From Lini’s Wardrobe to another hoops season: The key word is FAIL.

3/23/11

Mysteries of the Moment:

• Who the hell is Kayla talking to?
• Will Lini get to his ventriloquism gig in the Catskills in time?
• Will Whigham ever draw Marty Moon again? (On the plus side, today’s rehash is from one of my recent favorite strips, featuring Stretch Armstong attack!)

3/24/11

Mystery of the Moment: Why will Milford never make the playdowns in any sport ever again?

• Gil is too drunk to care.
• Ever since Gil acquired Clambake’s “Baseball Participant” trophy (which appears to be slowly shrinking), he has more than enough shiny metal objects on his desk for one decade.
• Rubin will never learn to pace a story properly, thus making playdown plots impossible. (“Well kids, we won all our games this year! Unfortunately the championship game happened two months ago…The district just didn’t have the heart to tell us.”)
• All of the above.

3/25/11

I will ignore the fact that Lini has gone to Gil for advice. The entire episode is unrealistic enough…I mean, how does Gil even know the phrase “cyber-bully”? At least there’s some realism here: Gil nods off in mid-advice again.

Since there’s nothing more interesting to talk about, the mystery of the moment for your discussion:

• Which 1980s character has Lini stolen his wardrobe from? I’m going to guess Joey Lawrence.

The Green Lantern has left the building. Way to beat us to it, dude.

2/21/11

Shocking Panel 1 Revelation:
“The administration” figured out how to block a website. My take: Kelly with her strong technical skills led Kaz to the server room, where she directed him to punch the crap out of the school’s dial-up modem.

Shocking Panel 2 Revelation:
The Goshen High Goshes have rebranded their school to the much slicker and sleeker “G High.” My take: The sign being cut off means the name is obviously longer…I’m guessing their new name is “Gil High School”, inspired of course by the popular local mug.

Shocking Panel 3 Revelation:
Everyone’s wrist is broken! My take: I don’t care.

2/22/11

Basketball season continues…

with the same result.

As every season.

That is to say:  numerous plots, none of them anywhere close to resolved, or even interesting, carry on into late February. Then the Mudlarks play a boring game for a while. Even Marty Moon can’t be bothered to be any different than he was on January 17th. (At least the kid behind him changed shirts, so we’re no longer concerned the Green Lantern is in the building.) Wake me when Lini Verde becomes famous so I can sell him his damned domain name.*

*For all the aspiring entrepreneurs out there, I would like to announce that I’m willing to sell LiniVerde.com to the highest bidder. But make me an offer quickly, as you’ll want to beat a fictional character to the punch on owning this valuable item!

New Jeffs on the Block

2/7/11

In a case that would be a tough nut for Kaz, P.I. to crack, the Jefferson Jeffs figure out that when #11 comes in, he will try to shoot the ball. So…they block it. So much for the complex Milford game plan! Too bad their other plan to add multiple unnecessary stripes all over the court hasn’t panned out either.

To keep things simple and lazy, Marty Moon repeats his pose from January 25th, complete with requisite claw hand preparing to strangle him (thanks to eagle-eye reader Regina for noticing this first…). Though looks like he’s changed into his black sweater…I guess it hides the chocolate cake stains better.

2/8/11

Under the bleachers:
“Hmm, they blocked the shots of the guy who we want to shoot the ball. Looks like some other team is not coached by morons.”
“Well, they can’t all be me, Kaz. At least that kid on our team who looks like me can pretend to coach while we sneak out the back door. I bet we can still catch the tail end of Happy Hour at PUB.”

Meanwhile:
Kid who looks like Gil: “[Nonsensical coach-speak].”
Guy who’d rather wear a sweater vest and tie: “No thanks to whatever that meant. I’d rather wear a sweater vest and tie. And a scarf. Oh and then go metrosexually boff your girlfriend.”
Gil Kid: “Boff?”

Later:
Two opposing players occupy the same physical space. That’s a  foul! Defying the laws of spacial relations on the Jeff with a stringy mullet! That’ll be two shots from the stripe… Wait. Which stripe? This floor looks like a damned zebra.

O Come All Ye Mudlarks

12/25/2010

Well friends, it’s another Christmas in Milford and the kids are still AWOL, like Chuck Cunningham from Happy Days, Mike Douglas from My Three Sons and Chad Zits from Zits, those kids just vanished into the mists of narrative irrelevance. Some speculate that they are earning their keep at Camp Touchstone and the real reason Gil took the football team to the camp was that he had to make a court ordered visit with his spawn. We may never know. Only Neal Rubin has the answers.

