jam-Jar running away from Jesus in panel three? Yep, that’s getting closer to something that’s something. Wake me when he gets caught.

12/17/09

Hey, instead of showing the winning play, we get to witness the other players pick Jam-Jar up, no doubt to deposit him in the nearest dumpster for egotistical jerks who refer to themselves in the third person. Not surprisingly, said dumpster is also Marty Moon’s home. The two egotistical jerks jaw off, though Marty with his greater years of jerky experience, causes Jam-Jar to slowly melt.

The melting off of his outer layer has caused li’l Jammie to forget about the fact that his man-crush on that Amazon dude Valerie, was well, crushed by that Amazon dude Valerie, and so he’s off to try his luck again. Looks like something is on the verge of happening….!

12/18/09

Whoah…who’s far-too-detailed crotch might that be? Well, if we were to be boringly predictable, it would have to be Deion Brand, band geek (TM)! So I’ll be shocked if that isn’t the case. However, at least for today, we can hold out hope it’s someone more ridiculous…As already suggested, perhaps the elusive Mr. Bakst? Tiger Woods? Clambake? My guess for a better twist: Valerie’s creepily too-proud father! Whoever it is, it’s turned Jam-Jar’s bizarre moustache-upper-lip thingie from black to white! Stay tuned, fans of band geeks with far-too-detailed crotches…Tomorrow should be your day!

News of the Weird: Gil visits city, does a coach thing.

12/9/09

“I’m making up team rules again.”
“Shocker.”
Days later: I have nothing interesting to say either, sweaty guy.

12/10/09

Panel 1: I’m sorry, I didn’t hear your lame dialogue…I have a giant ass in my eye.
Panel 2: Goshen-bashing: For Gil, it’s as much fun as kicking puppies!
Panel 3: A shortage of chairs at the wife swap has caused Kaz to be confused and answer questions in the wrong tense.

12/11/09

“Hey kids, as you know once a year I like to indulge in my amateur hobby of coaching! Well I had a lot of eggnog last night and decided today is the day…I think maybe we’ll unsuccessfully run the Wing-T again. So how about you, short kid? Wanna get crushed by a couple of giant dudes?”
“He already did. It was called his date on Saturday night. Zing!”

12/12/09

When Gil mentions someone showed him a new blitz package, he’s really just discussing last night in the men’s room at the Bucket. And too bad for the kids, Gil never even came up with a new play…He literally just pointed at his own new wrinkle for the rest of the quarter. So Charles Bloom told Jam-Jar to take the ball, hoping someone else would get clobbered for a change.

12/14/09

Because the other team is either very stupid, extremely poor at tackling, or both, they can’t stop wee Jam-Jar! It gets so bad that Whigham spaces out in the last panel and doesn’t even draw anything remotely matching the narrative. Can you blame him?

What’s more pathetic than another four comic post?

12/3/09

What could be more pathetic than the manner in which Jam-Jar’s uppance has come? Embarrassed in the privacy of the Okumbe home…forced to sweat and comically tug at his collar, then sent out in the cold and not allowed to date an Amazon twice his height? I’m quite devastated to know a heavy beating is not going to be happening…but what’s really much more pathetic is how thrilled Velerie’s father is about this whole thing…”A great parental moment”? Really? You seem to have set the bar extremely low.

12/4/09

What could be more pathetic than yesterday’s Okumbe celebration? How about the guy who sees a drunken student in an alley, manages to determine who it is, and then call the principal about it? OK, actually that’s pretty impressive…in a really, really lame sort of way.

12/5/09

…and what’s more pathetic than all that? Why it’s the sham of a marriage displayed at the Thorp house in panel three. The soulless shell of a relationship seems readily and depressingly apparent…two totally hollow-inside humans prattling on about nothing, as they slowly eat and drink themselves to death. Also, um, wait, who the hell is that weird-lookin’ lady there, since it sure isn’t Mimi?  Whoever she is, it was sure nice of her to put Gil’s crappy artwork on the fridge.

12/7/09

Christ, Gil. I know you support heavy on-the-job drinking, but just throw D(r)uncan off the team before you accidentally walk off the bottom of the panel or decapitate Pearl with those flipper things you’re swinging around there. Also, if you’re gonna do a flashback panel, why couldn’t it have been of the Goshen Oktoberfest? It might have made this comic (almost) worth looking at…

Tricking an idiot is so easy, even these half-wits can do it…

12/1/09

12/2/09

Oh, snap! Through a series of boring tricks, the Okumbes have gotten JamJar to fall right in their boring trap with his boring web of lies. At least they’ve gotten his eye to explode and his head beginning to melt…but I’m only staying tuned for the non-boring heavy sack beating that should be coming up next. Maybe D(r)uncan will stumble through the door and mistake JamJar for Gary Coleman* and snap his wee little neck.

*Why would D(r)uncan do that to Sir Gary Coleman? Gary knows why.

A case of BEER, your mom’s rack and thou…

11/24/09

Apparently your brother getting stabbed in prison is the real cause for celebration! (Hey he’s certainly not gonna need that ID anytime soon…) They just better hope they get to the liquor store before Gil does.

11/25/09

Not only is Duncan’s brother setting a bad example, it appears his headlight mama is flashing her brights on Robbbbb’s window in the first panel. With a family like that, it’s no wonder that Duncan is driven to slam a case of BEER brand BEER.*

*It’s shitty with Nutboys!