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Gasoline Alley, 2/1/22

Folks, for a long time I’ve been trying to ignore the fact that there’s a movie coming out called Gasoline Alley. As near as I can tell, it has literally zero connection to the comic strip, as its Wikipedia entry informs me its tagline is “Justice Gets Dirty” and it stars Bruce Willis as “Freeman,” Luke Wilson “Vargas,” and “Devon Sawa” as “Jimmy Jayne,” none of that tracking to our beloved comic strip, which is about [thinks long and hard about what you might describe Gasoline Alley, the comic strip, as being “about”] scrapbooking. Anyhoo, I don’t have the energy to do any research on copyright law, but since Gasoline Alley is 103 years old, I’m going to guess that the title, at least, is now in the public domain, and so all the strip can do in revenge for a movie with the lesser-known Wilson brother and “Devon Sawa” in it stealing its name is put out a long, rambling shaggy dog plot involving these two Hollywood producers that will ultimately go absolutely nowhere.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/1/22

I honestly couldn’t tell you what Mother Goose and Grimm is “about” either, but up until today I would’ve been very sure that what it wasn’t about was the seething, unrequited lust its elderly bird-person characters had for one another. You learn something new every day, in the funny pages!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/1/22

One of the great mysteries of Snuffy Smith: how old is Snuffy Smith, exactly? On the one hand, he and Loweezy are young enough to have an infant son; on the other, as we learned today, Snuffy is entirely toothless. I guess it’s possible that, at some point when Snuffy was in his late 20s or early 30s, Doc Pritchart found a rotten tooth or two and decided just to pull them all to “get ahead of the game.”

Dennis the Menace, 2/1/22

“We live in a degraded, fallen world, Mr. Wilson! Don’t bother getting dressed up for it, they’re just going to put you on TikTok and then do a cancel culture on ya.”

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Family Circus, 1/30/21

Shoutout to Big Daddy Keane’s mom for pulling a true mother-in-law power move here. “Oh, is my son annoying you? Do you want him to die? Is that what you want? You want to be a widow like me? Duly noted, dear, duly noted.”

Dennis the Menace, 1/30/21

“Henry, I know all we usually ever talk about is your idiot kid, but you do you ever think about how we’re all going to dead someday, and soon? Like, ever really think about it?”

Panels from Hagar the Horrible, 1/30/21

As we continue the saga of how the syndicated Hagar the Horrible comic strip relates to the Christianization of Scandinavia, we learn that one guy who’s really sticking by the old gods is Lucky Eddie. And he’s being real unpleasantly showy about it, honestly!

Mary Worth, 1/30/21

YES

FINALLY

THIS IS IT

THE MOMENT EVERYONE FINALLY GETS SICK OF WILBUR’S SHIT

I love that Mary is so mad that she’s storming out of her own apartment

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 1/15/22

One of the last pure pleasures of social media is when some bizarre bit of pop culture ephemera from decades past gets surfaced and passed around, and last summer many of us had some good fun with “Inhalants,” a song from McGruff the Crime Dog’s 1987 anti-drug album that, as a viral tweet put it, “sounds like New Order.”

So, I have one note on this otherwise amazing song, which is that “inhalants” is a pretty technical term and probably most kids don’t know that it means, like, huffing paint or sniffing glue, but otherwise this a banger of a track that manages to pack a lot of emotions in to the gimmicky McGruff voice, and I immediately thought of it when I saw today’s Mother Goose and Grimm. This McGruff? The one with the thousand-yard stare and a barful of empty shot glasses in front of him? That’s the guy who sings “they can break you in two” about inhalants and you can tell he knows exactly what he’s talking about.

Family Circus, 1/15/22

Guys, I’ve been spending a lot of time staring at this Family Circus, in which Billy eagerly stares at his mother in a low-cut dress and talks about people getting their eyes knocked out, and trying to come up with an Oedipus joke and I just can’t quite make the pieces fit together. I feel like I’ve let you all down on this one and promise to do better in the future.

Dennis the Menace, 1/15/22

A child amazed by the number of screens in a multiplex but angry that no Western films are on offer? The only menace he represents is one to the integrity of the space-time continuum if he ever returns to his native year of 1953 with knowledge of the future!

Mary Worth, 1/15/22

“Well, he didn’t jump, exactly … here, let me show you the video, but hold on a second while I queue up ‘Yakety Sax.’”