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Gasoline Alley, 10/1/20

A thing I often wonder when reading Gasoline Alley is, “Who is this for?” Like, are we meant to identify with its cast of stylized mid-century rustics and diner denizens? Are meant to laugh at them? Are we meant recognize them as a faint echo of a time almost gone from living memory now? Should we be reading the footnote in today’s second panel and thinking “Ah yes, I there was once a time when a real American would refuse a latinate word like instrument and instead simply call these music-producing boxes what they are, and that time was better than the corrupt era in which we now live”? Or are we supposed to be thinking “A music box is the thing with a ballet dancer on top that you wind up, what an absolute bunch of morons these guys are, I certainly hope they get sent back to prison?”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/1/20

Meanwhile — and I say this not on the basis of any insider industry knowledge, just a gut feeling — Barney Google and Snuffy Smith feels, well, more established. More sure of itself. Who is Snuffy Smith for? Well, at some point it was for people who enjoyed the Depression-era vogue for cruel jokes about hillbillies, but those people are all dead now, so it’s actually just for people who enjoy, or at least cannot imagine a world without, Sniffy Smith. And so it gets to do what it wants. If it wants to do a strip about starving hillbilly babies turning to cannibalism, can it do it? Sure. Why not? It has nothing to prove and nothing to lose.

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Six Chix, 9/8/20

I’ve come to see Six Chix as a puzzle feature and not a comic strip. Every day, it presents a collection of images and words, and implicitly asks the reader, “How is this a joke?” I’ve gotten pretty good at it — I can find one or two a week now! But today they upped the ante and added “How is this a chart?”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/8/20

I like fill-in-the-blank puzzles, too! Just imagine how other strips would handle this joke:

Rhymes with Orange, 9/8/20

We are all in very serious trouble.

Sally Forth, 9/8/20

Good luck, sweetie!

The shutdown has been a fascinating time for logistics geeks, as established supply chains broke down and became reëntangled in novel ways. For example, there was always plenty of toilet paper — but in bicycle-wheel-sized rolls of single-ply locked up in the storerooms of shuttered office buildings. And food — in March, I scored a ten-pound bag of chicken quarters for three bucks. They were chilled (freezer space was overwhelmed almost instantly), restaurant-sized (retail chickens are usually much bigger), butchered in-store in a hurry (bandsaw marks, bone fragments), and priced to move. It was probably diverted from the commercial channel by foodservice distributor and logistics prima ballerina Sysco, which turned on a dime to supermarkets once the bars, restaurants, and corporate cafeterias closed.

So a strategic sourcing specialist like Ted ought to be right in his element, puzzling all this out and planning how his company will avoid it next time. Certainly nobody’s going to fire a guy with skills like that at a time like this. But Sally is clearly conflicted about going back to her team of scatterbrains, and who can blame her? Maybe the strip will make a 180° turn and become the story of a happy, well-adjusted stay-at-home mom, her hardworking, sensible husband/breadwinner, their lovely family, and neighbors who still fence in their front yards in case the Forths revert.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Marvin, 8/27/20

Today’s Marvin is what happens when you’re trying to come up with a joke about toilets because that’s what you do, but you want to do one that isn’t about pooping, for once, so instead you decide to do one about how children become attached to ephemeral creatures and often their deaths and the undignified disposal of their bodies is their initial introduction to the scary notion of mortality, but then you decide to bring it back around to pooping in the end because, really, isn’t it all about the pooping, when you think about it?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/27/20

Look, I don’t pretend to be consistent, but I know what I like and I know what I don’t like, and what I don’t like is Snuffy Smith trying to get “topical.”

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/27/20

Hey, guys, fun fact: did you know that you don’t get goose down from a live goose? And that the world of Mother Goose and Grimm includes both sapient geese and goose down-filled pillows? Anyway, Grimm still likes to use Mother Goose as a living pillow. You know, for now.