In recent weeks Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp has had a bunch of panels of characters talking right to the audience. This is because the current chapter — Chapter Five, “It’s Lonely At The Top”, title given the 8th of April — centers on Rodney Barnes. (The chapter began the 25th of March, but we didn’t get a title until Eclipse Day.) Barnes has reached the skill level where he’s going to be A Sports Name, and a documentary crew has come to get footage of people knowing him when. It’s a development giving a lot of hooks for the new reader, inviting the question of whether I’m needed here.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 22nd of February, 2024. It’s a nice artistic touch to have the moment Barnes stops seeing things in “black and white” be a literally black-and-white flashback. That’s a touch lost in those who get the uncolorized version of the comic, yes, although the convention of presenting flashbacks with picture-frame cut borders probably puts those readers in mind of monochrome images. And, if not, Barajas is aware so many people read the strip on GoComics, where it is colorized, so the writing choice is still one made with thought.
Inma Rimsha has a brief lunchroom quarrel with Rodney Barnes. This because Barnes had no-commented his way out of a question about opposing the war on Gazans. (Rimsha came down n the no-extermination side.) But when an opposing basketball coach tries to keep Tobias Gordon from playing boy’s basketball, Barnes knows the pain of needing someone to have your back. So he apologizes and that’s cool. Rimsha, meanwhile, has a great season, taking state in girls’ wrestling. (It’s given as the MIF State Title; I don’t know what MIF stands for. Commenters at GoComics mostly shrugged and guessed it might be a deliberately ambiguous sports sanctioning body.)
Having a more ambiguous season: Coach Gil Thorp. While his teams are going great — plus, see the Rodney Barnes thread above and below — he’s divorced for good, Mimi has moved out, and Gil’s Mom and her boyfriend(?) Rod are urging him to try dating some. And he does, building a relationship with bartender Beth from the Jack Berril Coach of the Year awards strong enough to bring her home to the kids.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 27th of April, 2024. From narrative context I infer these are supposed to be good presents but I admit, as someone on Comics Curmudgeon said, it’s not clear that they — Keri particularly — aren’t being sarcastic. Baldur’s Gate 3 came out not quite a year ago so it seems like something reasonably timely for a kid whom I imagine isn’t allowed to buy his own games yet, although I genuinely don’t know if it is or not. Basically the only video games I understand are Pinball Arcade and Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. Sorry.
And then there’s the big story, Rodney Barnes, who’s gotten his own documentary crew. We’ve barely seen them, but we have seen the comic strip’s cast talking to them. And the narration boxes have taken on a new voice, one more plausibly the documentary’s. This includes asking leading questions from possibly an alternate universe, such as whether Leo Atazhoon has beef with Rodney Barnes. Atazhoon will go so far as to say Barnes’s competitive attitude intimidates other players, and that Barnes knows how good he is.
Maybe overlooked in goodness: Dorothy Wolfe is having a killer season pitching for girls softball, kicking herself for losing a game 0-1 when it’s not the pitcher’s job to score. And over in Valley Tech, Kwan Tak pitches a perfect game for their boys’ baseball team, which seems like it should get more than just the ice cream cone his uncle Coach Kim buys.
And some stray other bits. Coach Thorp and girls’ Coach Ochoa have their softball teams swap up positions as a teamwork-building thingy. Coach Martinez considers how he would have gone pro, playing for the Dodgers, if not for the tendonitis, and I assume spends the rest of the day listening to some old Bruce Springsteen, or as he’s known in Michigan, Bob Segar. This year’s Milford fundraiser is pet grooming, which should keep any bright but stupid players from getting in trouble. And Marty Moon would like people to please love him or at least remember he exists. Sorry, Marty.
Milford Sports Watch!
Now for my recap of what school teams have gotten some mention. This doesn’t include all of them. We’ve seen several games against unnamed opponents who probably aren’t all Valley Tech. Of those we did get specific names for, here’s what I have logged:
And imagine that. You’re t-boned at an intersection, the ambulance comes, rushes you to the hospital, someone tells you you’re going to be all right, you’re in the best hands, and you look up and it’s the piano guy from that cover of “Rock and Roll is here to stay” you really liked. And he gets into some small talk, to keep you calm, and asks what you were up to and you were on your way to a big meeting for your Sports Graphic Design magazine and he says, hey, I know the guy you were going to talk to! Small, weird world.
To hurl a wheel of cheese at one another until a person is knocked unconscious. (Cheddaring, New Hampshire.)
To wrap needed desks in blankets until it is an equally great inconvenience to dig them out or to not do what needed to be done on them. (Uptonshire-Upon-Mewling, Kent County, England)
To insist, to the point of being tedious, that the act of making pudding is “to puddle”. (Dads, when you’re about age 4 – 7)
To spin more than seems wise. (Bukit Twirl, Singapore)
To make appointments willy-nilly to have minor home inconveniences repaired. (Quatorze, France)
To resume trying to compose a coda verse for “You’re A Mean One, Mister Grinch” reflecting his transformation. (Estate of Thurl Ravenscroft)
To tape together as many ribbon streamers as one can and see whether it can reach City Hall. (Los Angeles)
To raise speculations about the fathers of the Snow Miser and Heat Miser since The Year Without A Santa Claus is clear that they’re step-brothers and both acknowledge Mother Nature as one parent. (Budapest)
To be the first professional quarterback passing for four thousand yards in a 14-game season. (Joe Namath, 1967)
To glare at a light until it stops doing that. (New Uptonshire-Upon-Mewling, Connecticut)
To hold a family meeting in which you plan out your safe landing spots and rendezvous points in case you should all suddenly find yourselves falling up to the ceiling instead of down to the floor. (Redundant Beach, Delaware)
To make popcorn bend to your will. (Lost Toledo, Ohio)
Reference: Degrees Kelvin: A Tale Of Genius, Invention, and Tragedy, David Lindley.
Today’s adventure in Popeye and Son comes to you courtesy of sticks. Sticks: good things to hit balls with, don’t you agree? I thought you might. If you’d like to see all of my Popeye and Son reviews, whatever their sponsor, please try this link. If you don’t see anything there please let me know. I don’t know how.
The Plot: Junior foresees doom when Olive has to take Popeye’s place in the parent-child baseball tournament. But Olive’s relentless, practicing first with Junior and then with Eugene to get the hang of baseball. On the day of the big game she’s exhausted, but she’s able with some dumb luck to not just make the winning out but also hit the winning home run. Everyone’s thrilled.
This isn’t the first cartoon to sideline Popeye. Unlike the pirates cartoon, Popeye takes an injury from his twisker pitch. It’s an adequate reason for Popeye to sit out the action and make jokes. (I’m disappointed that Popeye’s “well, I sure wouldn’t claim him, that’s for sure” after Mrs Bluto says that’s her Tank is so muddled. On the other hand, isn’t that the essence of a good Popeye Mutter?)
I don’t think I like Popeye suffering the indignities of age. It gives frailty to a character whose defining trait is indestructibility. In any other cartoon Popeye would eat his spinach and the bandage would unravel from his arm — just as it does, at the end. Was he afraid of trying the thing that always works? It makes most sense if Popeye was nursing his hurt arm to give Olive a chance to shine.
I’m not sure how I would fix this. Maybe make it a mother-son baseball game. That would also give Mrs Bluto the chance to be in a cartoon and maybe get a name. (It’s Lizzie, identified by Popeye as ‘an adversary in me midsk’.)
Eugene, being a magical fourth-dimensional creature, is able to pitch both left- and right-handed, making him the extremely rare southpaw and northpaw.
Once we have the premise things carry on about like you’d imagine. Olive tries to learn something about baseball, after apparently having aced a course in Wrong Things About Baseball. After a full day of practicing she overhears Junior talking about how doomed he is. This is when she realizes the game is important to him, somehow. Again, I understand the dramatic need in Olive gaining new resolve and practicing all night to get some skills down. But it does seem like she had already understood it was important and she was already doing her best.
We get another appearance of Eugene the Jeep that would baffle someone who hadn’t seen Eugene before, except that I think kids in this target audience are harder to baffle than adults are. Using Eugene as an inexhaustible training partner’s a new take on him, and it’s not a bad one. There’s not a whisper of using Eugene to magically graft baseball ability onto Olive, which feels like it would have undercut the moral of Junior’s Genie even though that’s not really the moral there.
I have several expectations subverted. Olive Oyl’s exhaustion plays into fewer jokes than I had thought. There’s no hint that Bluto and his Maulers are cheating, or ringers, or anything. And while they have an advantage in the last inning, it’s hardly an intimidating one. For all that Junior foresees a long day, the score is only 3 to 2, pretty tight even for professionals. For amateur baseball this is pretty near dueling perfect games. And neither Junior nor Olive Oyl eat spinach to make the final rallies and win the game.
So for all that the basic story is unsurprising, the specific path taken there is. It feels like a foreshadowing of more modern cartoons that take a goofball premise but try to infuse emotional realism. I can’t say this is a great cartoon, but it is an interesting one.
Yeah. Well, I guess there’s a sliver of deniability if you suppose this wasn’t a home pregnancy test, but, c’mon. Keri and Gil Thorp have a quick family meeting with Pedro Martinez, while his father’s busy with the Milford football game. And in less time than it takes everyone to thank Mary Worth for suggesting they talk about what’s bothering them, Keri is recovering in a hospital bed.
So that is the big news and big development in Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp the past three. I, too, am amazed how much it was not built up as a Very Special Episode. It’s also a reversal of one of the few famous Gil Thorp stories, from back in 2002-03 when Left Behind novelist Jerry Jenkins wrote the strip.
And yes, Keri and Pedro had been taking precautions. Keri mentioned having an IUD, at minimum. It’s just that the only sure method against pregnancy is laminating your body with at least 15mm weight plastic and never removing yourself from the box.
Keri Thorp and Pedro Martinez’s brief pregnancy you already read about. There are hints that the event might lead to some important further family developments, though. Keri’s abortion brought Mimi Thorp back from the golfing road. Mimi’s been almost entirely absent from the strip. Her strongest presence was learning she can’t live without Ericka Carter. And that coworkers are, in fights, giving Gil Thorp beef about his marriage failing.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 12th of September, 2023. I’m not sure whether Martinez is out of line here. Yeah, he’s fighting over what is, at heart, a disagreement about work plans. On the other hand, this it is an argument about they should do for a half-hour at work. It’s not exactly a personal quarrel, except that the context makes it so.
Those fights? They’re provoked by the existence of Luke Martinez on the Milford coaching staff. To his credit, Martinez is trying to behave, emitting apologies at a rate of hundreds per day. He’s got a lot he feels awful about. His inability to be normal about Gil Thorp has strained his marriage. And it’s alienated Pedro. Pedro, meanwhile, took a bad hit defending Valley Tech’s perfect season in the big game against Milford. Last we saw Luke he was rushing onto the field to be with his son who is, note, on the other team. Yes, it takes more than a moment of normal affection to break through (justified) grievances. But a bit of rain can end a drought, so, we’ll see.
Also on the apology tour: Marty Moon. Everyone at Milford is angry at him for snitching on Toby Gordon and Rodney Barnes just because they were selling vape sticks. Pedro Martinez is angry for his family drama reasons. But Moon’s even getting a cold shoulder from new Valley Tech coach Paul Kim.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 18th of November, 2023. I feel like there’s something weird in Luke Martinez coaching against his son, but I don’t know what the expected standards are for high school athletics. Maybe I’m overly fussy, since I’m in competitive pinball and that has a crazy network of competitors, tournament officials, and even game designers being the same people.
