Gil Thorp by Henry Barajas and Rachel Merrill for January 17, 2024

P1: The crowd cheers as Johnny Carson’s original bandleader is in the stands.

Avoid orange roughy! It’s a very long lived fish with high levels of mercury.

P2: Crowd asking for the post-game 80’s band.

P3: Crowd chants for Yogi’s pal to make an appearance.

Ref places his post-game seafood order.

Grah! Bruh!

Hey, Boo Boo!

Skish, skish, I was taking a bath.

This strip is firmly in the pocket of Big Onomatopoiea. How much are they paying you?!?

P2: Looks more like spearing a skish kabab than roughie.

Denver’s Orange Crush?

“No roughing! Sing ’I’m A Little Tea Pot’ instead!”

P3: Burt Reynolds makes a cameo appearance as the ref. FWEET!

Where did Orangeman’s hockey stick go to in P2?

Amid these budget cuts, where do the dollars come from to fund girls and boys hockey? All this skishing around with no goal defined. What the fweet is going on?

Looks more like cross-checking to me.

Big orange brings in Draymond to make a statement.

So now we’re in hockey. And I think the crowd is booing because the plexiglas panels have been painted over and the spectators can’t see the action.

P1: It might help the skating if they actually froze the water on the rink. Budget cuts? P2: ®ESS- (Really!) Exploding something syndrome

The upcoming 2-minute power play may be resolved by next June. Or not at all.

Looks more like a Slashing penalty

The call should have been cross checking, but we have a Milford power play coming up nonetheless.

P-1: Today’s Sesame Street is brought to you by the sound of Ice Skates. Can you say: SKISH?

P-2: For some unknown reason, the Milford player responds in pain to a fist delivered to the hard, plastic Kidney guard in his Hockey Pants.

P-3: Yes, children, punching is bad.

P-4: A second penalty for un-sportsman like conduct to the Milford player for “acting”. We’re going to go 4 on 4. (Sounds like an old feature of a Muscle Car.)

He can make it up to his team while singing “Bah, Bah Black Sheep” in the penalty box so they’ll win.

Skish! Skish! Skish! Grah! Wham! Fweet! Boo. Boo. Now that’s writing!

wham bam thank you mam

you mean to tell me he forgot the name of the orange teams school

how can kid orange skate with his legs spread that far a part

more going on at the concession stand where you smell dorothy for a dollar a whiff

I guess they learned from their first game and decided to fully cover their limbs. And speaking of learning, by reading this you’re learning that today’s Mopped Up Thorp is online.

https://moppedupthorp.wordpress.Com/2024/01/17/everybodys-a-critic/

There’s a lot of characters in this strip that I’d rather see get hit hard with a hockey stick than this unnamed player too.

Milford wears a different helmet for away games? We don’t need no stinking budgets!

Misdirection. My everyday mantra.

Going for the back-to-back-to-back winning streak against the Orange Roughy’s from New Jersey.

So students assault a coach, and we’re not going to hear anymore about it?

P 2 (Kid in orange roughy jersey): “sing baa baa black sheep now, b****…”

Hockey again? Not one strip about the Milford Curling teams????

These drawings are priceless! “Orange”’s leg appears to have withered in panel 1, plus I’ve never seen anyone hold a hockey stick like that..I’ve also never seen short sleeve hockey jerseys, and don’t even get me started on the helmets!

I remember “Fun with Dick and Jane” where Ed McMahon plays an aeronautical engineering manager and complains that the business “stinks on ice”. He’d be complaining literally in today’s strip.

Chef’s Special of the Day — Orange Roughy.