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Gasoline Alley, 8/26/23

Hey, remember the bear in Gasoline Alley who can talk? Well, he found a human baby abandoned in the woods and brought him to the ranger station for safekeeping. Today we learn that he’s “heard” of angels but doesn’t know much about them, which implies to me that while bears in the GasAlliverse are sapient and can talk, they don’t have eternal souls that live on after death. Some real unsettling implications there if you think about it!

Dennis the Menace, 8/26/23

Margaret is showing Dennis was a true menace is: she’s not only irritating Mr. Wilson, but breaking the fourth wall and confronting the comics’ aging readership with the fact that the late 1990s were 25 years ago.

Marvin, 8/26/23

Imagine if your house was burning down, everything you own going up in flames, but one of the firefighters who’ve come to help has to sheepishly tell you that they can’t hook their hoses up until a bunch of dogs finish pissing. That’s life in the Marvinverse, Where Piss Comes First™.

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Gasoline Alley, 7/20/23

Look, I’m not saying I’m in favor of the Machines declaring themselves “superior” and then forcing us to consume medications of an unspecified variety. What I am saying is, maybe we should let them start with Rufus and Joel just to see what we’re up against before we really start working to get the resistence up to speed.

Beetle Bailey, 7/20/23

Look, I’m not saying that Beetle and Miss Buxley’s relationship is definitely a sexless sham meant to deflect curiosity about the orientation of the former and deflect male attention from the latter, and that Beetle can’t even be bothered to maintain consciousness when they spend time together. What I am saying is that it’s interesting that Miss Buxley, a woman who wears a little black cocktail dress and pearl necklace to work every day, has now decided to start dressing like this on their dates.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/20/23

“Like riding a bike right through man’s eye, ha ha! Anyway, he’s blind now.”

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Gasoline Alley, 7/19/23

I always respect Gasoline Alley’s commitment to doing shambolic, pointless plots that seem to go on forever, and we’re in the middle of a real stemwinder at the moment. To recap: Rufus is still in the hospital due to his head injury, still has amnesia, and is still showing more skin than I’m comfortable with. Today’s strip is noteworthy because of the comical terror in which these two rustics regard the Automatic Robotic Techno-nurse. This can’t be the result of sheer ludditism, since they’ve taken technological advances like CAT scans in stride in the course of their medical adventure, so it must be that they’re shocked that anyone would go through the trouble of building a humanoid robot that carries pills and decanters in its hands for this purpose, when an automated and wheeled cart would be much more efficient and easier to implement.

Dick Tracy, 7/19/23

Speaking of plots that go nowhere, Dick Tracy is in the middle of a plot that has been going so nowhere that I haven’t bothered featuring it here much, though I will tell you that there was a whole week where Dick became obsessed with a chunk of plaster found at a crime scene that was from a very specific Art Deco decoration on the front of a very specific building. Anyway, you’d think a guy that much into historic urban architecture would at least consider that the story behind moving trucks showing up in a largely abandoned warehouse district might be “gentrification” rather than “crime.”

Judge Parker, 7/19/23

Good news, everyone! A sweaty guy in a suit holding a surprisingly large knife has shown up in Judge Parker, and there’s never been a soap opera plot that couldn’t benefit from that kind of development.

Gil Thorp, 7/19/23

Gil Thorp has an intermittent tradition of doing wacky summer plotlines like “Coach Kaz becomes a rock star’s bodyguard” or “Marty Moon gets grifted at golf” or “Gil does a charity pro wrestling match with a guy whose angle is that he has Alzheimers.” But will any of those be able to hold a candle to 2023’s Summer Of The Throuple?