Kim’s perfect season does suggest maybe Luke Martinez isn’t as exceptional as he claims. In this case, though, Kim hasn’t got anything against Marty Moon. He just thinks this town is really, really weird about its high school athletics. Man has a point. I come from central Jersey, where high school sports rate at about a two, but Milford’s letting them cruise at around 186,244.
My realization was that Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp is more narratively complex than, oh, Mary Worth. Not to diss Mary, just to compare to a comic strip with a strong single-story tradition. The strip has gone to a more fragmented narrative, often with two or more characters having their stories advance every week. My recap will be more coherent if I separate it out by character, then, and note how these lives interact.
Gil Thorp finished his first year in Henry Barajas’s tenure pretty strong. The boys baseball team won the championship in fine, riotous form. Hold that thought. Gil is named the Jack Berril Coach of the Year again, and this time his family is at the dinner for the awards. Missing from Gil Thorp’s acceptance speech is Mimi Thorp, who’s out at the bar with new golfing best friend Ericka Carter. Mimi and Ericka have been spending a lot of time together. One late night Gil Thorp asks Mimi whether she and Ericka are in love. We haven’t heard that answer.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 12th of July, 2023. This summer also saw Gil Thorp and Ericka meet for the first time, and seem to get along well. I’m not sure what to take of Ericka warning that they were missing Gil Thorp’s speech, rather than Mimi. The Thorps do seem to be getting along enormously better than they were last year this time.
Also at the banquet? Ex-Coach Luke Martinez, there to declare his surrender to Gil Thorp. Thorp notes that he never accepted Martinez’s bet, last year, to have the Coach of the Year run the other out of town. And, come to it, has a coaching position Martinez might be able to fill. Everyone else thinks that’s a terrible idea. Emmett Tays asks whether Martinez can be worth this much trouble. Characters from other comic strips come in to tell him this is gonna be a disaster. “Fair dinkum onya innit,” asks Ginger Meggs, who could use a job himself. “Blooming Perth!” But why should this be a disaster other than Martinez’s inability to be even a little bit normal about Gil Thorp?
And that comes to the final baseball match between Milford and Valley Tech, the championship. Martinez’s Korean exchange student, Kwan Tak, had five solid innings.Pedro Martinez, having surrendered to his father’s demands that he play obediently, relieves. He also lets two runners on base. Martinez goes out to demand to know if his son, his son, is throwing the game. The question is received as well as you might think. As the fight grows more heated the rest of Valley Tech’s team walks off the field. Whether they forfeited or simply forced the coach to leave doesn’t matter. Milford won and Valley Tech fired Martinez. (Valley Tech hired assistant coach Kim as athletic director.)
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 27th of June, 2023. Later in the summer we see Luke Martinez sleeping on the sofa in the living room and admitting he’d done something stupid. It seems independent of this, although his wife does warn he’s on strike two. I don’t know who that is recording this to be a viral video about a coach going nuts on his own son. But I know it’s someone recording correctly, in landscape format, so it’s probably someone old.
But Gil Thorp likes fixing up people. And he got to know what it’s like working with Martinez over several weeks coaching kids at Milford Juvenile Detention. This lead up to a streamed, charity football match that between donations and sports betting raised $150,000. A fraction of it’s even going toward paying kids’ restitution fines. Gil Thorp is glad people might benefit, but ever-angrier that the jail was profiting off the kids. Tobias Gordon offers a touch of wisdom straight from the heart of my Generation X. He’s “just preparing us to play college ball”.
Also, Toby Gordon and Rodney Barnes are in juvenile detention for several weeks. Marty Moon finally ran that story, supported with his pictures, of Toby and Rodney selling vape sticks. While they keep socializing it’s the tense way that friends who are justifiably pissed do. Toby is angry he gave in to Rodney’s plea to sell “one last case” of vape sticks, the one that got them caught. Rodney is angry Toby told school principal Dr Pearl they were saving to buy a car, rather than athletics fundraising. As Jacob Mattingly picked up, before I did, no sense dragging the sports teams into their scandal.
Over on the side of things where I’m not sure who’s coaching, girls softball also did great in the playdowns. They went to state championships thanks to a hit the bottom of the last inning by Keri Thorp’s bully/crush Dorothy Wolfe.
The new school year started, our time, the 7th of August. Kwan Tak is staying in exchange another year. And talking with Inma, who probably has a last name, about how she’s the first person he could come out to. Her parents are way overdoing Inma’s birthday party, renting out the museum for a sleepover. Luke Hernandez Jr and Jami Thorp look forward to have time to continue their Dungeons and Dragons campaign sometime. They’re young. They’ll learn. Mimi Thorp is off on the golf circuit.
And Luke Hernandez shows up for his first day as Milford wrestling coach. In the suspiciously well-funded athletic department he spots a photo of a random old guy hung in a spot of reverence. Commenter Charks explained Pop was the school custodian, from 1958, the original storyline. Pop welcomed Gil to Milford, and encouraged his rebuilding of the team, the year its only win was against unbeaten Valley Tech. It’s where Gil Thorp learned to be okay with losing.
And now I think you’re all caught up.
Milford Sports Watch!
One thing I know I am doing is keeping track of what other schools Milford is facing down. This gets easier over the summer. The season as I make it out looks like this.
Valley Tech (26 August) I know, that seems like a long gap to me too, but most of the interim was purely Milford or Juvenile Detention stuff. Summer, you know?
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.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 19th of May, 2023. I understand the desire, to avoid apparent conflicts of interest, in Coach Martinez deferring to his assistant in formally deciding to replace Pedro with Kwan. However, Kwan is still Kim’s cousin, so the problem remains. Anyway, between this and the Marty Moon line about Pedro not playing basketball we get that the relationship between Pedro and his father is getting explosive.
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.
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.
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.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 3rd of June, 2023. I’m not sure whether Coach Martinez is genuinely blown away by Kwan’s wit, or is supporting him for doing this well in wordplay in a foreign language. Absent contrary indications, I’m going to suppose Martinez is impressed Kwan is joking like a native speaker and building him up for that.
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.
And, yes, I’m late — even for postponing a day — in this plot recap for Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp. This is not because the story has been that complicated. I’ve just had a bit of a week and hope not to have another like it soon. But if you’re reading this after about June 2023, and I haven’t had another week like it, a more up-to-date plot recap should be at this link. And in other questions I can’t answer: on the 26th of December we learned this was “Part Two: The Only Game In Town”. Henry Barajas wanted the first year of the strip to have an overarching story with distinct parts, like he was writing The Phantom or something. No, Part One was not named anywhere on-panel. I don’t know if Barajas provided it in the comments or on his own site.
That all said, let’s get to the story.
Gil Thorp.
12 December 2022 – 11 March 2023.
When I last checked in Milford and Valley Tech were finally playing football. Valley Tech coach Luke Martinez has made beating Gil Thorp the summum bonum of his life. So the match has a weird intense energy. Valley Tech wins in the last play of the game. Martinez is busy giving his speech for the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize in Academy-Award-Winning Medal of Freedom High School Coaching (GCMG) when he notices all he gets from Gil Thorp is a good handshake and promise to see you next year. So Gil Thorp one-hit-killed Martinez in all the ways that count.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 22nd of December, 2022. So, welcoming failure sounds like a bad thing for a coach. But it is a respectable, somewhat Stoic, approach to any competition: ultimately, all but one participant in an event loses. You can drive yourself crazy thinking about that, or you can decide that doing your best is the real triumph. And, if you’ve taken the second, there’s nothing terrible about failure; it’s either random luck or teaching you what you can do better.
Part Two, the current phase of the story, began the 26th of December, with Milford looking over budget cuts. They have to look into fundraising ideas. Sports Team Candy Bars move okay-ish. Toby Gordon and Ron who probably has a last name an idea as brilliant as it is dumb: what if they sell vape sticks instead? I’m not clear how they finance this. Those details would have been the center of the Neal Rubin version of this story. As it is, they’ve raised enough money to stand out, but no grown-ups have figured out what’s going on here. Which is striking because that would absolutely have happened if this premise were done last year.
While that plays out, girls’ coach Cami Ohchoa has an idea for a Lift-A-Thon. People pay a buck for every four pounds their chosen athlete can lift. Fun enough idea. When Luke Martinez sees that Gil Thorp is going to be lifting, he gets a new goal in life. Even more important than telling boring stories of his glory days to his students? Out-lifting Gil Thorp. He focuses on this with the manic energy of a 24-year-old with ADHD who’s just fixated on Nixie tubes. He’s soon spending every waking moment training, to the point he even misses a practice. Valley Tech business-suit-wearer Paul Lastname calls him out on this. Martinez can’t hear Paul over the sound of out-lifting Gil Thorp. Martinez’s wife also calls out how this is being creepy and weird and he needs to think about something that isn’t out-lifting Gil Thorp. No luck getting through to him. He’s got out-lifting Gil Thorp to do.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 20th of January, 2023. I hope Ian and Sue are fellow high school students because if they’re even two days older than Ron and Toby, they’ve burst into laughing at these two bright young idiots the moment they were out of hearing range and are still, two months later, going. Also, I like ‘Peach Disorder’ as a string of words; I have no idea if that’s a plausible vape flavor.
Other stuff going on. Keri Thorp and Pedro Martinez are happy together, sharing a New Year’s Eve kiss. Toby, reassuring Gil Thorp, tells him how he’s the only man who’s ever apologized to his mother, one of those sincere compliments that makes the receiver feel the world is rotted beyond repair. Oh, but Mimi Thorp’s mother is doing better. And Mimi is taking golfing lessons in Scottsdale, Arizona, from someone named Ericka Carter whom Gil Thorp’s glad to meet. The Thorps have a happy Valentine’s day dinner, too, suggesting their relationship is getting back on track. Mimi still has doubts. She had told Carter “I don’t know if my husband even finds me attractive anymore”. But trust is hard to rebuild, I hear, so it reasons it wouldn’t be linear.
Meanwhile, Coach Kaz has, as promised last What’s Going On In, left Milford High. He’s now Milford Juvenile Sports Program Manager Robert Kazinski, and also his name was Robert Kazinski all this time. Keri is still being harassed by Dorothy, who keeps using her connections with Princess Ozma (rightful ruler of Oz) and Glinda the Good to stay out of trouble. And Pedro Martinez is still angry at his father. After Valley Tech’s football team had a perfect season, his father made it all about him. The actual players got a mention somewhere after the jump in the newspaper. Which is much like the injustice that kept Luke Martinez going for years.
Emmett Tays comes in as temporary assistant coach to fill Kaz’s place. Tays, whose glory days tale started Barajas’s run and also figured in Luke Martinez’s Origin Story, impresses the kids just by being there. I feel like he has more backstory than even this and I don’t know what. Sorry. Tays has some rough edges. Player Leo Atazhoon wears sneakers that are dozens of sneaker molecules held together by masking tape and good intentions. Tays starts to rag him about that. Thorp warns Tays off who suddenly sees, oh, right, poverty. Next time we see the two, they’ve got Atazhoon new sneakers, for the sake of team looking like a team.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 6th of March, 2023. A recurring motif here has been Gil Thorp doing his best to center the story on other people, and Luke Martinez wanting it to be about himself. It does well at making Gil Thorp be likable without forcing us to like him any. And it helps make scenes like this even more evocative of that episode of the 90s Superman cartoon with Mr Mxyzptlk.
