Gil Thorp by Henry Barajas and Rachel Merrill for August 19, 2019

P1, A new star running back Gil has poached from another of his rivals?

P2, Did he just leave Tiki in the dust? Nice job, Hadley.

P3, A ray of hope that football starts before Halloween this year?

Yay, a swift change of direction!

For connoisseurs of such, there’s a nice eye explosion over in the “Fearless Fosdick” strip-within-a-strip over at the “Li’l Abner” reprint today, panel four. Also plewds, hites, emanata, and an instance of the multifunctional drooping tongue.

In all reality , Why does the would be tackler in P2 have a tire around his waist ?

I predict a lot of fumbles this year.

Okay, one more time. What a lousy lesson we learned this summer! It’s okay to cheat the system and Hadley and Mr. Ed are unethical lawyers after all. Well maybe we’ll seen them again around year 2034.

Truly a record setting pace, segueing to football pre season before the last few days of August. No Milford Lake panels. R & W must have an important lesson to share with Snark Nation by flipping to football so early. GilPa pulls Assistant Coach Matt Shaw from shower sanitizing duty for a cameo appearance.

They have never been able to replace True. Maybe it’s his turn to come back.

The plot twist in Gulliver’s Travels was a Swift change of direction

P-3: Hmmm, Ray Hope great grandson of Bob

more P-3: Gil describes his half back like you’d identify a horse. Ray of Hope, Turn Blue of Secretariat, Mr. Tibbs of Mr. Ed

Ray (The White) Hope is Gil’s latest recruit from Milford Correctional. He’s really 25, but HvB got him a waiver “because of the 8 years he lost.” He’s living with his ‘foster’ family at a half-way house.

P4-….followed by a runny, sporadic fart of despair. Anything to ease the tension of striving for 2nd place in The Valley.

P3: Gil is totally refreshed after a leisurely summer of golfin’, winin’, dinin’ and hangin’ by the pool with their oldest and dearest friends, HvB & JqC, and also havin’ HvB take care of silly little annoyances like Tiki’s incessant whinin’ & cryin’.

Never have truer words came out of this strip than those in panel three today. I don’t know if that was intentional or not but it sure sums up the closing of that last story line for the ‘regulars’ here.

Speaking of ‘regulars’. CJ did you see the ‘set up’ comment by a potential new ‘Whiz’?

This looks great, but it’s not likely that Milford’s opposition are going to only have one player on the defensive line.

…well, R & W owe ME a full season of gratuitous shower references seeing how they teased with the early Milford CC golf lesson, then nothing else! We never will know what flavor snow cone it was…

So the coaches are surprised that they have a talented running back. Which is not surprising, at least for Milford, the fact that they knew nothing of this kid. It’s not like they would have seen him playing JV. Unless it’s one of those rare occurrences where a new star moves into Milford or transfers into the school. Which only happens, well, every season. And speaking of happenings, you know good things are happening over at Mopped Up Thorp:

I’m sure this guy will have some personal baggage too. The knitting circle led by Andre Ruffin will be ready to help