Oh yeah, and the new character talked Gil into organizing basketball team caroling. So Cortez has some strong beliefs? I think he should have gone full out and requested they do a live nativity scene. That would’ve been wild. What we get is this cheesy tableau with Gil alone extending holiday wishes. Mimi’s at home drinking hot toddies and crying at Lifetime movies.

As my Christmas gift to you, I’ve dug into the archives to offer the previous 9 years worth of Thorp family Christmas wishes so that we can watch the family shrink, so you can enjoy some blasts from the past, so you can gather clues about what might have happened to the kids, etc.

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

Day After Day I Get Up And I Say I Better Do It Again

11/2/10

Is the implication here that there are Mudlarks who haven’t tuned out Jamarr already? Seriously, the tedium that has settled in to this storyline is off the charts. Broken record. Groundhog Day (Bing!) Choose whatever analogy for repetition to the point of inanity you’d like.

Speaking of repetition, everybody assume park positions! Black t-shirt guy, raise your arms! You, by the fire pit, twist your legs around! Cargo pants guy, raise your coke and stare into the fire! Everybody else with cans, get ‘em up! C’mon people, we’ve rehearsed this. Wait a minute, who are those guys? They look like a couple of St. Fabe’s geeks. (Plot Point! Plot Point!)  They’re totally ruining the continuity!

I think the spirit of this post can best be summed up with this song by The Kinks:

Deja Vu All Over Again

10/28/10

Another day, another recycled panel.* I’ll stop short of accusing anyone of being lazy. I can barely come up with anything new to say.

Gil’s got some new wrinkles, though. This mainly involves using players other than Jamarr Gaddis, since Central’s been squeezing him like a tube of toothpaste. Welcome aboard, Tim “Keep on Truckin’” Summers and Robby Grillo. Who wants to bet blocking back Robby Grillo gets the ball instead of the Ghost?

*At least now, because of a differently positioned speech balloon, we can see that whatever Marty was scrawling on his pad is emphasized with two (!!) exclamation points. Maybe “See doctor about itching!!” or “Pick up more Ring Dings!!”

I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus

10/27/10

Woah! Major Recycled panel alert for Panel 1! I see the guy with the raised fist has allowed his hair to grow out since last month, and Marty’s gibberish has changed, but otherwise, we’re looking at a total duplicate.

Widened the splits on the line? Sooo, this is some kind of spread offense? Whatever it is, it’s making everybody happy. Jamarr’s slicing through gaps and grinning like a fool. Even Steve the Disco Referee seems to be unable to control himself. Maybe that’s not Steve. Maybe it’s Smilin’ Lee, the Referee Who Can’t Contain His Glee.

As for Panel 3…chipper? You call that chipper? It looks like they’re psychotic (not to mention in violation of all the basic safety codes of school bus riding….”Hands and heads inside the windows, Gents! Turn that music off or we’re not going anywhere!”). Steve the Disco Ref must be doubling as the bus driver since he’s most likely to be pumping the Village People and encouraging the team to perform the YMCA dance through the windows.

Yo, a little help?

4/22/09

Thanks to Molly Kinsella getting lost in the Crock desert for several days, where she proceeds to hallucinate about tennis balls, the Milford girls lose the game!

4/23/09

Meanwhile, a reluctant (mostly reluctant to have to look at the ugliest mug in Milford. Ugh, no more close-ups of Thumb Poser please!) Robb Larue is about to give Shep the bad news that Bill “Opie” Hawkins is already putting the moves on Molly. I mean, who else would it be? Also, he should explain that a wingman can only do his job for the pilot when the pilot didn’t previously crash face-first into a chemical waste dump.

And even more meanwhiler, I would have never imagined a legitimate comic would ever attempt a Gil Thorp cross-over, but apparently such a thing has now happened. Thanks to alert reader Debbie, here’s this Wednesday’s Lio:

I’d have to say the weirdest thing about this is that Lio is being attacked by the Frank Bolle-era Gil Thorp characters… More specifically, it’s the characters from March 4th of last year!

Thumbs up to Mark Tatulli for this cross-over, which still makes way more sense than the real strip ever does! Thoughts?