But back to the lift-a-thon. That gets going in good, respectable order. And then Luke Martinez shows up for his out-lifting Gil Thorp. And he’s quite good at out-lifting Gil Thorp. He earns thanks from Thorp and like five hundred bucks for Milford sports. I assume not all in one lift because, like, two thousand pounds at once would be a stretch. (The 500 bucks may also not be literal. Barajas is willing to let people say things that are exaggerated or sarcastic in the ways regular people talk.) I mean if they were dead-lifting. They’re bench-pressing, though. And it’s two-handed. The important things are that Gil Thorp is gracious and congratulatory, and Luke Martinez is left demanding that Elmer Fudd does too have to shoot him now.
Are we nearing a Part Three? Is the vape-selling scheme about to come unravelled? Is Mimi Thorp’s mother going to die when she’s just got back into babysitting? We’ll see answers to some of these over the next couple months.
Henry Barajas has brought a different style of writing to his and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp. Compared to the Neal Rubin era the stories are much less linear, with many characters having stuff going on at once. And Barajas has an apparent desire to set everyone up with a host of issues. The combination has made the strip — already having a reputation for jumping around, because it often changed scene during a day’s strip — seem more unfocused.
So things are still going on, and the story threads are more obvious when read a week or more at a time. This may be inconvenient for people who can only read Gil Thorp in the newspaper, but, c’mon. People doing that aren’t reading my blog, anyway. Still, Barajas may need more experience with providing background or reminders in the text. It’s a hard thing to do. Science fiction fans call it “incluing” and the daily story strips are a master challenge in doing that well.
Meanwhile, Milford’s been having a good season for the boys football team. After losing the first game the team would go on to a string of of wins, including two wins in a row against Madison, somehow. I assume this was an editing mistake but never saw it explained. Centerpiece for the season — and what I imagine Neal Rubin would have made the focus of the season — is Tobias Gordon. His soccer talent leads Thorp and Kaz to naming him a kicker, and over the season he transitions to being a linebacker. GoComics commenters say this is an improbable turn of events, but I don’t know any better.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 7th of November, 2022. I understand all two/three opponents playing in the same colors is most likely an accident. The people colorizing daily strips generally get very little direction and not much time to think through their work. But there is a dramatic unity provided in giving all these dramatically-unimportant visitors the same outfit, as a visual cue of how the audience should read them.
Gordon’s progression draws media attention, as he is the first (open) transgender male athlete in Milford football. Early on some of the athletes complain about how Coach Thorp “went and got woke”, talk a win streak squelches. I appreciate the choice to portray treating transgendered people as people as the winning course. But it does carry an undercurrent of “respecting human rights will be profitable” rather than “is what decent people do”. Still, Milford enjoys a good season and is — this week — facing Valley Tech and Coach Martinez in the finals.
Speaking of Martinez. After one of Valley Tech’s wins Martinez describes what his issue is with Gil Thorp. It goes back to the Valley Tech/Milford game of 1987, when he was playing. It was a hard-fought game, and Valley Tech won. But the local press reported on how “Coach Thorp Ends Season Strong”. And now Martinez is out to right that historical wrong.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 30th of November, 2022. It occurs to me we’re maybe not to take this as literally happening; that Gil Thorp is reading in whatever Martinez actually said the coach’s present-day intentions. But it’s always hard to pull off unreliable narration, and like ten times harder to do that in a comic strip.
Anyway, the game was a rough one. Tays sure seems to have done something foul-worthy against Martinez. But Tays fumbles the last play, letting Martinez save the game for Valley Tech. In the 1987 postgame interview Martinez says he hopes “Coach Thorp knows one thing … I’m coming for your spot, Thorp”. Which … doesn’t quite satisfy me? It doesn’t seem to me like Thorp did anything particular besides be the coach he beat in the playdowns. Fixations can be weird, though, and small incidents can curdle in one’s mind.
Other stuff going on. Keri Thorp is having a rough time of it. The school has a mass-shooter drill, with the simulated shooter holding Keri’s class. This is less traumatic than an actual aggrieved white supremacist with a gun collection coming into the classroom, but that’s all. On top of that trauma is a fellow student’s death, identified as “the third overdose this semester”. Three seems very high to me, especially given it was only November, but I understand high school has changed since I was in it.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 16th of November, 2022. To be fair to Dorothy we don’t see that she’s laughing at Keri (or a friend) so this isn’t quite the neat story of punching out the bully one might like. I’m all right with things being a bit messy, even though it makes the stories harder to snark on.
Dorothy, who’s been bullying Keri (cropping her out of team photos, for example), mocks her for tearing up over this. Kari punches Dorothy, getting her sentenced to counseling through December. I know high school hasn’t changed to much that the worst offense of all is punching a bully. (Many commenters pointed out two years ago we saw a kid expelled for bringing a bread knife in to spread peanut butter on a bagel. Actual violence getting a “talk with someone ineffective” punishment seems like inconsistent standards.)
And in the most important non-student relationship bit of business: Gil Thorp asks Mimi if she wants a divorce. She says she does not, and that she’ll always love him. It doesn’t make their relationship any easier. And I don’t believe Mimi has yet owned up to how her mother is months away from death (and encouraging Mimi to leave Gil). That’s surely a heavy strain that Gil Thorp can’t anticipate or deal with.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 4th of November, 2022. Lot of action going on with those hands there, which is not me being snarky; it’s the correct thing for the camera to focus on. I do like that the trouble in the Thorp’s marriage isn’t some simple thing that could be worked out with one good conversation but rather something they’re not able to articulate. I feel optimistic given that they both want to work it out (Mimi’s defended Gil to her mother too much for me to think she doesn’t), but it’s not a thing with a sure fix.
Past that there have been a lot of small bits of business. Mimi’s mother noticing how much attention Tobias is paying to Keri, and Mimi encouraging her child if they want to date him. Kaz talking about how happy he is with his partner, maybe wife, Rachel. Keri bruising their ankle in a volleyball practice. Discovering Marty Moon has a two-year-sober Alcoholics Anonymous medallion. (Combined with how amiably he chatted with Gil Thorp back in September, this suggests Moon’s clashes with Thorp reflected alcoholism. I don’t know that Barajas meant that, but it’s a thread for possible exploration.) Thorp saying he’s old enough to have had Cold War civil-defense drills in school. Student Monica Yellowhair preceding her singing the National Anthem with the observation that the school was on stolen land, which narrows Milford’s location down to “the United States”. All told, many miscellaneous things that I’m noting in case they get built on. Or because I took notes and you’re going to see notes. As you like it.
Milford Sports Watch!
Among my notes I tried to keep track of the other schools mentioned in the strip. Here’s my record of them:
So. Henry Barajas knows much more of the lore of Gil Thorp than I do. As part of his first three months of writing the strip he’s brought back Melissa Gordon, who was a student athlete seen in a story from 2002-03. Back then the strip was written by Jerry Jenkins. Yes, the Left Behind novelist. (And illustrated by Frank McLaughlin.) This Week In Milford dug out the original strips and summarized the story, with examples of the strip. I’ll make the story even shorter. Melissa, pregnant with fellow student Kyle Gordon, took refuge with the Thorps when her parents kicked her out. She and Kyle had decided on an abortion and Coach Thorp talked her out of it.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 15th of September, 2022. In the subsequent strip Melissa says she’s not ready to accept Thorp’s apology and asks him to imagine if that were to happen today: ‘I’d have to fly back to Los Angeles or worse’. I’m not precisely sure what she means, but commenters on GoComics say that in the full 2002-03 story, Gil Thorp pushed his way into Melissa and Kyle’s decision. So while she may well love her child, it also complicated, and changed, her life and can hold Thorp accountable for talking her into it.
Then it got confusing. On the 15th of September (this year) Thorp apologized, saying, “I shouldn’t have told you to get that abortion.” In the comments on GoComics that day it’s explained that this was a lettering error. Barajas had written that Thorp apologized for telling her not to get that abortion. It’s always the critical word that gets dropped, isn’t it?
One can’t fault Thorp for having regrets about advice he gave long ago. One can fault him for saying this to Mel, when he’s having a meal with her and her child. So this makes Mel’s reaction — to someone who had, when she was a vulnerable teen, shown kindness — more understandable. Well, Thorp has been going through a rough time himself. let me try and catch up on all that. Here’s my first attempt at recapping the plot in Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp.
Barajas opened his writing tenure with Gil Thorp receiving the Jack Berrill Coach of the Year award. (Jack Berrill was, in reader time, the creator of Gil Thorp.) Again. Presenter Emmett Tays introduces Thorp with a quick football story. It’s about how Coach Thorp bonded with him over having abusive parents(!) to help him find the drive to win the big game. It’s a story that makes you ask: wait, isn’t Coach Thorp a mandatory reporter? Even if he wasn’t at the time of the story, is it admirable he saw a kid’s traumatized home life as a chance to complete forward passes? Not that a character has to be admirable to be worth our focus, but Tays is trying to tell a story of Gil Thorp doing something great.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 16th of July, 2022. By the way, we haven’t heard any mention about whether they’re still ‘playdowns’, although I imagine Barajas wouldn’t lose something that distinctive to the strip.I hesitate to play the “unreliable narrator” card. But it seems important how in the story Thorp speaks with Tays’s voice. I’m willing to suppose the story was compressed to the point it created confusion. What I don’t know is whether this was an adaptation of an actual story from deep in the Thorp archives. What I can say is what this establishes for Barajas’s writing here. It starts with a quick sports story, a promise that he’s not losing sight of that as we get into some serious family drama.
The drama: Coach Thorp’s family is not there. Mimi’s mother is dying, and Mimi’s taking a leave of absence to deal with her. Also, Mimi has not revealed how bad her mother’s health is to Gil. The subject got buried under how their own marriage is failing. She’s taken to leaving notes about how she thinks she’s worthy of his love, but not answering his phone calls. It’s a frustrating level of conflict-avoidance, one that her own child Keri calls her out on. I’m frustrated because I can’t tell you exactly what they’re struggling with. The reader’s desire to know who’s in the Right is understandable. But I’ve seen where people can fail to recognize one another’s signals of acceptance, so the relationship fails without anyone doing wrong.
Beth, a bartender at wherever it is the ceremony was, hits on Gil Thorp before finding out he’s married. Natural mistake. But they’re seen by Luke Martinez, the new coach of Valley Tech, a bombastic and outgoing and somewhat aggressive man. He declares he’s tired of Thorp winning this trophy every year and offers the deal. If Martinez wins next year, Thorp quits, and if he doesn’t, Martinez gives up coaching. Thorp doesn’t see why this man has decided to be Thorp’s problem.
Martinez goes on Marty Moon’s “Behind the Playbook” podcast to boast to everyone about how good he is, which shows how new Martinez is in town. (Also for some reason he’s introduced as Luke Martinnez. Maybe a middle name.) But he drops a mention of seeing Thorp flirting with the bartender. Moon is skeptical. But Martinez says how he’s in Mensa, so anyone should know never to take a thing he ever says seriously. Moon calls Thorp for his side before publishing. Thorp says what happened. He also opens up to Marty Moon of all people about how Mimi’s avoided him and took the kids to her mother’s while he was away for the awards.
When she learns of this Mimi says of course she doesn’t believe anything went on. She’s not jealous of some random person hitting on Gil Thorp. Also that the trip was not set off by anything; it was the only weekend free before his Pinewood summer camp coaching. But she still wants him to be at home, emotionally, more. This desire seems to contradict scheduling a trip away the last weekend he’s free. But it’s muddled but in a way people are.
