When plot is past expiration date, please dispose of it immediately.

7/5/08

Up-nostril shot: Totally unnecessary.

Attempted first panel joke: Totally unfunny.

Window into just how goddamn stupid Elmer is: Totally sad.

The fact that this dreary plot is wrapping up…?: Totally worth it.

There’s no way this can keep going, right? Right?

7/7/08

Auggggh! Still? The drinking of wee soda and discussion of Mexican directions that make absolutely no sense do nothing to placate me. This was supposed to be over by now!!

In the nearly two  years I’ve been writing this blog, I think this is the least-satisfying plot arc yet. Starting from August 2006, we had:

• Thorp daughter and her Indian friend participate in gymnastics meets against a little bitchy girl: Lame, but at least not too time consuming.
• Ben Franklin hustles Marty Moon at golf. Marty drinks heavily in his parked car: Awesome.
• Stormy Hicks whines through football season, but then a car explodes and Bill Ritter chops his leg off: Violence worth initial whininess.
• Tyler Hicks wants to be the starting point guard so he clubs himself in the head: WTF?-Awesome goodness.
• Old weirdo named Clambake coaches baseball team, tells boring stories that apparently fascinate teenagers, then turns out to be a lying fraud. Also softball team shaves head because their coach doesn’t have cancer: Now we’re rolling!
• Kaz punches his way into becoming a private investigator for a washed-up singer. (Turns out Ben Franklin did it.) Also…Bill the one-legged boxer: The standard-bearer of plotlines. Can Neal ever top this?
• Cully the killer football player makes bad friends, then Coach Thorp asks him to kill Marty Moon. Also, losers from another school play some pranks. (I’m still waiting for that part to be resolved…): Well anything after last summer is bound to be a bit of a let-down.
• Andrew Gregory goes through like 14 personality changes and for some reason Marty Moon pretends to be his dad while Mr. Gregory is out on jungle patrol: Back to good ol’ WTF!

Then…Several months of this crap. Why did I just recap a bunch of old stories? 1.) Because I have literally nothing left to say about El-Mullet and 2.) To remind all of us (including Neal), how spectacularly ridiculous this comic can be! So let’s just call Mulligan on the spring/half-of summer 2008 and start fresh tomorrow. Please??? For the children? Won’t someone please think of the children?

Lack of Intelli-Gents

6/28/08

Good thing nothing is going on…otherwise I would have felt bad about not posting since Friday. (Sorry!)

Panel 1: I’d be mad too if my dad had removed my forearms while I slept.

Panel 2: Too bad the picture of this sad Mexican clown is not painted on velvet.

Panel 3: After smoking his fatty and grossly misjudging some talent, Bugs takes his “Mi-So High!” bus back to Detroit.

6/30/08

Panel 1: The less said about Gil’s crotchal area, the better.

Panel 2: How did a guy known for “brick magic” manage to cement his hand to the wall?

Panel 3: And the award for “Most Depressing Panel of 2008″ goes to…

7/1/08

Panel 1: Uh, seriously Gil…enough with the crotch pants.

Panel 2: I’m too lazy to look this up, but isn’t Gil the third character within the last year to use the word “gents” in a sentence? How can we make this trend stop? Nobody born in the past two centuries speaks this way.

Panel 3: And I forgot to tell you both: The jury decided in your grand douche-off, it’s a hopeless tie. So just shut up already.

And now, unlike the rest of this post, something of very marginal interest: Did you know that Gil Thorp now has his own Facebook page? Yep. I’d join but that would require creating a Facebook account, and that’s just too muck work, gents.

Gil unscrambles another problem

6/7/08

I am sure you’re all as  chompin’ at the bit to talk about the exciting development that is Gil writing a letter to his own personal congresswoman.  Can’t beat a twist like that! At first I figured the letter he was writing involved how the arc of Elmer’s home run balls were so high, they managed to land just six inches over the fence. Then I got a look at Gil’s screen and realized he’s just doing the Junior Jumble!

6/9/08

“Wait, so you wrote an e-mail to Betty Bright?”

“I don’t even know what that is. I wrote a letter. Hey, where’s your earring?”

“Still in the shop. So you think solving this immigration problem by writing your elected official is the best, not to mention the most interesting, way to resolve this story arc?”

“It worked with that whiny douche, Stormy Hicks, didn’t it?”

“Actually, as I recall, while Rep. Betty Bright did solve Stormy’s problem,  it was only because she was bribed by friends with the rich and powerful Charles Ritter.”

“I don’t recall that.”

“No?  Well check this out. She said herself your letter was completely pointless. Did you just send her a copy of your completed Junior Jumble again?”

“Isn’t that what a letter is?”

“My god. I can’t believe how dumb you are. You probably didn’t even hear that Elmer is already back in Tijuana.”

“I like Junior Jumble.”

