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Gasoline Alley, 5/19/06

If you weren’t paying attention (and you almost certainly weren’t), Gasoline Alley had a halfway exciting plotline going on a few months ago: Sheezix and Gertie were in a dark, scary forest, tangling with what they thought was an escaped psycho killer.

Then the supposed psycho killer turned out to be a cop, who was looking for the real psycho killer. Then he noticed that Sheezix’s driver’s license had expired, so Sheezix had to hire Gasoline Alley’s two horsedrawn hillbillies to tow his car home. Then he had to go get his driver’s license renewed, which meant that he had to get info from the Social Security Administration, which meant…

Well, what it really meant was that a storyline that contained suspense and action and the threat of violence was transformed by degrees into a storyline that involved an old man doing battle with surly government bureaucrats trying to get his paperwork in order.

Which brings up a question: Could this storyline be made even more boring? “More boring that the DMV?” you ask. “That’s a tall order!” Well, perhaps. But I’ve got some ideas!

• On his way out of the DMV, Sheezix has his pocket picked. Now he has to go through all the stuff he just went through to get his paperwork in order again, plus he has to go down to the police station to file a report with a bored desk jockey.
• On the street, Sheezix bumps into an old friend. “Hey, Sheezix, what’ve you been up to?” he asks. Sheezix proceeds to tell him, in great detail.
• Sheezix gets home to find that his wife is having the house repainted. “Don’t touch any of the walls until the paint dries!” she says. He sits down to watch and wait.
• Sheezix dies. His body is embalmed, placed into a coffin, and buried in the soil. Over the course of years, the wood of the coffin rots, and his corpse decays to its organic components, nurturing the soil. Some four billion years later, the Earth’s sun becomes a red giant, and the Earth is destroyed.

Also, in Rex Morgan, M.D., we learned that Dr. Troy likes clown art:

I don’t know what the hell this means, but it can’t possibly be good.

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Three for Thursday today, folks:

Gasoline Alley, 11/10/05

Check out the turtle-mouthed death’s-head look that the hateful Lil Skinner is sporting in panel one. You don’t know how much I wanted this to be the harbinger of the horrible truth: that Lil really was dead, and that Slim was carrying on a week’s worth of Norman Bates-style insane conversation with her withered, husk-like corpse. Unfortunately, Clovia seems to see her alive and well in panel three, so I guess we’re stuck with yet more hijinks from the comics pages’ most transparent sociopath.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/10/05

OK, OK, Rex Morgan, we get it, OK? You like to look up Rex’s nose. But why do you have to make us look up his nose so often?

Sheesh.

Curtis, 11/10/05

Now, I mock Curtis a lot. I’m a Curtis-mocker, it’s fair to say. But I do like the art, and it’s growing on me more and more over time. What comic would spend time lovingly detailing a large, late-middle-age woman with a gynormous bosom as she levitates three feet off the ground in wide-eyed panic? Curtis would, that’s who. And I for one salute it.

Speaking of sociopaths, I’m guessing the perpetrator of this arachnoid outrage is none other than “Tuffy,” the kid who brought a gun to school a few weeks ago; it turned out to be a squirt gun, but it still would have gotten him sent to a lock-down facility in any actual school district in twenty-first century America. His capacity for over-the-top mischief seems matched only by his unfounded loyalty to Curtis, which could result in discomfort-causing storylines far more intriguing than that damn invisible lizard’s latest antics.

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Gasoline Alley, Herb and Jamaal, and Kudzu, 10/5/05

There’s nothing that brings out humor better than the interplay of two opposing minds! Yes, it’s the back and forth between two different points of view, and the zingers that well-formed characters can throw back and forth at one another when they’re versed in each other foibles, that really form the core of sparkling wit — nay, heart the comedic enterprise itself.

Or, you know, you could just have three or four panels of some character talking or thinking to herself, with nobody else in sight. Your call, cartoonists!

The saddest thing about this Herb and Jamaal is that, since Mrs. Herb here (I forget her name … Peaches?) spends half the comic mentally rehashing what her husband said, the comic could just as easily been written with the miserly Herb speaking for himself. And maybe Mrs. Slim (I forget her name too … Jim?) is showing some sort of meta-awareness of her soliloquy by reminding us that we’re never really alone, what with the omnipresent LORD always listening in on our conversations. As for Doris the Parakeet … well, I’ve always found it to be a good policy to say as little about Doris the Parakeet as possible.