On the golf course — I think at Pinewood — Gil and Mimi run into Luke and Francesca Martinez and their son Pedro. They play together, and Luke turns on what he believes is charm. His jolly references to Mimi as the ‘ball and chain’ or ‘your old lady’ sink him somehow even farther in Gil’s eyes. Francesca’s happy to meet the Thorps, though, and mentions how she’s a heart surgeon starting at Milford Medical. This is where we the readers learned Mimi was a “stay at home” mother now, though not yet that it’s to care for her own mother.
This gets us to the new school year, though. And the formal reintroduction of the Thorp Children, who’d gone without much (any?) mention in years. It’s also where we learn that Keri Thorp goes by they/them pronouns, the second nonbinary human character I know of in the syndicated strips. (The first would be Kelly Welly, in Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail.)
We also meet Melissa Gordon, and her child, born Tabatha but now her son Tobias. I don’t know that this is the first transgender human character in syndicated newspaper comics, but Tobias is at least the first in a long while. (I’m adding the ‘human’ qualifier as I’m not sure how to characterize Rosebud from the 1980s Bloom County. I imagine “aged in awkward ways”. And of course Krazy Kat is a bunch of essays.) Also that, apparently, she and Kyle married, but separated. Melissa asks for Thorp’s hep watching after Tobias, who, yeah, can’t be having a good time in high school. I’m sure it’s better now than it would be in, oh, 1992, but that’s still not great.
And we finally see Mimi Thorp going to Milford Adult Care, spending time with her mother, who says she has six months to live. Also we meet Mimi’s replacement as girls coach, Cami Ochoa, a name that seems familiar but that I haven’t mentioned here at least. (Also the part of my brain that used to do Jumble notes her name is an anagram for ‘I Am Coach O’. This I suppose is coincidence.) The girls volleyball team wins their first game, but Coach Ochoateammate Dorothy crops her out of the team photo for some reason.
Meanwhile, Jami Thorp doesn’t have to worry so much about making friends at school. He’s getting along great with this Luke Martinez Junior character, prompting Coach Thorp to eat his glass. Jami and Keri like the Martinez kids, though, as if they have an instinct to drive their father crazy.
And it falls outside the official date range for this recap. But we learned this week that Assistant Coach Kaz is moving to another school after this year. We’ll see whether it’s Valley Tech or someone else.
Milford Sports Watch!
Here’s my attempt at tracking all the schools besides Milford that get a mention or appearance. Summers usually see a lull in team references, but this has been a quite short season. All that time on new drama, I suppose.
The new writer — the fourth in the strip’s history — is Henry Barajas. Barajas has some renown for comic book series that I admit I was unaware of. (This is not a slight on his work; it’s me admitting my ignorance. I haven’t followed comic books directly since Marvel’s New Universe was put out of its misery.) But they include Helm Greycastle, the biographical La Voz De M.A.Y.O. Tata Rambo, and some Avengers and Batman stuff. An interview with the Tucson Daily Star says “He plans to introduce characters of color and with different sexual orientations and gun violence,” as good a case for the Oxford Comma as I know.
Greg Hamm, on the boys’ baseball team at Milford, was losing his eyesight. Rapidly. His catcher, Wilson Henry, and the second baseman, sports trivia maven Eli “Scooter” Borden, had a scheme to work around this. Borden would relay the catcher’s signals by code words in his chatter. This works okay for pitching. Fielding is harder; if a ball isn’t in Hamm’s dwindling field of vision he’s helpless. When a hit zooms right past Hamm’s head without his even flinching Coach Thorp works out what’s up, and pulls the kid.
It turns out Hamm’s done an outstanding job concealing his vision problems. He even worked out how to fake his way through eye tests, so his parents and eye doctor didn’t know how bad it was. Now that they do know? Dr Maisano explains to Coach Thorp that this is the last year he could play baseball. If he wears facial protection, something like a catcher’s mask, he should be reasonably safe. Coach Thorp finally accedes to letting Hamm play.
The trick with a vision-impaired pitcher is the other teams work out where his blind spot is, and can hit to it. Borden’s girlfriend Charis Thompkins has an answer, direct from Borden’s trivia banks. Relief pitcher Ryne Duren played a decade in the late 50s and early 60s, and used his poor vision as a psychological weapon. Duren’s warmup pitches would go wild, an intimidating thing for batters to face. (Oh, and the plot bits about Thompkins and the girls’ tennis teams were not followed up on.)
An old trick is good again. Hamm warns a batter off bunting by “accidentally” throwing a pitch that barely misses the batter. The umpire demands Hamm be thrown out but Coach Thorp refuses, noting, you can’t eject a player for one bad pitch, whatever you think of his eyesight. This seems like a good way to insult the umpire while staying within the rules and make sure you never get a toss-up call your way again. Thorp tosses in an insult of how that umpire called an earlier game, which probably felt good anyway.
The blend of Hamm’s actual control, and ability to look uncontrolled when it’s intimidating, works. It launches the boys baseball team into the postseason. And the local media is quite interested in a blind pitcher.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 10th of June, 2022. I’m a little surprised if there isn’t any rule by which an umpire can declare a pitcher (or other player) is too dangerous — or endangered — to play. But, as Thorp notes, he hasn’t hit a pitcher, or thrown anything wilder than ball one, and he’d fielded a ball well just one or two strips before. I suppose an umpire would have to be able to point to specific cause, that isn’t shown. This even though everyone knows what stunt Hamm was pulling. (Thorp goes on to warn Hamm not to pull the stunt again, although it’s not needed.)
The trouble is the other major part of this story. Hamm’s father is pathologically camera-shy, to the point he hides from people taking cell phone pictures of the parents in the stands. He works so hard to not be noticed that everyone notices, and feeds rumors that he’s in the witness protection program or something. Coach Thorp hears the rumors and decides to just ask the Hamms what’s going on. Greg Hamm’s mother gives the clue.
Before he was a ghost-writer for businesspeople committing books, Greg’s father was Mason Hamstetter. Hamstetter had been a hot journalist, with great cover stories in big magazines, book deals, everything you hope for when you’re a writer. He was also a plagiarist. He faked quotes. He invented sources. He got caught. So he fled New York, and truncated his name, and did his best to completely hide from a shaming public. And now, after a decade of hiding, Hamm’s wife has had enough.
Mason Hamm meets Coach Thorp, who admits he doesn’t see how there’s anything to talk to him about. But if you ask his opinion, it’s this: nobody has any idea who he is or why they should care about him. Meanwhile his son’s got an amazing story that shouldn’t be hidden for the fear that one of the four guys in a Manhattan publishing office who kind of remember his name might hear about it. It’s a hard truth that Mason accepts. He allows his son to do interviews and talk about his experience. A reporter is curious about Mason, and suggests a “where is he now” interview. But his boss kills the story because nobody cares. Having lived through his two worst fears and finding them not so bad after all? He’s able to settle in to having a son whose story might become an inspirational book he might write.
Greg Hamm pitches for Milford in the state tournament, but the team loses 9-4. It was still a good season.
And with that, the 9th of July, the story ends, as does Neal Rubin’s tenure writing Gil Thorp. I’ll learn the new direction of the comic strip as you all do, but I intend to recap it in just about three months. See you then.
Not watching or playing baseball, of course, just thinking about baseball statistics. So I got to looking up World Series and postseason-play droughts from the Major League Baseball teams and, you know? I always think of the Mets as a particularly hapless team because, you know, the Mets. Right? But you know what it turns out? There’s eight teams that have gone longer than the Mets without winning the World Series. They’re not even in the top quartile of World Series winlessnessness. There’s 22 teams with longer streaks of not winning World Serieses. And pennants? The Tigers have three streaks of twenty or more seasons where they didn’t win a penant, and the Red Sox and the White Sox have two each. The Pirates have two streaks of over thirty seasons without a penant. And the Mets? They don’t even have one lousy twenty-year streak without a penant to their name.
So anyway now I’m learning to appreciate how the Mets are somehow particularly hapless at being particularly hapless.
Eli “Scooter” Borden seems to be a key figure in this season’s story in Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp. We met him challenging folks with his baseball trivia. He’s part of the scheming to help pitcher Gregg Hamm cover up his lousy eyesight. His girlfriend’s on the girls’ tennis team.
He picked his own nickname. He says “without it, I’m a too-short kid named Eli”, but that with it, coaches figure he’s a small speedy guy. We do see Coach Thorp and Assistant Coach Kaz talking about how he’s fast. It’s not clear to me whether they’ve fallen for his branding or because they’ve watched him move.
Pranit Smith, on the boys’ basketball team, figured he was pretty good at sports betting. Then he snuck his way into a real for-money sports betting web site. And then friends started asking him to place bets for them. And, thing is, he takes bets before he takes the cash to cover them. When many of them don’t win — and even his own bets fail — he’s in a fix, since the people who did win want their payouts.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 26th of February, 2022. So this explains why the strip made a point of mentioning Gordon Achebe’s joining the basketball team. The text never mentions the racial component of Smith hoping this large (he was a football player) Black kid trying to be threatening. It’s an extra element of danger that I’m not sure the story meant for Smith to realize he was flirting with.
He has a brilliant idea. Like most brilliant ideas the kids in the strip have, it’s dumb. He asks Gordon Achebe, who again I think was on the football team before, to … you know, go mention to people who still owe Smith money. Not beat them up or anything, understand, just kind of … you know, noticeable and intimidating.
Achebe goes right to Coach Thorp, who once again can not believe what his idiot players are up to. He walks Smith through exactly how dumb this scheme is. And suspends him from games indefinitely. Smith also gets a five-day suspension. But Smith gets in line fast and behaves well enough that Thorp lets him into the final game of the season. He does well, scoring 13 points on a game that’s a 14-point win anyway.
Smith’s even able to solve his deadbeat-bettors problem. He lets it be known that his suspension can’t end until he turns over the names of everyone who owes him money, so, people pay up. He’s bluffing, but it works. He tosses off a joke about how if he’s this good at betting there are online poker sites. His friends toss him out of the story.
Meanwhile, the girls’ basketball team also had a story, unrelated to this one. Team Captain Hollis Talley freaks out on learning she was at a party where some teammates were drinking alcohol. Almost, anyway. They had two cans of hard seltzer for six people. She sees this as something that could threaten the team and/or her appointment to the US Air Force Academy. Her team responds to her concern with eye-rolling disdain and nominate her for Team Karen.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 18th of February, 2022. This is a nice little show of the different levels of maturity within the group here. Talley can see how something that is, really, harmless (two hard seltzers for six kids) could still explode and leave her covered in blame. Her teammates can’t see how their actions could have a consequence and can only understand Talley as selfish or controlling. And there is a struggle in establishing yourself as a leader so that people go along with you even if they don’t agree with your stated reasons. Talley getting along that path, even if she doesn’t get there, is a big element of this story. And, to add some pleasant ambiguity, there are absolutely no consequences for the drinking at the party. No grown-ups ever learn about it (that we know about), nobody gets in trouble, nothing bad happens except her teammates think Talley is power-tripping.
She has some constructive moping about this, and about the team’s poor performance and worse morale. Talley asks Coach Mimi Thorp to move her from center to guard, displacing her friend Cathy Sasaki. And working outside of regular practice with Maddie Bloom, another guard. This works well for the team, which gets them some compelling wins against teams that had been beating them. The important thing is getting the team to work. One person, and I’m not sure who, says she hopes that if she is Team Captain next year she’ll be able to make choices like Talley has.
