One thread in the baseball-season story in Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp is that Valley Tech coach Luke Martinez isn’t giving his son, Pedro Martinez, chances to pitch. He’s got a foreign-exchange student, Kwan Tak, who’s hogging all the glory. But you need more than one starter for a baseball team, and Pedro Martinez was bred to be a hall-of-famer. He’s got allegedly a 90 mph fastball; between Kwan and Pedro, Valley Tech should be winning games they aren’t even in. I saw one Gil Thorp commenter ask whether Henry Barajas even knows how the game is played.
I imagine Barajas does. There are a couple things going on here that you might miss if you aren’t reading three months’ worth of story at once. While you need multiple starters, there’s the starter you give the most important games and there’s your second-chair. And that hurts. And Luke Martinez is busy screwing up his relationship with his kids, including Pedro Martinez. The last we saw him on-screen, Pedro was upset that his father had made their win against Milford all about his coaching, rather than Pedro’s playing. Pedro didn’t play basketball for Valley Tech, a gap you might have thought was just because not everyone plays every sport. Except that last month Marty Moon asked Martinez why Pedro didn’t play. That attention makes the picture clearer.

The picture: Pedro Martinez is angry at his father. He didn’t play basketball, either on Pedro’s or Luke’s initiative we don’t know. Now? It appears Coach Martinez wants a more compliant pitcher than even his own son. Whether he’s actually not playing Pedro at all, or whether he’s benching Pedro for the bigger games, is ambiguous so far. Pedro’s sense of rejection is understandable to me.
So this should catch you up to early June 2023 in Gil Thorp. All going well, I’ll have another plot recap by September 2023 at this link, so look there if you’re reading this in my far future. And if you need to catch up more quickly. Now back to the sports department.
Gil Thorp.
13 March – 4 June 2023.
My last visit to Milford saw the basketball season nearing its end. To seal up an undefeated season, assistant coach Emmett Tays brings in a friend. It’s special celebrity guest star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar! Who gives advice about outlasting the competition; he recommends it, himself. (Later, for Free Comic Book Day, we get special celebrity guest star Steenz, Heart of the City‘s cartoonist. And we get one more special guest star in the window of strips I’m discussing.)
The competition will be a tough one: Valley Tech versus the undefeated Milford for the 2023 Boys Basketball Championship. The game starts, reader time, the 24th of March. (Marty Moon says he’s joined by “the legendary Lachlan Maclean”, a name unfamiliar to me. A commenter at GoComics found that he’s a Louisville, Kentucky, sports reporter, so counts as our third celebrity guest star! Let’s give him a big hand and congratulate the strip on more celebrity ‘gets’ than Dick Tracy managed this cycle.) It’s a hard-fought match, both teams playing well and Coach Martinez not being all weird about Gil Thorp. It’s either team’s game until an accident with one minute left to play. Rodney Barnes — who with Tobias Gordon was selling vape sticks to support the sports program — collides hard with a Valley Tech player. He’s knocked out hard enough Tobias starts giving CPR. Rodney’s taken off by ambulance, and he’ll be in the hospital until the next storyline starts.