Lazy Haze of Summer

Today’s comic answers the question nobody needed to know, which is: “How will Rod Whigham draw school reporter Helen Marzano?” It also features some disconcerting Panel 2 Siamese Twin action. But really, what it shows is that Neal and Rod were already checked out for Memorial Day weekend, even when creating this comic several weeks in advance. So I will oblige them, and be completely disinterested and checked out as well. Enough writing, it’s PUB time!

(If you prefer something amusing rather than this crap, check out this old post featuring special guest star, Slylock Fox!)

Rotary Club Fever: Catch It!

4/12/08

First, I’m just going to presume that’s not Coach Kaz talking to Gil-Hulk there. (If it turns out it is, which would be an utter catastrophic travesty, I will insist that you, fair readers, barrage Mr. Whigham with mail alerting him to the fact that our lovable Kaz MUST be featured with hulking super muscles, Heatmeister hair and most of all pearl earrings!)

Next…Rotary Club meeting? Kids singing the National Anthem? Some sort of award? Apparently “getting more involved” means Gil is going to find the most boring local activities possible. To punctuate the utter lameness of it all, Jim Gross is portrayed as pre-stached FOOB Granthony! Yuk. At least one of the other sleepy choir members is wearing pearl earrings (or has a Cully-stein bolt in the side of her head?)

So is the Rotary Club in fact a club for local citizens who got their hands caught in rotary blades?

4/14/08

Antonio Vargas, either a professor, a key grip, or a wanted criminal, depending on who you ask, wins some sort of boring award presented by Stone Cold Steve Austin. Then some other guy talks to Gil about immigration. This better end with Elmer Vargas being deported or I want my money back*.

*Oh that’s right. They don’t send me money to read their comic. Alright then. I’ll just keep complaining for free.

Drowning your sorrows in flat beer

So Sgt. Thorp has somehow discovered the Gregory family secret that every single student, Seja’s aunt and a local orthopedist all already know. How did he find out? Who cares? But it’s pretty damn funny to see ol’ Gil actually feel any remorse about anything. Hey, he’s been recklessly half-assing everything for the last few years, and only heavily drinking because he’s a closet alcoholic. But now he’s cracked the bottle at home…

Why the sudden burdened soul? My theory: Gil heard that Marty Moon got to play Curley-Horse’s dad. That’s supposed to be his role, damnit! How did someone even more half-assed than him (quarter-assed?) get the part Gil was born to play? Probably because Moon was drinkin’ in public more than he was. So after this beer, bring on the schnaps, Mimi!

Day 2 of Whigham Art-Watch:
Comic Sans font usage continues, leading to comic sans interesting text. But groovy new angles like “Crotch/Butt Cam” and “Midget under Basketball cam” keeps everything but the text visually compelling. Though is Gil drinking out of a two-dimensional bottle?

Exit stage right.

Hey look, it’s Neo-Not-Gil’s friend, Bob “Scarface” McSweatervest! (clearly no relation to Coach Bob Kazinski, as they have different last names , look nothing alike and this jerk has the nerve to walk around without any pearl earrings.) This Bob is a local shoe distributor, so the first panel makes sense.

Big “Smallfoot” Ray is so discombobulated that this mysterious Hugh Beaumont-type character would be talking trash to him, it’s knocked his bobble-head up to maximum power. Or possibly his sonar superpowers. So that makes sense out of the second panel.

Realizing that Hugh NotGil is just about as lame a trash talker as he’s ever heard, and that murdering him would only land him in Milford’s JAIL CELL, Big Smallfoot walks away. That JAIL CELL is so rank nasty, it’s just not worth it. Thus making sense of the final panel.

Now I suggest we take a page out of the Big Ray playbook: We’ll all just stand up and walk the hell away…relocate to Micronesia for a spell, at least until they* finish smoking this latest giant bag of crack.

*Who’s “they?” Anyone who had anything to do with the creation and distribution of this comic.

Trainer Wreck

OK, if “trainer Rick Scott” has ever been a character in this strip before, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t played by Robert Duvall. The only trainer-ish guy I recall is this forgettable fellow with the glasses and goatee. So why the sudden appearance of Mr. Duvall? Easy. Gil is no dummy…he knows he should pretend to care about his kids’ problems. But he also knows that he doesn’t want his spine broken by some hot-headed dad who also happens to be a  special-ops ex-marine Blackwater contractor who knows 37 ways to kill a man with his bare hands. So obviously, he’s gotta send someone else to tell Big Ray to shut the hell up.

Why not Coach Kaz? He’s tough, right? Sorry, but Gil can’t take a risk that his drinking buddy and homo-erotic running partner gets hurt…so he wisely sends over theMilford equivalent of Ensign Expendable. Nice knowing ya, trainer Rick Scott. You might think the students in the third panel are grieving their loss (and missing the playdowns, which we don’t have time for anyway), but really they’re mourning the untimely decapitation of some guy they were just told was their trainer.