The 26th of March saw the basketball storylines end. The 28th of March saw the start of the spring, boys softball, story. The key player here is Gregg Hamm, pitcher who’s going blind. His vision’s bad enough he can’t read the catcher’s signals anymore. But he, catcher Wilson Henry, and second baseman Eli ‘Scooter’ Borden work out an alternative. Borden will catch Henry’s signals and relay them by code words in his relentless chatter. Despite being a brilliant plan, it’s not too dumb, although I’m not clear how well Hamm can pitch if he has that poor vision. Also I don’t know why a sixteen(?)-year-old is losing his vision that fast and whether his parents know about this. He does fine his first game of the season, though.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 22nd of April, 2022. So Hamm says his right eye is useless, his left eye is blurry and getting worse, and Coach Thorp doesn’t know. But we also know he’s doing all right on pop quizzes. I understand that Hamm has exactly the eye condition that causes what the plot is. But I don’t know what eye problem would fit all these traits (plus that it hits a teenager). But I’m also fortunate to have never had a serious eye problem myself. The closest I’ve had is needing to give our pet rabbit eyedrops for her cataracts, and pet rabbits are almost never expected to play even slow-pitch softball.Hamm’s parents, by the way, include a father who ghost-writes autobiographies for business people. I don’t know whether this will have thematic or even plot significance.
In the parallel, girls’ tennis, story, Scooter Borden and his friends come out to cheer for his girlfriend Charis Thompkins. They bring their enthusiasm, if not an understanding that one simply does not hoot in the middle of a volley. It’s too soon to say where this storyline’s going too.
Milford Sports Watch!
Here’s my best attempt at keeping track of who’s played against Milford teams the past couple months and when they did it.
For several months the 1956 Winter Olympics were scheduled to be held in Santo Domingo until someone asked why Avery Brundage’s geography whiz of a grand-nephew kept giggling.
If this were 1988? You could get a laugh anywhere, anytime, out of anyone, just talking about the “luge”. Just the idea of the sport was the most funniest thing anyone could imagine. By 1992, the moment had passed. Sorry if you missed it.
Although they’re formally named the “Winter Olympics”, in the southern hemisphere where the seasons are opposite they’re known as the “Winter”.
They didn’t originally plan to have the 1976 Games in Innsbruck, it’s just everyone assumed that’s where the Games would be and everyone had bought their plane tickets before anyone checked where they were supposed to be held (Santo Domingo).
Fictional nation with the greatest number of gold medals in the Winter Olympics? Freedonia. Greatest number of medals, period? Klopstokia.
Sports never played in the Winter Olympics include ice baseball, snow basketball, sleet football, frost hockey, and slush rugby.
Like you could pretend you’re trying to think of the name of “luge” and then say your brain keeps on wanting you to say “luge” and that isn’t even a word, and if it’s 1988, you’re beloved for your sense of humor.
Oh yeah and if this were 1994? It would be crazy funny for David Letterman to have his Mom asking Olympics athletes questions, and that’s why to this day we have the talk show comedy genre of “somebody’s relative does a halting, insecure interview that would be painfully embarrassing to watch if you weren’t at least 75% sure the relative was in on and liked the joke”.
Luge, though. Luge.
Olympic events added for Richie Rich include $ledding, bob$leigh, $peed $kating, and ¢ro$$-¢ountry $kiing.
They are figuring to sneak in an extra Winter Olympics in Innsbruck next year, just to stay in practice.
Happy luge, everybody! We probably missed it for this year, though.
Reference: Expository Sciences, Editors Terry Shinn, Richard Whitley.
Since 1984 the official mascot of the Winter Olympics has been Groo the Wanderer and nobody knows why.
They wanted to organize some winter events for the Stockholm Olympics of 1912 but couldn’t find a good place to hold them.
Each gold medal is initially struck in stainless steel and then touched by King Midas.
The typical Winter Olympics athlete will consume over twelve pounds of vegetables in their lifetime.
The first Winter Games were named in 1925 when the International Winter Olympics Committee woke up in the middle of the night remembering that’s what they meant to do last year and sent Chamonix, France, an exciting letter.
The correct answer to any trivia question about any Winter Olympics up to those of 1960? Sonja Henie.
Each silver medal is initially struck in stainless steel and then touched by King Midas’s decent but not really ready eldest son.
Ice skating was originally in the Winter Games as Ice Kating — that is, putting on a performance of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate — until a typesetting error in the program for the 1952 Games changed things forever. (Not Olympics-related, but a similar mishap with the event of rotating episodes of Mrs Columbo gave us roller skating!)
Each bronze medal is initially struck in stainless steel and then touched by King Midas’s brother who, you know, he’s trying, he means well, he just doesn’t get it.
The first ski jump was put in place because the event course had to get over State Road 832 somehow.
There is a 288-way tie among all the countries and special teams for greatest number of copper medals won at the Winter Games, with zero each.
Taking the most Winter Olympics gold medals through to 2022? Carmen Sandiego.
Reference: Expository Sciences, Editors Terry Shinn, Richard Whitley.
That kid, Pranit Smith, is betting on sports things because if you do it right you win money. He may be urgently short on money — he at one point says he gets the coffees he does because of a “low budget”. But that hasn’t been explicit. He’s betting online using his older brother’s identity. He also gives a curiously long explanation for how his brother has the name ‘Bob’. I believe that’s so we the readers understand Bob is a real person and Pranit’s misdemeanor is just using that driver’s license (or whatever the proof of age was) instead of counterfeiting one. It’s about setting the level of his transgression.
He climbed on the lunchroom table to announce he’d been seeing a sports psychiatrist who was helping him. Spiller’s YouTube-lesson hypnosis was harmless nonsense until it wasn’t. But thanks for trying to help.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 3rd of December, 2021. Regarding that first panel: I do not read the comics to be called out like that. And no, the evidence is that I can’t speak up.So that’s got Bello not talking to Claxton. And Coach Thorp required to give a pep talk about how the team was good because they worked hard and together. They lose the next football game, though, and one of the players gets wounded. The ever-reticent Chance Macy decides it’s his turn to say something. He announces where he’s going to college so he can play football without anyone seeing (it’s Canada). And that everybody has to learn to say when expectations on them are unreasonable.
For example there’s Bello, burdened by how everyone expected she could take on more responsibilities. Or Claxton, who got razzed a lot for a couple bad plays the previous year. Macy calls for everyone to go easier on each other, and ourselves, and “snot-pound Valley Tech”. It reads like a goofy replacement for something an actual high schooler might say. But everyone in the strip agrees they have no idea what that means. Macy just said something weird and got away with it. Since they beat Valley Tech, that’s all working out well. Unfortunately Goshen beating Oakwood means that Milford will finish the season in second place. At least they close the season on a win.
And that closes the football-season story. The 13th of December started the basketball-season story. Girls basketball player, and swiftly-named team captain, Hollis Talley is going to the US Air Force Academy. And, on the boys team, Pranit Smith is doing great in his fantasy-football picks. He’s a mediocre player, but in a tight game Coach Thorp spots where passing the ball to Smith can let him get a three-pointer that wins the match. It sets him on a string of great performances. Since this is early in the season, this has to set some terrible comeuppance in motion.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 24th of January, 2022. Since there’s no ties in college football, this indicates Smith was betting on professional football. If we were to foolishly try to tie this to current events, then this has to be the week of November 14, when the Lions and Steelers tied. Anyway, since it is true that every team in football pushes, wouldn’t it be a better name for the sport if we called it “pushball”? Let’s just see what happens if we try.
Using his elder brother’s name, Smith opens an actual betting for-cash account. And, worse, it starts out great. Some other kids start giving money to him to put down bets. So everybody else waits for the incredible obvious disaster even people in adjacent comic strips sees coming. Even Coach Gil Thorp Assistant Coach Kaz, who only gets to overhear the players’ nonsense, notices he’s paying attention to his phone rather than the game he’s playing.
Meanwhile on the girls team, the season’s starting pretty rough. Talley feels she should be doing something captain-y to turn things around. But she doesn’t know what. Ask people to do extra practices? Coach Mimi Thorp is also frustrated but hasn’t got an answer. Talley is able to coax some of it out of Cressa Baxter: her knee hurts, but she’s not willing to spend her last season benched. The doctor’s supposed to drain it in a few days so that problem may fix itself.
And one last bit. Gordon Achebe, who I think was on the football team, joined the basketball team. I don’t know the significance of this. (I don’t seem to have mentioned him before, around here.) That it was established suggests he might be being set up for something.
Milford Sports Watch!
Who’s Milford playing? What schools get mentioned in the strip? There’ve been a lot the past couple months, as the strip showed a lot of games being played and a lot of talking about conference rivals. Here’s, to the best of my knowledge, the full list. Also mentioned, as schools that seniors were graduating to, were McGill University and the Air Force Academy.
You might remember “Blowtop Mad” Chance Macy from the 2019 football story in Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp. Macy’s a senior now. He’s not much for hanging out, not much anyway. He’s also not one for talking with the local sports reporters. Colleges are trying to recruit him. He’s not answering the phone, e-mail, or physical mail, which, mood. A recruiter from Milford State University comes to ask what his deal is. What he’s thinking is he doesn’t know he wants all this.
I didn’t know the athletes at my high school, so I can’t say how authentic this is. But there is a recurring Gil Thorp motif of pretty good athletes figuring they don’t want to keep doing this. It feels mature, but that might be because I suspect I wouldn’t want to have to go on playing any sports. It intrigues me the strip has its characters feel such ambiguity about the sports they work that hard at.
This should get you caught up to mid-November 2021 in Gil Thorp. If you’re reading this after about February 2022, or any news about the strip breaks, there’s likely a more useful essay at this link.
And my A-to-Z project, on my mathematics blog, continues. Last week I tried to explain Analysis, which is one of the big things of mathematics. I left some stuff out. You might enjoy it.
From the 30th of August the autumn, and current, storyline started. One key figure is Kianna Bello, a bit overcommitted to girls volleyball and the gymnastics team. Another is Boyd Spiller, on the boys football team, who’s discovered this thing called consciousness and wants to see it raised. He has a glorious scene trying to turn the annual Bonfire into a visualization of the cosmic All that happens to include beating Oakwood. They beat Oakwood anyway.
They also beat Kettering, although it’s a closer thing than Oakwood. Tevin Claxton fumbles and Spiller asks if he wants to do something about his choking problem. After Claxton misses a pass in the Goshen game he hears what Spiller has to offer. It’s hypnosis. Which Spiller totally knows how to do because he learned it on YouTube. I adore this, and I wish also to thank whatever junior high teacher assigned him a book report on Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 22nd of October, 2021. And yes, this is all a bit silly. But a lot of sports psychology is silly. For example: if you have a little superstitious ritual going in to some competition? You actually do play better, even if you’re not superstitious and you’re just doing it because you heard it helps you play better. People, you know?
Thing is, it seems to work, with Claxton putting in clutch performances the next couple games. More people start coming to Spiller for hypnotherapy. Including, finally, Kianna Bello. The strip’s cut back to her and her overloaded schedule several times. Her frustration at taking only third in a tournament; she’d been second the year before. Her barely getting enough rest, and keeping going on caffeine and competitiveness. She thinks Spiller’s hypnosis might be a way to push through her fatigue.
