Rick Soto

Football player/aspiring YouTube singing star who is the center of a late-2017 plotline in long-running sports soap opera comic Gil Thorp. Soto's Uncle Gary, a wannabe Colonel Tom Parker of the viral video era, is pushing to market him as "Ricardo" because it "plays up [his] heritage" (15 Nov. 2017). That heritage really comes out in the songs Soto has been shown performing: "Mack the Knife" (21 Sept. 2017), Ed Sheeran's "Give Me Love" (12 Oct. 2017), and the national anthem (8 Nov. 2018).

Side note: There is a shockingly large number of people who seem to either love, or love to hate, Gil Thorp, a strip we always skipped past on the way to Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side.