Gil Thorp turns 65 this year on Sept. 8.
This may not come as a shock. To many of you, that name means nothing.
For thousands, Gil Thorp is but a crew cut memory, a relic of our bygone youth. And he remains a daily part of many lives, a comic strip character who appears in dozens of newspapers across the country, the coach at fictional Milford High School.
Gil Thorp means a great deal to a 34-year-old Latinx writer named Henry Barajas, who is the latest in a relatively short line of people who have, in words, given life to Thorp since he first leaped from the mind and pen of creator Jack Berrill in 1958, the writer and illustrator who gave his character a name that combined those of baseball player Gil Hodges and Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe, dropping the “e.”
“I feel very lucky,” Barajas told me by telephone from his home in Los Angeles. “I was asked to take on writing a year ago and I was thrilled. I like to think of Gil as the Captain America of school hallways, 100% as American as apple pie, a symbol of goodness.”
As a child, Barajas was an early fan of comics but aspired to be a newspaper reporter, which is what he became at the Arizona Daily Star.
But comics called and he has produced acclaimed graphic novels such as “La Voz De M.A.Y.O.: Tata Rambo” and “Helm Greycastle.” He has worked for Marvel Comics and written a short story for DC Comics titled “Batman: Urban Legends.”
The man who has drawn the “Gil Thorp” strip since 2008 is 68-year-old Rod Whigham, a seasoned pro who lives near Atlanta and has been an artist and commercial illustrator for Marvel and DC Comics. Among his works are “G.I. Joe,” “Men in Black” and “Doc Savage.” He has a number of graphic novels and created art for trading cards series.
He and Barajas have not met face to face but have communicated via computer and Whigham says, “He is a vast improvement over previous writers. He meets his deadline.”
Barajas is more effusive, saying, “Rod is simply the best artist I’ve worked with. He is so good. When I have brought up some controversial stories and themes, he is always game to hear me out. We are becoming a real team. If I could only clone him, then he could draw all my ideas.”
They are both keenly aware of the legacy they manage.
In my sports-playing teens, I was a steady reader of the strip but many pals were passionate about the comic strip coach. One of them is Ron Pen, an author, long a professor of musicology at the University of Kentucky and once a ferocious lineman on our high school football team.
“I read the comics from the time I could first navigate the words and pictures in the paper,” he says. “There were those cartoons that seemed funny and those that were a mystery. There were things like ‘Brenda Starr, Reporter’ ‘Mary Worth,’ and ‘Apartment 3-G’ that were clearly not kid’s fare, more like soap operas in newsprint. There was ‘Dick Tracy’ and the two-way wrist radio that should have been engaging, but seldom was. There was ‘Peanuts,’ mildly amusing.
“And then there was ‘Gil Thorp.’ He was a living manifestation of coaches I knew at school with the crew cut and rugged athletic demeanor. Nothing funny about the comic. He was the guy that inhabited the sweat-smelling little gym, the inner sanctum of the coach’s office, not open to students.
“Gil Thorp was tough but he understood kids as jocks. He seemed more authentic than characters like Prince Valiant. He always seemed to be right about some issue that surfaced in the locker room. Gil resonated in a real way on the real football fields in Lincoln Park.”
The strip was firmly focused on sports but societal matters began to sneak in as Berrill reflected the times with such off-the-field topics and troubles as teenage pregnancy, divorce, peer pressure, depression, mental ills, drinking problems, sexual harassment, marijuana and on and on.
Berrill died of cancer in 1996. The strip was then in the hands of various artists and writers, such as Jerry Jenkins and his son Chad, followed by Neal Rubin. Last July, Barajas took over.
Long a sports pages staple here, the strip stopped appearing in the Tribune in 2003 but it still is found “in dozens of other papers across the country,” says Christina St. Joseph, acquisitions editor at the Tribune Content Agency, which syndicates the strip.
Wayne Lown, general manager of TCA, says, “‘Gil Thorp’ has always tackled the issues of the day head-on, and Henry has done a great job carrying on that tradition but in a new voice.”
“It is important to me to not disappoint current and longtime fans,” says Barajas. “My goal is to bring the strip into our current age, with all of its complexities. I hope to do Gil justice by engaging regular readers and attracting new ones.”
He says his work in mainstream comic books has brought him into high school classrooms and into contact with teenagers. “I benefit greatly from that,” he says. “Listening to them talk about vaping, about the real dangers of school shootings, about sexual fluidity. I do my best to listen, with the idea of maybe addressing some of these things in the strip.”
Comics fans tend to be ardent and loud. For them, a strip and its characters are like neighbors. Barajas has seen online comments both favorable and not so but, “I have a tough skin,” he says, adding that he is not reluctant to respond to complaints or criticism. “I like to read what people have to say.”
There have been Gil Thorp collections published in book form over the decades and Barajas and Whigham have been bouncing such an idea around. In the meantime, the serial strip goes on and Thorp will be turning 65.
Social Security? Who knows? We’ll just have to wait and see.