But she doesn’t feel better-rested. And she takes a bad landing at the district meet, spraining her foot and putting her out of competition for two weeks. She can not believe what an idiot she’s been. And (we learn this week) Claxton has had enough, and has secrets to reveal.
Milford Sports Watch!
Who’s Milford been playing? These schools, back around these dates:
The Summer story in Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp turned, in part, on what school a “BSU” jacket belonged to. The school colors therefore mattered. Gil Thorp has started running, in GoComics, in color. But, as is common for weekday comics, the colorizing gets done without checking the writers for guidance. I do not know why the colorizers of daily strips don’t get guidance from the original cartoonists. I understand if the cartoonists do not wish to do the extra work of picking out colors if they’re not paid for it. It makes every day as much work as a Sunday strip.
But the practice keeps screwing things up. Here, at least, it’s an innocent screw-up. The BSU jacket colors were not mentioned in text until several weeks after the jacket’s appearance. Whoever put color in had no direction. And that’s the sad usual for colorized dailies.
Karenna saw no point going to college. She’s got an appalling record. All the athletic scholarships she could apply for are long gone. And her mother is too depressed to function without her. Still, Mimi Thorp hates to see a talented, bright, determined kid just peter out. She pokes around her contacts and alumni and finds a setup. Karenna moves to Syracuse, takes community college classes to get her credentials in order. Transfer to Le Moyne College, where there’s volleyball scholarship money and roommates to be had.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 23rd of June, 2021. There’s story detail lost in my compression. An important one is Mimi Thorp talking with Corina Karenna’s mother. And her mother talking about how she feels her daughter’s protecting her more than she actually needs. So the later assertion that Karenna’s mother did “a lot of the work” in setting this up has some textual basis. And it at least addresses the question of whether Karenna’s mother can function without her daughter. Anyway, I still don’t see how you could tell someone needs a roommate in two years.
And … Karenna’s mother? She, Thorp says, did a lot of the work putting this together. And believes she can keep herself together while her daughter’s at school. One likes her optimism, but I admit seeing many failure modes.
Meanwhile, the vacancy on the Library Board. The Board loves it. It’s drawn them, like, attention. It helps they have two candidates. One is young Zane Clark whose family depends on the library’s public good. The other is cranky middle-aged Abel Brito who doesn’t see why the public should be paying for good. And the juicy part is that Zane’s dating Katy Brito. So Zane’s and Abel’s every interaction is a good rousing fight.
The Library Board plays it for what it’s worth, with a public debate and everything. Zane pushing ideas of ways the library could do more. Abel pushing ways that the library could run like a business, unaware that almost every business is appallingly run. Only one person can get the seat, though, and either way will hurt Katy. Coach Thorp pushes his way into the action for some reason.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 14th of June, 2021. And having re-read the story a couple times to summarize it, no, I still don’t understand why Gil Thorp considers this worth his attention. I guess it’s nice to relieve some stress from Zane Clark and Katy Brito’s lives? Which, I guess, if he’s a nice guy should be enough motivation, but I really would have thought “didn’t get to be on the Milford Library Board” the sort of thing someone bounces back from. Also nervous about talking up “life in a meritocracy”, since what that means is “we made up charts so our racism looks like test scores”.
What he does is nudge Rollie Conlan, 29-year veteran of the Library Board, into retiring. The argument being they need both Zane Clark’s ideas about providing public services and Abel Brito’s ideas about making money. So, two vacancies, two candidates, and all is happy. Apart from family dinners that now argue about whether the library should be providing a service or something.
With that, the 10th of July, the Spring story ended. The Summer story began the 12th of July and it looks to wrap up this week or next. This was a hard one to parse, as Rubin and Whigham played coy about what the conflict even was. And there were two threads that didn’t seem to have anything to do with one another, not until the end. I can’t fault them for verisimilitude. Often in life we have no idea we’re in a story until it’s ending. But as art? It meant we had weeks that seemed to be watching people deploy golf terminology.
So here’s the golf thread. Carter Hendricks is in his second summer as part of the Milford Country Club. And he’s a popular guy. Does well, as a “humble industrial solvents salesman”, playing games for money. Oh, he blows the occasional shot, sure, but somehow he’s always got what he needs when it counts. Almost suspiciously so. Like, when he happens to play a cheap golf ball instead of his usual.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 4th of August, 2021. A pivotal moment: if they’d gone golfing two hours earlier Hendry’s scam might have gone unproven. Also a good example of the frustrations in reading Gil Thorp. The first two panels are dropping plot points, and the third is setting up the important reveal of Hendry’s Bemidji Statue University jacket. Read the whole month, or even the whole week, and it makes sense. Read just the day’s strip and there’s no guessing what’s happening. I don’t have a good solution to this.
Enter someone who can be suspicious, besides Gil Thorp. Heather Burns, who’d been star of the summer storyline in 2017, is back from college. University of Iowa. Thorp’s able to get her a spot as assistant coach for Milford Football, which pays in glory. She wants to be a reporter, because she doesn’t know where money comes from. It comes from selling coffee in the library’s former periodicals alcove.
She puts together Thorp’s doubts with Hendricks’s green-and-white “BSU” rain jacket that he got from somewhere. He’s in fact Carson Hendry, who won two conference golf championships for Bemidji State University, in Minnesota. Had a minor career as a pro. Also had a six-month jail term for stealing clients’ money. He is, in short, hustling the club members.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 19th of August, 2021. I admit I’m not clear what charges the golf club could press. I guess faking your handicap while betting on games is some kind of fraud but does it rise to a prosecutable offense? The characters admit that’s all a bluff, but I’d expect a good hustler to be sure of what he can get away with claiming without provably breaking a law. But it could be Hendry isn’t all that good a hustler, too.
They kick him out, demanding he repay his winnings, which they know he’ll never do. Meanwhile, at the Milford Star, sportswriter Marjie Ducey sees good reporting talent, albeit in the service of a non-story. Hendry isn’t a public figure, at least not public enough, unless the country club presses charges, which they don’t see any good reason to do. Editor Dale Parry agrees this shows Burns to have good instincts and abilities. But he’s already offered their job to someone with two years’ reporting experience.
And that is about where we land. It’s again a point for Rubin and Whigham’s verisimilitude that Burns’s good work doesn’t get rewarded with the job she wants and needs. Sometimes things suck and you have to muddle along with what’s all right in the circumstances. But the story isn’t quite over yet, and as you can see, sometimes Coach Thorp figures a back door into solutions.
Milford Sports Watch!
Who’s Milford been playing, at least until the summer break caught up ? These teams have turned up in past months.
Bemidji State University (5, 6, 16 August.) Also a reference in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode Red Zone Cuba that’s now about something I specifically kind-of understand. (“They’re over the Cuba-Bemidji border.”)
Boise State University (16 August.) A guess about the BSU jacket.
Next Week!
It’s been months since Randy Parker disappeared from Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker! And weeks since the bed-and-breakfast burned down! And we haven’t been seeing Norton any! Is there anything left in the comic strip? We’ll check in soon, if all goes well.
Beats me! There’s a couple different feeds for Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp and one of them offers colorized pictures. GoComics.com, where I read the strip, has, like, always used the black-and-white feed. But then in March it started, sometimes, switching to the color feed for a week or two. And then switching back to black-and-white. If I ever hear an explanation why I’ll pass it on. I do find the color version of the strip easier to read, making me wonder how Rod Whigham plans out the comics.
The other girls basketball players decide Doucette needs to know she’ll never date him and why. She says it’s because he drives this “grandpa van”. The other players take her at her word. I’d wonder if Milton was offering a less-bad excuse than that she doesn’t want to date someone handicapped like Doucette is. His car is a 2004 GMC Something, modified so that he can drive it on days his cerebral palsy is particularly bad.
So they tell him. She won’t date him, because of his car. “And because she’s vapid and shallow”. Doucette says he can stop working on his prom-posal, then, a statement they take at face value. I’m not sure he wasn’t being wry. Doucette’s friend Doug Guthrie (they bonded over car stuff) tries consoling by the weird tack of asking why he was interested in Milton at all. Doucette liked how she was cute and seemed interested in him, and asks if that isn’t shallow. Which … like, all right, but you don’t need deep reasons to go see a movie with someone. It could be Guthrie’s bad at sympathy. But Guthrie does know that revenge is a dish best served in a cryptic, confusing way.
Guthrie gets the team to take some photos. At the photo session, after the team gets knocked out of the first round of playdowns? Why, Doucette pulls up behind the wheels of a 1966 Pontiac Something, which I’m told is a cool car to have. He waves to Milton and then tears off.
He’s physically able to do this because Doug Guthrie crouches under the seat, working the pedals. (It’s Guthrie’s car; he and his father restored it.) And that sure showed her … uh … I’m not sure I can tell you. It has the shape of revenge, but I can’t imagine Milton feeling humiliated by this. But I also can’t read Doucette as being too traumatized by someone who flirted with him not being willing to date. Disappointed, sure, but … ? Eh, what do I understand of high school drama?
With that, the 27th of March, the Vic Doucette and girls-basketball storyline ended. The current one began the 29th of March, with one of the Milford Library Board resigning. Family’s moving to Denver. Also with senior Zane Clark rejoining the boys softball team. Things are “looking up” at home, in that he thinks he can make the time to be on the ball team. His father’s disabled, and his mother can only work part-time. So Zane Clark’s working, like, to midnight most nights. I am not sure what Zane thinks is “looking up”. But he’s also the vice-president of the senior class. So he seems to be one of those people who needs to do everything. He might even see his girlfriend Katy Brito again.
Meanwhile, Brito’s family Internet is out. This sends her father, grumbling, to the library to get some work done. There, Abel Brito discovers the library has computers that aren’t even being used. And a librarian who’s just, like, standing there answering questions that better signage could handle. He comes home fuming about the waste of taxpayer money.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 23rd of April, 2021. “And another thing! The library had lights on over stacks that nobody was even in! And don’t get me started on how much money they’re throwing down the toilet with bathrooms on both floors of the building!”
He’s still fuming weeks later, after Zane Clark’s first and ultimately successful spell as relief pitcher, when he comes for a family dinner. Clark takes Abel’s attack on the library having computers personally. He depends on them, after all, and knows other people do, and that the library does not always have more than it needs. And storms out. It plays a bit abrupt, but we have to allow some narrative compression. I suppose also that they must have met before. The story introduces Clark and Katy Brito as an established couple. And Abel Brito must have been like this before. You don’t wake up one day the sort of person who fumes about the city spending money on the library. You get there by making a long series of wrong choices about your politics.
Mrs Brito says if Abel is so worked up about the library why doesn’t he join its board. And since it would be a terrible idea for him to take this advice, he takes this advice. When Clark learns there aren’t any other candidates, he decides to take responsibility and applies. Partly to kick back at Abel Brito, yes. Partly also because Corinna Karenna has pointed out his need to focus instead of bouncing around things. She meant about his pitching, which flutters between lousy and awesome. But when you give someone advice there’s no controlling how they’re going to use it.
So things look to be exciting for Katy Brito, who knew nothing about Clark’s plans until after they were made. So she’s angry at him, even though he declares he can’t see what he was wrong about.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 27th of May, 2021. I don’t know why every time we cut away to Gil and Mimi Thorp they’re cooking but I guess that’s a normal thing to do. Me, I grew up in a family with the rule that if one person was cooking everyone else cleared out except to fetch things as directed.
