Coach Gil Thorp is eligible for senior discounts. As the comic turns 65, a new writer hopes to ‘bring the strip into our current age’

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