Vaya con carne, Martín Luna

This has to have gone down as the Gil Thorp arc with the least amount of actual sports action ever. It also has to be near the top of arcs requiring the greatest suspension of disbelief. On top of all we’ve had to choke down around Marty, Pirate Boy and the Milford Pirate Network (does one station constitute a network?), now we’re supposed to believe that WDIG has at least three studios? Couldn’t at least one of them held Marty’s substitute, re-creating the basketball games Ronald Reagan style while Marty was suspended?

Marty played his traditional role of designated heel, between making light of the Padillas’ life situation, the gratuitous Mexican food references (intended to woo a potential sponsor but interpreted as “Puerto Ricans/Mexicans are all alike and their cultures all the same”) and the mispronunciation/pissy over-pronunciation in response to criticism. But really, Gil doesn’t come off as much less of a schmuck either. True, he couldn’t have anticipated the tack the MPN took on covering Milford hoops – nor Marty’s blue response to them – but he did in effect goad them on to goad Marty on. His ham-handed efforts at negotiation showed how little he thinks of Milford girls’ basketball and required us to connect the dots and assume Marty’s suspension would turn into termination if Marty didn’t accede.

Finally, Gil’s little dig at Marty in the last panel (yet another in which characters depart via a doorway), meant to remind Marty of the Boricua culture of which he is so ignorant, comes off a bit dickish as well. I’ll admit I like the idea of Marty as Scooby-Doo villain, but wouldn’t that mean he’s actually somebody else under a rubber mask? My money’s on Dr. Pearl.

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Terms of endearment

Ok – – first of all – sorry profusely about yesterday. Yes I was busy but I still had a bit of time to knock this out and just plain forgot. I know you dont mind  That Much… so here goes…

The terms of Martys punishment are being laid out both today (Friday) and tomorrow (today). He has to go back to school (yikes) and learn Latin-American  history. Maybe if we’re lucky he will learn to speak Latin too. Everyone that speaks Latin is dead, or will be shortly. So good luck with that.

Its an online class so he can do it in his underwear, or better yet, in the buff. Nobodys looking.

And – how about this — he will broadcast a girls game for the first time. Woo-hoo. I guess all those other games the box narration was the “announcer”.

Plus he has 2 more weeks to not announce basketball like all the other basketball announcers who have been done since oh, April 2nd. Well there’s still the NBA but we arent counting that.

How about how the kids get away with the shenanagans involving distracting a paid announcer from doing his job, and he gets punished but they get off scott free? Comment on that if you want..

Unsold ad time? Why not use that time to give public service messages about the situation in Puerto Rico?

Again thanks for your patience. We now resume regularly scheduled programming.

 

Gil’s Not Alone in Needing Good Ideas

If you were plugged into the 24/7 news cycle yesterday, you know that much of Puerto Rico has gone dark again. You also know that that didn’t stop The Show from going on… unlike in Pleasantville Milford, where suspending Marty stops the show dead in its tracks.

Rubin is forcing us to connect many dots today as he lurches toward an awkward, tone-deaf ending to this underwhelming, once-promising arc. The first dot is Gil’s acknowledgement that Karina, at his suggestion, instigated the Milford Pirate Boy Network and thus had a hand in bringing about Marty’s suspension. The second dot is that Gil convinced the Padillas’ and Karina’s teacher to let them skip class (he has a history of doing this, y’know) to sit around the most lovingly rendered cafeteria table in comics history and decide on Marty’s penance. The third dot (and maybe several more after that) is that whatever terms the kids decided on were presented by Gil to Pocket Square Sporting Radio Station Manager, who accepted them and delivered them to Marty as an ultimatum – agree to these or you’re fired.

All of this unfolded even more slowly than Boo Radley’s fatal car crash, but faster than the full restoration of Puerto Rico’s power grid. In a world where teens can tweet and stand against social injustice while adults cower and hedge, all of this would’ve played out in the course of a week. We could’ve been treated with two months of Drunken Uber Driver Marty Moon dumpster diving for the dregs of Johnnie Walker bottles and begging for a cameo on Pirate Boy’s YouTube livestream.

So sit back and buckle up for the last few days of this bumpy ride. Me, I’m off in search of some Pudge Coffee. (Seriously. Check it out. Not affiliated with Pudge or his coffee.)

Saturday haiku à la Padilla

Marty Moon’s boss is

covering his ass big time

Slow trigger finger?

 

“Imploded” must mean

“using the seven words you

can’t say on TV”

 

Don’t know why Gil Thorp

plays intermediary

to the Padillas

 

Who cares if Marty

is “disgraced, embarrassed and

suspended”? Can him!

 

Paloma gets it

Jorge wants to get along

Milford ain’t Georgia!

 

Marty should offer

A public apology

Over the airwaves

 

Then we can move on

From this disgraceful story

I give it a week

Cant anybody here do this job??

Gil runs into the station manager at WDIG who tells him Marty may get his job back if Gil tells the tall girl who started all this MPN nonsense to endorse it. And if she doesnt endorse it he wont. Double negative. Whats the future of MPN now that the Pirate Parrot guy doesnt want to do it because Marty lost his job? Why is the girl as tall as Gil? Whats the point of all this if the basketball season is over anyway, which it should’ve been a month ago?