Meanwhile there’s a story going about Corina Karenna. She’s been delivering blunt and perceptive advice to the Milford kids. Coach Mimi Thorp also notes she’s a skilled athlete. Has she considered applying for athletic scholarships to college? Karenna has. But her mother’s too depressed to function if she were to go to college. And anyway, all the deadlines are long past. I don’t know whether the Thorps are going to find some way around that. Sometimes the comic strip admits that things suck and there’s only bits one can do about that. We’ll have to wait and see what develops.
Milford Sports Watch!
Who does Milford play? Who do they just talk about playing? Here’s teams that showed up in the strip the last couple months.
Finally! It’s been over a half-year since we saw a bit of this cartoon. It was among those featured in the deeply baffling Popeye’s Testimonial Dinner. Now, we get to appreciate how much it did not fit that clip cartoon.
This is, as with the earlier cartoon, a Jack Kinney production. Kinney’s also credited with the story, such as there is. Animation direction is credited to our old friends Volus Jones and Ed Friedman. And now from 1960, take in a Golf Brawl.
As said in the prologue, Jack Kinney’s credited with the story, such as it is. The catch is there isn’t much story. There’s a string of golf jokes at the Meatball Meadows Championship Golf Tournament “to-day”. Popeye, Brutus, Olive Oyl, and Wimpy start as a quartet but go mostly into their own separate threads. The exception is that Popeye and Brutus do taunt one another, most often with the chant to “play the ball where it lies”, one of many repeated refrains. The cartoon flits between these and there’s not much development.
This isn’t to fault the cartoon for not having a plot or story or such. It’s an observation. There is an almost hypnotic pace to the cartoon. This especially with bits like coming back to Olive Oyl hitting the ball only to have it loop around the rim of the hole and come back to her. Or Wimpy counting up from “fore” to “five” to “six” all the way to at “one hundred and twenty-four” without hitting the ball. I can’t even call it antihumor, since it’s clear what’s supposed to be funny about this. It’s closer to that Sideshow-Bob-and-the-Rake thing of repeating a mildly funny joke to an extreme.
I mean, I’d even take a two-stroke penalty instead.
Popeye and Brutus have the thread nearest to a story here, as they keep getting into terrible lies and carry on. At one point Brutus hits a ball wild, and it bounces off several trees before klonking Popeye. This bit got used as a clip in Popeye’s Testimonial Dinner and there’s no way to see it as Brutus’s perfidy here. Eventually Brutus ends up stuck in a water hazard, and Popeye’s bad drives dig a tunnel out underneath, releasing the water in a tiny cataclysm. Somehow that isn’t the end of their thread. Nor is Brutus accidentally swallowing Popeye’s ball.
Olive Oyl finally putts her ball into the hole. This earns her the Popeye-the-Sailor-Man musical flourish. It earns her thread the only real resolution of anything this cartoon. Otherwise, given this group’s ability? There’s no reason the cartoon couldn’t carry on forever, drifting between strange failures to play golf.
It won’t be everyone’s taste, but if it is yours, it’s really yours. In any case it doesn’t match the clip show use at all.
It’s a rare appearance of Olive Oyl’s niece Deezil Oyl! Deezil first appeared in the 1960s shorts and I’m not sure if she’s been promoted to the “real” comic strip. She got to be in the Popeye’s Cartoon Club feature that ran for a year, but that’s noncanonical.
Deezil’s not here for a deeper exploration of her character. She’s here because if Swee’Pea were throwing baseballs through the window on his own, he’d be a jerk. Instead they can just be kids playing. Popeye steps in to show the kids how to play properly, and Brutus interferes because he’s Brutus. The resulting cartoon is a weird one. The story feels developed well enough. But there’s also a lot of dead air between things happening. Maybe Jack Kinney was leaving space for the kids to finish laughing. I don’t think of other Kinney-produced cartoons having quite so much space between events, though.
I’ve been trying to figure what feels off about Popeye’s and Brutus’s dialogue. It feels, to me, written to be a bunch of wordplay jokes, whether or not they make sense. Like, consider the exchange where Brutus declares “I can do better’n that!”. Popeye answers, “Ya can’t, cause you’re a bully!” Brutus answers, “Bully for you too!” There’s no logic there, but I can absolutely imagine being seven and delighted by the shifting uses of “bully”. Brutus and Popeye then get into a back-and-forth of “Can!” “Can’t!” and I go back-and-forth on that myself. On one watching of this cartoon it struck me as what writers put in when they want a fight but haven’t got anything to fight about. On another watching, the rhythm and pointlessness of it was funny. So I’ll suppose Jack Kinney knew what he was doing and did it.
Popeye playing jacks on the lawn implies he’s either really confident about his ball-bouncing skills or he has no idea what he’s doing.
A slightly odd moment is Popeye declaring, “Kids, this is the wrong way, but I gots to teach him a lesson” before eating his spinach. Popeye’s always held up spinach as a good thing everyone should eat more of. With that setup, though, it plays into treating spinach as an illicit advantage. I suppose that attitude was in the air. In the 60s we’d still get Underdog having his Proton Energy Pills and SuperChicken havin his super-sauce. But we’d be taking that sort of power-up out of children’s entertainment soon enough.
An unreservedly good bit here: Brutus declaring to the camera, “Gee! I didn’t count on this!” after Popeye eats his spinach. It’s the sort of absurd, facetious touch that I liked as a kid and still like today.
The kid, Vic Doucette, was going on about the 90s Pistons because he researched them. He researched them because Coach Gil Thorp referenced them and he wanted to do his job as game announcer well. Not that anything about the Pistons is likely to come up in a Milford basketball game. But a marker of excellence in a field is enthusiasm for its trivia. Doucette’s decided he wants to be an announcer and he is throwing himself wholeheartedly into the role.
It happens that last time I checked in was the week the story wrapped up. I often feel like these recaps happen suspiciously close to a new story’s start. That’s an illusion created by “close” feeling like “within two weeks, give or take” and that covers, like, a third of my cycle. Still, the new and current story started the 14th of December, neat as I would hope.
We start basketball season. First major player: Vic Doucette. He’s not an athlete, owing to cerebral palsy. He asks Coach Gil Thorp to be the announcer for boys’ basketball games. Thorp is impressed with Doucette’s knowledge of basketball trivia and also his existence as a living body willing to do this job.
Next major player: Shooting guard Doug Guthrie. He has a 1966 Pontiac GTO, which I am informed is an impressive car to have. He’d found and rebuilt it with his dad. And he keeps ducking out for thinks like go-kart races in Florida. Like, real kart racing at 70 mph and so on.
Third major player: Tessi Milton, forward for the girls’ basketball team. And teammate to Corina Karenna, who’s transferred over from volleyball. The girls’ team feels disrespected, relative to the boys’ team. She comes into significance later in the proceedings.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 6th of January, 2021. To get a handle on Doucette’s character: we see him working on these nicknames before the game starts, including things like asking Tessi Milton if “Tessi” is short for anything, so that he can look more spontaneous. That’s a level of professionalism I hope to someday achieve.
Doucette got the job of announcer because he was willing. It turns out he’s eager, though. Enthusiastic even. He works out catchy nicknames for everyone, he rallies the crowd, he shows open and unbridled delight in a high school thing. He goes to away games — where he’s not an announcer — to take notes about the team. He follows Gil Thorp’s mention of the 90s Pistons to study how Ken Calvert announced players, and pick up moves from that work. In short, he shows unbridled interest in a thing. In high school. Vic Doucette is braver than the troops.
At a postgame dinner at The Bucket, Guthrie talks about Doucette’s car. It’s a modified 2004 GMC Safari. The modifications are to help Doucette when he’s having a harder day. They bond over the car talk, though, Guthrie asking about the MV-1, identified as “the first van designed for wheelchairs from the start”. So you know how deep the car thing interests Guthrie.
The girls’ basketball team, meanwhile, wants for attention. Tessi Milton figures to get Vic Doucette to announce their games, too. It’s not a bad plan. In boys’ basketball he’s advanced to running in-game givewaways and stuff that plays well with the crowd. (He’s giving away the hot dog and soda that are his “pay” for announcing. I mention because the strip made a point of mentioning it. I appreciate the craft of that. You can fault Gil Thorp for many things, but it does justify most everything that appears on screen. It may be the story strip that most improves on rereading twelve weeks’ worth at a go.) Fun enough that Guthrie even skips a car-racing thing to play. Doucette even has some decent sports-psychology, talking Guthrie out of the funk of a lousy game.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 4th of February, 2021. I don’t know whether we’re to take that last panel as Doucette smoking or just that the air is cold. I suspect the latter, on grounds of dramatic economy: if we were supposed to think Doucette smoked, some panel would make that unambiguous.
So Milton asks Doucette to announce their games. He’s not sure. He needs time to study, after all, and see his friends and do stuff that isn’t basketball announcing. Also, I notice, he uses a crutch reliably from mid-January on; he hadn’t needed one earlier. This may be a signal that he’s getting worse.
He decides to announce girls basketball games, though, saying, “studying is overrated, right?” And he brings the same level of research and hard work to this that he did the boys games. It goes well, and Milton’s grateful, to the point everyone tells Doucette that she’s flirting with him. So he asks her out and she “can’t this weekend”.
Guthrie, with Tom Muench, are late to a practice. They’re pulled over by a traffic cop, who recognizes that they’re popular white athletes and lets them off with a little car talk. But, running laps at practice, Muench sprains his knee and is out for a couple games. And this throws Guthrie way off his game.
Doucette notices all this, and tries to sort out Guthrie’s problem. He observes how Guthrie’s interested in someday driving racecars at 200 mph; it’s hard to do that when you’re worried about running laps. And this bit seems to help.
After a girls basketball game, Tessi Milton dodges Doucette, whom she points out to her teammates has asked her out twice now. Her teammates point out she was flirting with him. Which she owns up to, yes, but they needed an announcer. And while he’s “a nice guy,” well, “would you go out in that grandpa van?” Which does support Karenna’s earlier assessment that Milton is a deeply shallow person. To be empathetic, though, Milton is in a lousy place herself. Suppose you’ve agreed the team needs Doucette to announce their games; what tools do you have to get him to do it? There’s no pay available, and no glory either. What option does she have but flattery? And — I write before seeing Monday or Tuesday’s strips so may be setting myself up to be a fool — faulting Doucette’s car is less bad than sneering at the idea of dating someone with cerebral palsy.
And that’s the standings as of mid-March. It does feel like Milton’s being set up for some comeuppance. But the story might resolve to something as simple as hurting a guy who’s been quite giving. It does feel to me significant that Doucette’s repeated his worry he’s ignoring friends and school for all this announcing work, though. Also that he’s seen using the crutches more than he was early in the story. Maybe not significant is Guthrie mentioning how his dad teaches driving to the area cops, part of why he and Muench were let off with small talk. I’m not making detailed predictions, though.
Milford Schools Watch
Who’s Milford playing? The past couple months, these teams. If you want the win-loss record, oh, I don’t feel up to tracking that. You have your fun.
In the game against Ballard, backup quarterback Terry Rapson gets put in, with directions to run the clock out. Rapson decides to run more aggressively, getting a touchdown and securing the game win. But also giving away a play that Thorp was keeping in reserve for a more important game. Now any opponent can prepare for it. This has to count as a failure of Thorp’s coaching. Granted teenagers are going to make dumb mistakes. But you can’t expect people to follow what seem like bad directions — here, to refrain from taking scoring chances — without reason. They have to know the point of this all.
