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Gasoline Alley, 4/6/23

Oh, hey, Ida Knoe the evil talking doll who can travel through time, wild that you’re only now worried about the consequences of disrupting the spacetime continuum! Maybe you should’ve thought of this before you time travelled with a bunch of children, who are notorious for being idiots. I’m talking about all children, not these ones in particular, and maybe “idiot” is a bit harsh but if you’re looking for someone with both the mental acuity to understand what will and what won’t change the course of history and the self-control to act on that understanding, a bunch of seven-year-olds is not your best bet.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/6/23

One of the funnier possibilities in this storyline is that Mud Mountain Murphy and Dr. Mirakle are entirely sincere and have just picked the worse possible venue for a long-established artist to unveil an entirely new repetoire/personality. Like, I don’t mean to talk smack about the great pastime of going on cruises, but I think the cruise lifestyle largely caters to people who want a certain nonthreatening consistency out of a vacation, and if you try to “mix things up” you will end up with patrons like Yvonne in panel three, literally praying to hear just one song she already knows the words to, just one.

Dennis the Menace, 4/6/23

Look, kid, the swinging can’t start until you go to bed already

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Slylock Fox, 4/3/23

I genuinely love how flabbergasted Count Weirdly looks here. “Oh my god! Slylock Fox? The detective who foils literally every one of my dumb schemes? The one who I specifically set up a camera in order to detect? Here? Now?”

Dennis the Menace, 4/3/23

With those theatrical hand gestures and that hilarious wordplay, the only people these two will be menacing are the other players on the vaudeville circuit, as their old man/little kid double act takes the world by storm! (EDITORS NOTE: There is no more “vaudeville circuit” as such and has not been for many years)

Blondie, 4/3/23

I’m excited to see Blondie just give up on telling “jokes” altogether and instead become a comic presenting slices of life so mundane that the strip becomes a work of avant-garde art. I certainly hope that the entire remainder of the week consists of three panels a day of Dagwood staring at the microwave in silence, to really hammer home how long 90 seconds can last if you’re reasonably hungry.

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Blondie, 3/29/23

I’ve always been a “work at home in my pajamas” guy rather than a “carpool” guy, but my understanding is that carpools that consist of the same people generally follow the same route every day, so I’m honestly not sure why Herb needs directions suddenly. I guess there could be a detour or something and this could end up like one of those ’80s/’90s exploitation thrillers (usually called something like DETOUR) where innocent middle-class types take a wrong turn into the wrong neighborhood and suddenly have to fight for their lives against the criminal element. That honestly seems more likely than, say, any of these losers somehow getting a new job that requires them to learn how to drive to another office building.

Dennis the Menace, 3/29/23

At least Blondie had that little detail to keep me interested in a strip that was basically a “ha ha, how about that Siri, amiright folks” joke. Today’s Dennis the Menace doesn’t even have that level of texture to it, it’s just “Alexa! It’s a thing that exists, that children know about!” Honestly, doing jokes about digital assistants are a mid-’10s thing, even syndicated newspaper comics should’ve moved on to jokes about generative AI by now.

Safe Havens, 3/29/23

Here’s Safe Havens, a strip I don’t think I’ve ever talked about before, but it’s about time travel and space travel and, uh, some other stuff, and say what you will about it (or don’t, I certainly haven’t) but at least it knows that the hot tech jokes in the year of our lord 2023 should be about generative AI.

The Lockhorns, 3/29/23

Oh, man, not to smugly say I told you so, but: If Loretta were posting a pic of their dinner on Facebook, that would be a sure sign the Lockhorns were boomers. A deliberately badly staged photo and a snarky, self-deprecating comment on Twitter? Gen X. A Leroy reaction vid captioned: “POV: you are feeding your husband inedible slop” on TikTok? Zoomers. But Loretta is gonna slap a filter on that plateful of brown goo, making it look like she took a picture of it with a Polaroid camera in 1977, and you know what that means: THE LOCKHORNS ARE MILLENNIALS.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/29/23

OH MY GOD HUGE MUD MOUNTAIN MURPHY NEWS EVERYBODY! He looks … like this now? I have literally no idea what aesthetic he’s trying to make happen here; I’m not sure how to map “Secret Service Agent” onto a musical genre and honestly wish Buck were here to rattle off the names of a bunch of arcane categories so I could get my bearings. Anyway, it’s obviously funny that Mud Mountain has made this stylistic change, but it’s much, much funnier that he’s doing it on a cruise. If it doesn’t work out, well, what happens in international waters isn’t binding, career-wise, right?