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Gasoline Alley, 9/24/10

Even beyond the bus plunge trope beloved of generations of lead-type print journalists, the current Gasoline Alley plot is chock full of old-timey goodness:

• Sound effects in dialect — “Kee-rash”, y’all! “Smootch”!

• Regionalisms — “Let’s don’t”, like Louisiana’s “might could”, Josh’s beloved upstate N.Y. “pop”, and the “bubbler” (water fountain) of my own Milwaukee roots.

• Agricultural sexuality — Rural kids don’t have much patience for courtly love. But Rover won’t fall for Miss Chris’s comely charms either, considering what’s waiting at home.

• Picaresque plotlines — A forgotten lunch, excess cell-phone use, failed brakes, missing spare, sudden infatuation: what us know-it-all city-folk call “incoherent.”

Blondie, 9/24/10

OK, cartoonists, listen up. It’s wonderful that you’ve got friends and neighbors, and peachy that they give to charity and get married and whatnot, but won’t you please, please stop sticking them in your comics? Your audience doesn’t give a rip about these people, and they always look creepy and out of place. This is not how to treat friends and neighbors in print.

Sally Forth, 9/23/10

This is how to treat friends and neighbors in print.

Dick Tracy, 9/24/10

Chief Liz is right. In fact, Dick will eventually fool himself, arrest himself for vagrancy, and then die a grisly and mysterious death at his own hands while in self-custody. His last words will be a lame wisecrack about how he died. At the funeral, friends will say, “He would have wanted it this way”, and they’ll be right, too.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Click above to contribute by credit card or PayPal, here to contribute by check, or here for more details — Thanks!

Josh Fruhlinger started this blog as a hobby in 2004; now thousands of people read it every day to get a chuckle from comics they’ve followed since childhood. Twice a year, I encourage readers to join me in financial support of the Comics Curmudgeon, to help keep this fine entertainment going.

Click the banner above to contribute by credit card or PayPal. Full details (and an index to the fundraiser banners) here. Thank you!

And while you wait for your generous offshore wire transfer to slip beneath the radar of the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, please enjoy this Comics Curmudgeon exclusive, Random Dick — the Dick Tracy Continuity Randomizer:

Dick Tracy values continuity even less than the so-called Rights of the Accused. Can you find any differences between a regular Dick Tracy strip and a random collection of panels? Let’s find out!

Dick Tracy, 7/22 — 9/18/10 (panels)*

Enjoy!

— Uncle Lumpy

* Random Dick may not work in some browsers and RSS readers. If you can’t see it or it runs too slowly, please use the fast large-format version at this link instead.

Notes: OK, it’s not completely random: strips are assembled from one randomly-selected “Dick Tracy” panel, one “Other Person” panel, and one “Building or Object” panel, and then presented in random order. Many thanks to young codemaster Spiff Lumpy for scripting, html, and debugging.

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Mark Trail, 8/28/10

Oh, he’s going into politics! That explains the giant fence. He’s not building some kind of private hunting preserve; he’s planning on running for office on the always popular “let’s round them up and put them into concentration camps” platform. The fence is his tribute to America’s can-do spirit. We don’t need wasteful government agencies like FEMA to build our internment compounds for us! Private enterprise can do it more efficiently! Look, I’ve already managed to imprison my wife and ugly little stepdaughter, and some dumb baby deer they adopted!

Note where Cherry picked up this juicy bit of gossip: at the hair salon. Remember when Cherry went to get her hair done, four months ago? You probably thought Jack Elrod had forgotten all about this, but Jack Elrod never forgets. Obviously the whole point of Cherry going to the salon in the first place was for her to pick up this plotline-advancing tidbit. The point certainly wasn’t for her to have anything done to her hair, because it looks exactly the same as ever.

Dick Tracy, 8/28/10

“Detective Tracy” and “Miss Sue Doko” are in extra large font here, and while it’s almost certainly just because otherwise the words wouldn’t take up enough of the word balloon, I’d like to think they’re both saying things really loudly and sarcastically, like Steve Martin saying “Well excuuuuuse me,” mostly because neither of two can believe how stupid the other’s name is.