Anyway, Rapson and Thayer compete to be the lead quarterback. Also to get the interest of Karenna, who can’t think of a reason to care. Rapson and Thayer are pretty well-matched in both contests. And get increasingly angry with each other. Rapson particularly when Thayer loses the game against Madison (for which Rapson was benched).
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 20th of November, 2020. The story switches to Karenna dealing with Rapson and Thayer’s nonsense. So we don’t get to see what Marty Moon makes of what is, yeah, a ridiculous loss of control on Coach Thorp’s part. This is a shame since we don’t get to see Marty Moon falling on his face with this story too, somehow.
Rapson finally takes Karenna’s hints, and goes to a girls volleyball game. He also gets a bunch of friends to go with him. They don’t understand the game, but are putting in the effort, and Karenna consents to go to a football game. The teams start going to one another’s games and that would be great. Except that the football team divides between Rapson and Thayer for first-string quarterback. (And a couple kids who don’t see why they need to have an opinion on this.) They won’t even sit together in the stands.
Gil Thorp learns about this, and tells Rapson and Thayer to knock it off. Rapson and Thayer figure the other went to the coach so he would make their rival knock it off, so the team remains divided. It gets bad enough that teammates fight on the sidelines at a win.
Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 30th of November, 2020. Oh, jeez. Karenna, I hate to dash your optimism, but, speaking as a recovered teenage boy, oh gads no. We are not nearly as bright as you think, and I’m sorry, but we aren’t going to be before about age 28 or so. You and all society would be better off if you stopped giving us attention, or driver’s licenses, or sharp or blunt objects, until this changes.
So Karenna steps in. She invites Rapson and Thayer to her place to fight it out. She explains the problem with the authority of a teenager who’s had to be the functional adult for years. (Her parents divorced. Her mother’s been too depressed to parent.) They’re being selfish, they’re screwing up the team, and they’re not making themselves attractive to her. So what are you going to do? They agree they’ve, at least, had a weird night at Karenna’s place.
Karenna tells the Thorps she’s solved the quarterback problem. Coach Thorp figures he has, too: playing emergency quarterback Leonard Fleming. It works for the first game. At Valley Tech, it’s a bit tougher, and Fleming gets injured. Thorp tells Thayer to step in. But Thayer bows: he’s aware Rapson is reading the defense, should play instead. So, Rapson plays, and the season ends on a win. The girls volleyball players try to congratulate him. He credits Karenna as the most valuable player. She does a shrugging rah.
And that’s where things stand for the middle of December, 2020.
Milford Schools Watch
It’s a bunch of familiar teams that Milford’s played, in football and girls volleyball, the last three months. The dates are from the starts or first mentions of a rival school in the storyline; several of the games went on for a week-plus.
Did Toni Bowen win the mayoral race? Is Sophie Spencer going to go to Local College? Is Ronnie Huerta still in the comic strip? And what storylines have gone totally bonkers? You already know if you’ve reading Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker. Or you can wait a week and catch my Judge Parker recap here. Thanks for reading.
I don’t mean to suggest we don’t have bigger problems. Also I agree we have smaller problems. The medium-size problem I’m looking at here is: do we have enough seasons? I mean in the year. I mean weather seasons. I know we’ve got all sorts of sports seasons, like baseball and football and preseason baseball and basketball and postseason baseball and hockey playoffs. I mean seasons like spring and summer and stuff. We’ve got four of them, and been trusting that to cover the whole year, and I’m just asking if that’s enough to cover the year as we’ve got it these days.
Take spring, for example. We know it as a time for spring cleaning, which we get around to once we’ve run out of other things to do in spring. And yet for all that cleaning, we never get around to anything else with spring. We never set aside a season for spring curating, for setting our springs out in a thoughtful manner that lets us appreciate them. Or just see their development. Maybe come to understand how new spring technologies have come and changed the way things spring. This paragraph belongs in a different essay written on the same starting point, and doesn’t fit the mood of the one I’m writing at all. But I like it as it is, and so I’m sticking with it. You can go ahead and imagine the essay that goes off in this paragraph’s direction.
The big old blocky names for seasons works fine for some period during them. But when they get a little changing the categories break down. Like, right now we in lower Michigan are in early autumn, or fall, depending on whether you’re east of US 127. That is, we’re in the time of year where it’s autumn, or fall, between 9 pm and 10 am every day, but then it’s summer between 10 am and 2 pm, and again from 5 to 7 pm. Between 7 and 9 pm it’s free pick, the days alternately sunny or ice-monsoon. There is no weather between 3 and 5 pm, as that’s too late in the day to finish anything before rush hour.
The period lasts a while and it’s not fair to call that ‘autumn’ because so much of it is not. All it really has to call it autumn is that we buy more cider than we’ll have time to drink. It’s not like late October, which is some of the most autumn-nest weather you’ll find. That’s when the sun emerging from the clouds somehow makes your skin feel colder. We handle that by around the 24th of October putting the sun behind a cloud, from which it doesn’t emerge until March. Which is another seasonally-elusive time of year, when the cloud-covered sky feels warm on your face, but touching the ground causes a sleeve of ice to run up your boots and cover your legs.
Granting these kinds of periods have enough identity we need to give them names, what names? The early one in the year seems easy enough, since we could go with ‘sprinter’ or ‘wing’, depending on what fits the sentence. The one this time of year is tougher to make the syllables match. ‘Sumtumn’ sounds like the year is a fat baby we’re teasing, and maybe some years are like that but I’m through with teasing 2020 for anything ever.
And I know giving these parts of the year names are going to inspire other problems. Like, there’ll be a part of the year that’s not really summer yet but still not sumtumn. What do we call that, summer-sumtumn? Keep this up and we’re going to end up with seasons given names like summer-sumtumn-summer by half-winter, or something. I didn’t mean ‘something’ as a season name, but maybe that’s where we’ll end up.
You know maybe I should have written that other essay instead, the one where I come up with like four zany seasons of doing mildly quirky behavior. Too late to rewrite it now. All I can do is think back about it during the season of regrets, which is all of them.
![Marty Moon, narrating: 'Pedro Martinez needs to pass or stop the clock!' [ He's tackled, and there's a snap from his knee. ] Moon: 'Pedro is not getting up from that one.' Luke Martinez, shouting: 'Mijo! I'm coming for you!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/11/gil-thorp_2023-11november-18_henry-barajas-rod-whigham.jpg)
![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)
![Marty Moon, on the 1987 videotape: 'What was going through your mind on that last play?' Martinez, on tape: 'Execute. Milford gave it their all. But I hope Coach Thorp knows one thing. [ winking at the camera ] ... I'm coming for your spot, Thorp.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/gil-thorp_henry-barajas-rod-whigham_2022-11november-30.jpg)
![Tays, in flashback: 'Why? I don't need to give [ my mother ] a reason to give me a matching [ black eye ]'. Thorp, in flashback: 'I ain't no snitch.' Tays snickers. Thorp continues: 'My pa was a drinker. He did't know how to communicate any way but with his fists and the belt. But those fellas out thre? You need them as much as they need you. So, let's not send them to the ER?' Tays: 'Heh. Fo sho, Coach.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2022/09/gil-thorp_henry-barajas-rod-whigham_2022-07july-16.jpg)
![[ Paying a visit to Gregg Hamm's eye specialist ... ] Dr Maisano: 'Trust me, Coach. I'm more irate than you. He's taken so many eye tests, he figured out how to fake his way through one.' Thorp: 'And now that you've re-tested, Doctor?' Maisano: 'Let's go talk behind his back.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2022/07/gil-thorp_2022-05may-25_neal-rubin-rod-whigham.jpg)
![[ After Gregg Hamm whistles a fastball four feet outside ... ] Umpire: 'Your pitcher is a menace. Take him out.' Thorp; 'You're ejecting him because he threw ball one?' Umpire: 'I'm not tossing him. But he can't see.' Thorp: 'He just fielded a batted ball. He hasn't even hit anyone. And no rule says you can make me pull him!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2022/07/gil-thorp_2022-06june-10_neal-rubin-rod-whigham.jpg)
![Thompkins: 'So, Wilson is on board?' Borden: 'As long as Gregg doesn't hurt himself, or the team.' [ Cooley at Milford, and ... ] Borden, at second: 'C'mon, guys! Let's make some noise out there!' (The catcher signals) Borden: 'No stick, 32. Rock and fire!' Gregg Hamm, thinking: 'OK ... fastball it is!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2022/04/gil-thorp_neal-rubin-rod-whigham_2022-04april-22.gif)
![[ The normally reticent Chance Macy takes the pulpit ... ] Kid 'Dude, can you speak up?' Macy: 'Probably not. But here's Tevin, our quarterback. He's been great --- but he had to deal with negative expectations, based on just four or five plays last year.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/gil-thorp_neal-rubin-rod-whigham_3-december-2021.jpg)
![[ The Traditional Pre-Season Bonfire ] Tevin Claxton: 'They handed me the microphone because I'm the quarterback - but meet the heart of our team, the offensive line!' Mimi Thorp, to Gil: 'Boyd Spiller and a microphone. Watch out.' Spiller: 'Okay, everyone. Let's close our eyes and *visualize* beating Oakwood.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2021/11/gil-thorp_neal-rubin-rod-whigham_16-september-2021.jpg)
![[ The hypnosis session continues - Boyd Spiller, presiding. ] Spiller, waving a flashlight in front of Claxton's eyes; 'Keep looking at the light. You live for tough situations, Tevin. Your breathing is steady. Your mind is clear. When the light goes off, up you go ... ' He clicks the light off.](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2021/11/gil-thorp_neal-rubin-rod-whigham_22-october-2021.jpg)
![[ A high difficulty Tsukhara vault, an off-balance landing --- ] Bello: 'Ugh!' The trainer examines: 'This isn't good.' Bello: 'You went to trainer school to know *that*?' on the phone: 'Oh no. I'm sorry, Kianna .. how long?'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2021/11/gil-thorp_neal-rubin-rod-whigham_12-november-2021.jpg)
![Thorp, golfing: 'Another big drive, Carter!' Hendricks: 'Blind pigs and acorns!' [ Two holes later, Hendricks watches a shot of his. ] Hendricks: 'Whoa --- where did that come from? And where the heck is it going?' [ Then, on hole #12 ] Heather Burns: 'Those clouds look ominous. Are they headed our way?'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/gil-thorp_neal-rubin-rod-whigham_4-august-2021.jpg)
![[ At the unofficial team photo ] A 1966 Pontiac GTO, licence plate 'MST3K', drives up in front of the girls basketball team. Vic Doucette waves from the driver's seat: 'Hey, Tessi! Looking good!' And then the car tears out of there.](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/gil-thorp_neal-rubin-rod-whigham_26-march-2021.gif)
![(At a family dinner) [ Abel Brito gets ramped up --- again --- about the library ] Abel: 'Seriously, why do they need all those computers?' Zach Clark: 'For people like me! We can't even pay for cable anymore, Mr Brito. We have three kids sharing one outdated PC.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/gil-thorp_neal-rubin-rod-whigham_23-april-2021.gif)
![[ Corina Karenna orchestrates a quarterback summit ] Rapson or Thayer (from inside the depicted house): 'Of course we want to win football games!' Karenna: 'Great. now explain how undercutting each other helps. ... No answers? Excellent. Maybe you're brighter than I thought.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/gil-thorp_neal-rubin-rod-whigham_30-november-2020.gif)
Another Blog, Meanwhile 