After Rodney’s taken away — and they get the news he’s conscious — the teams agree to finish the game, telling one another it’s what Rodney would want. So he would: Milford gets the final basket and tops a perfect season with the local championship. Martinez congratulates Gil Thorp on a good game, “but know this … this ain’t over,” causing people in adjacent comics to roll their eyes. “C’mon, mate,” Ginger Meggs chides. “You don’t have to be all weird like this. Cricket wallaby billycart.” But he does, and he’s only going to ramp it up for the baseball story.
The baseball story — also, Chapter 3 of Henry Barajas’s first year here, “The Prestige”, begins the 12th of April. There’s miscellaneous little pieces of business. Coach Thorp’s kids are still hanging out with Luke Martinez’s kids. Martinez’s younger kid wishes his dad were nice like Gil Thorp. Marty Moon asks Luke Martinez why Pedro — signed up to be Valley Tech’s star pitcher — didn’t play basketball. Marty’s so used to being told “because shut up is why” he doesn’t even register there’s a story there. It’s right up there in my prologue.
But he does find the long-simmering story of the vape sticks. A leading comment from Gil Thorp sends Tobias freaking out that someone knows what they’re up to. He’s swears that he’s out, even if Rod won’t quit yet, just as Marty Moon snaps pictures of their dealing.
Mimi Thorp’s on the golf circuit. She gets a bouquet of roses and a supporting card on the start of this tour. They’re from Ericka Carter, who’d been giving her lessons.
![Dorothy; 'I wanted to *thank* you.' Keri: 'I hope you'd do the same for me ... but I doubt you've ever been in a fight.' Dorothy, hugging her: 'I still hate you for beating me up [*] that one time! I'll follow you on Instagram tonight, bye!' Keri, thinking: 'She even smells pretty.' [ * Editor's note: read the strip from 11/16/2022! ] Later, Mimi Thorp, picking her up: 'Keri Harper Thorp. How was your first time serving detention?' Keri: 'Honestly? Rad.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/gil-thorp_henry-barajas-rod-whigham_2023-06june-01.jpg?w=840&h=263)
And Keri Thorp, playing on the girls’ team, has a strange encounter with her bully Dorothy Wolfe. Wolfe’s been pitching a great season, topping it with a no-hitter. Someone on the losing team congratulates her with an elbow into the chest. It starts a brawl, and Dorothy’s stunned when the rest of the team comes to her defense. Wolfe hugs Keri, who startles me by thinking, “She even smells pretty”. It’s a gentle open to a much-needed Pride Month. Also between this and Ericka Carter, Mary Worth has like 350 years of social catching-up to do.
The central sport of all this is baseball, or possibly softball. Someball, anyway. Gil Thorp’s having some trouble finding a pitcher. Kaz gives his old boss one more good tip by reminding him of Greg Hamm, star of Neal Rubin’s final story for Gil Thorp. And Hamm is up for a special guest appearance, giving faintly Yoda-ish lessons about how to feel the air, the sunlight, the position of the catcher. And to make your pitches count; you don’t know how many you’ll get.
Luke Martinez, meanwhile, is almost sick for choice in pitchers. His own son would be killer enough. But Martinez goes all the way to Korea, to coax assistant coach Kim’s cousin into coming over as a foreign exchange student. He offers the promise of being a hugely noticed fish in their pond. Martinez even shows off that he speaks Korean to do this. I like learning buffoon-leaning characters like Martinez have unexpected skills. I assume he’s doing all this on his dime. I can’t imagine Valley Tech has a huge recruiting travel budget for the boys baseball team.

Kwan Tak, “The Korean Nightmare”, comes to Valley Tech. Martinez bunches his own son to start Kwan, raising eyebrows from Gil Thorp and scowls from Pedro. Kwan — staying with the Martinezes, for that extra dose of energy — gets along great with Coach Martinez. But also (we learn this week) feels isolated and pressured by his family. They have unrealistic high expectations for accomplishment in the field of high school baseball.
And this, more or less, is where we’ve reached by early June. I don’t know how much of this will wrap up before Barajas’s one-year anniversary of the strip, coming up in five weeks, but we’ll learn together.
Milford Sports Watch!
Who’s Milford playing? Who’s Milford talking about? These teams, and these days. If you want their win-loss record you can work it out from here.
- New Britain (13 March)
- Oakford, Central, Jefferson, Valley Tech (20 March)
- Jefferson, Valley Tech (24 March – 8 April)
- Oakwood (26 – 27 April)
- Bobcats (boys and girls) (2 – 5 May)
- Goshen (9 May)
- Valley Tech, Goshen (20 May)
- Jefferson (26 May)
Next Week!
It’s spies! And betrayals! And family intrigue! And probably a three-month jump ahead to the next season! Three months of Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker gets reduced to like 800 words next week, I hope. See you then.