And the elephant in the room? WHY ON GODS GREEN EARTH DOES MARTY MOON HAVE TO BE THE ONLY FUCKIN PERSON ON PLANET EARTH THATS CAPABLE OF BROADCASTING A GOD DAMN TINY ASS HIGH SCHOOLS’ BASKETBALL GAMES THAT NOBODY GIVES A FLYING FUCK ABOUT AND WHOSE PRIMARY CHARACTERS IN THIS PLOT HAVE BEEN FORGOTTON ABOUT BECAUSE OF SOME DUMB ASS PIRATE NETWORK THATS NOW OUT OF BUSINESS??? CANT ANYBODY ELSE IN THIS MORONIC SCHOOL SIT BEHIND A GOD DAMN MICROPHONE AND DESCRIBE MEANINGLESS BASKETBALL ACTION 2 FUCKIN MONTHS AFTER EVERYONE ELSE IN THE SHIT-ASS UNIVERSE IS DONE PLAYING????

Where’s the Excedrin?

Marty Moon: The Straw That Stirs the Milford Drink

Today’s strip just serves to bring the glaring plot holes, inconsistencies and missed opportunities into stark relief, not unlike Marty’s face in P2.  Without belaboring the obvious – oh, who am I kidding? Let’s belabor the obvious:

1. If an Aagard scores 26 points and there’s no one there to report on it, does it make a sound? Last winter’s saga of Aaron and his opioid-addicted mother ended with his transfer into the protective custody of the Hiatt-Brown family. Rubin brought Aaron back this season, but Big Ken Brown is no longer around to make things happen. Couldn’t those loose ends have been tied up in a panel?
2. Nice use of parallel drinking by the not-broadcasting broadcasters, one with hooch, the other with Yoo-Hoo (or does that just say “Poo”?). The glaring sign behind Marty’s head must be meant to offer a contrast to his apparent sour mood. It also offers a nice segue into a song parody but I fear those days are behind me. The idea that WDIG can’t or won’t run games without Marty to call them borders on the absurd. Absurd doesn’t begin to describe the Milford Pirate Network’s approach to the games. If they’d been up front about why they popped up then played it straight, they’d still be on the air and no one would’ve cared that there was no coverage from Marty and WDIG. But noooo, MPN based its whole schtick on taunting Marty, so no Marty, no MPN. For that matter…
3. … no Marty, no Gil to antagonize or be antagonized by Marty. Hence Gil’s call on Pocket Square Sporting Radio Station Manager to no doubt try to get Marty back on the air. As with his meeting with Marty, Gil’s on neutral ground where drinks are involved but this time it’s only coffee (unless Gil’s secretly making it Irish).

If all this is a pivot towards turning this strip from Gil Thorp into Marty Moon, I could be persuaded to stick around. The travails of a drunken shock jock looking to redeem himself to unwitting victims of his shock doesn’t cover new ground but it has potential.

late metapost: Over lunch I came across this article about Latinos attempting to assimilate in the American South. No one in the story is Puerto Rican, but it touches on an angle Rubin has chosen not to pursue to much extent in this arc.

Lo siento, no lo siento

Okay, so Gil’s not meeting Marty at his crate shack but on neutral ground. Dunno why Gil acts so surprised: he knows Marty’s a known souse and it’s not like Gil doesn’t knock back a few every now and then, in public, even. Marty’s got his Captain Haddock brows working again and, yeah, he wants Gil to clean up his mess.

That weak-assed excuse for a mea culpa doesn’t fly anymore, if it ever did. Everyone and her brother knows that “I’m sorry you were offended by my actions” is not the same as “I’m sorry for my actions.”  There’s a few dots here that haven’t been connected – like how Marty thinks all of this is the Padillas’ doing – but hey, baseball season is a week old so let’s wrap this thing up, shall we?

Now I guess we just sit back and wait to see what level of public apology from Marty will suffice. An appearance with Pirate Nebbish Boy from MPN seems more than likely.

Martys a bum, bar none.

Another week rolls by and its Marty and Gil meeting in a bar. I have to say, I’ve never seen a bar drawn in all my years of reading this strip, and here the waitress is drawn with an outfit more suited to IHOP. The bars I go to they dress way more casual/ skimpy. I was with a group on St. Patricks Day a few years ago and we got kicked out of Tilted Kilt because there was a pay per view fight on and they didnt think we were spending enough money. Now THOSE are outfits I approve of.

Now we have this meeting. How many days for this? Bar closes at 2am so I’m sure they’ll use it all. What else can they say besides – I’m a dickwad, yes you are, stop those kids from screwing up my broadcast, I’m a coach not a policeman (or so I say) etc.

Dont expect to see another game for a few days as these 2 hash out not only the current predicament but all the underlying tension of their 50-year relationship. Again, we’ve forgotton completely about the whole issue in the first place, which was Marty taking liberties with Chicos name (remember Chico kids??)

Anyway, drinks are on me. Cheers!