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Gasoline Alley, 4/10/24

You know, after all these years, I still experience the joy of discovery from reading the newspaper comics. Or, well, at least sometimes I read something like today’s Gasoline Alley, sigh heavily, and then Google “gasoline alley family tree” in hopes of making sense of it, but then am just a little bit charmed when I find a graphic like this:

That comes from a page on Hobbylark dot com that also includes an annotated timeline of important events in the strip lore, such as “Wilmer admits to being a sap, a wart, and a drip, but claims the Army did a job on him!” (November 20, 1945), “Corky and Hope move into a new apartment – landlord is Pert!” (May 6, 1954), and “Melba decides to take advantage of leap year to move Rufus along towards a wedding” (July 5, 1976, and yet somehow Melba is now the mayor and still hasn’t sealed the deal). Anyway, from this documentation I have confirmed that Sheezix and Corky are brothers, and Corky runs the diner (in fact, according to that timeline, 1950 was the “year of the Diner”). And because Corky has decided to embrace the town name change, that means that the coming Gasoline Alley vs. Electric Acres civil war will literally pit brother against brother, so I guess I’m finally coming around to being interested in it.

Judge Parker, 4/10/24

“He’s going to kill your mother, April. Then he’s going to kill you! The he goes after Charlotte, your daughter! It never ends! He’ll just keep going after you or your female relatives! Your male relatives will be fine! Certainly any of your relatives who happen to be the title character in the strip are safe! But it’s the principle of the thing!”

Hi and Lois, 4/10/24

Big news, everyone! Trixie seems to have grasped the concept of the linear flow of time! Also, Hi and Lois did a strip without a joke, but I guess that’s not “big news” per se.