GIL THORP's Sunday companion

One of the odder comic strips I've been following on The Comics Curmudgeon is GIL THORP. It's a remarkably goofy daily strip about the eponymous high-school coach, who resembles the post-plastic surgery Mickey Rourke and teaches life lessons as well as athletics to various impressionable teenagers who go through bizarre adventures. The supporting cast includes Thorp's family; assistant coaches like Kaz, who once bodyguarded a Carole King-like singer over a summer tour and had to figure out who was sending her poison-pen letters, and Clambake, an aged Negro sage who told aspiring pitchers inspiring stories about training legends which turned out to be made up; Marty Moon, the snide, goateed sportscaster who often gets made a fool of and has drinking and gambling problems to deal with. And of course there's the kids, like the guy who saved someone's life but let another kid take the credit because he was enough of a hero already; the guy who lost a leg in a chainsaw accident; the new kid trying to live down his manslaughter trial that resulted from careless wrestling; the guy who bopped himself on the back of the head with a thick branch and said he'd been mugged. The current story involves Andrew Gregory, an attitude-challenged hotshot basketball shooter who nicknamed himself "the A-Train." All this is accompanied by some of the most bizarre visual compositions in the current comic-strip scene.

It may or may not interest some of the current fans to know that GIL THORP was once a better strip, as regards both writing and artwork. That was back when it was drawn by its original artist, Jack Berrill. (I actually read it for a while in my college days, when I started looking at a wide range of newspapers in the university library and often checked out the funnies pages.) All of this is an indirect way of answering the question two or three people must be wondering: Why isn't there a GIL THORP Sunday? The answer is that while it's always been dailies and nothing but, back in the late '60s through the mid-'70s Berrill actually drew a teenage Sunday strip for the same syndicate: TEEN-WISE! (That exclamation point was part of the title, which usually suggests a writer trying too hard. Another example is Upton Sinclair's OIL!, the book THERE WILL BE BLOOD is based on.)

Anyhow, TEEN-WISE! is a Sunday strip showing adolescents in challenging everyday situations, to teach them good sense. (Teen--wise, geddit?) It featured an annoying little owl giving the moral at the end. This was an old-fashioned concept for the time, and it's good for a few cynical laughs today.




Yeah, right. In the real world, of course, it's the well-informed teenagers who feel like misfits. (Take it from me.)

Gil Thorp himself had a cameo in a few episodes.



Another thing you could do is move to another school, get onto that school's team, play dirty against your old school and beat the pants off them. (Of course, if the new school's team takes you, chances are they aren't as good.) Or else you could avoid being a jock to begin with.

Happily, we get some multi-episode high school soap opera stories.



What do you think will be the outcome here?



But there are also dangerous situations. (Nice girls don't hitchhike!)



And there's the 13-year-old girl who lies about her age to get an 18-year-old boyfriend. (It helps to be tall.)



He fobbed her off on his friend Roman.

Somewhere in my immense comic-strip collection, on the reverse of some superior strip, I have a couple of TEEN-WISE episodes about The Marijuana Menace, in which a couple of users decide to retaliate against a girl who's threatening to squeal on them by giving her a beating. (Still think it's harmless?)

"I can allus tell a man who's married a good housekeeper from the way he brightens up when I speak kindly to him"