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They can’t all be highbrow, folks

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Gasoline Alley, 11/18/22

Big Good Some news, everybody: Rufus has managed to use his sexual wiles to help Walt make his big dream of hanging off the back of a garbage truck come true. The Sanitation Department will definitely get some good publicity out of this, unless Walt falls off and terribly injures himself, which is actually a pretty likely scenario. I mean, that’s why they banned sanitation workers from doing this in the first place, and none of those guys are supercentenarian World War I vets. In that case, the publicity will end up being pretty bad: lawsuits from the family, Denzel Washington giving a press conference disavowing knowledge of or participation in this stunt, etc.

Marvin and Dennis the Menace, 11/18/22

I find comics where the punchline is “Ha ha, lady can’t cook even though cooking is lady’s job” fairly distasteful, and have come to conclusion that I like the ones where it’s the lady’s son slagging on her cooking even worse than the ones where it’s her husband doing it. That seems a bit unfair, since a grown man could easily cook for himself and a little kid couldn’t, but you have remember that these jokes are written by and for grown men, which make the mommy issues tied up in them all the more distressingly apparent.

Gil Thorp, 11/18/22

There’s something funny to me about how “wet” is emphasized unnaturally here. “I heard you still wet the bed. Whereas me? I dry the bed. That’s what I call it when I make a real cakey poop when I’m sleeping.”

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Forbidden municipal romance

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Gasoline Alley, 11/10/22

Gasoline Alley is, I admit, one of those strips I read out of a sense of professional obligation rather than a true inborn enthusiasm. Yet one can derive a real satisfaction from achievements that are wholly professional in nature! For instance, I’ve managed to keep the “Rufus is fucking the mayor” plot thread close enough to the top of my mind that when I read the final panel of today’s strip I nodded sagely and thought to myself, “Ah, Walt’s going to get to ride on the back of a garbage truck, just like his hero Denzel Washington, because Rufus is fucking the mayor,” whereas I assume the typical comic reader simply shook their head in confusion and disgust before moving on to Garfield.

Judge Parker, 11/10/22

Oh, hey, remember how Abbey was running for mayor? Well, she lost, and she’s mainly mad that her ex, who for once in his life is doing something interesting, didn’t text her about it. Abbey is by my count the third character in this strip to unsuccessfully run for mayor, and frankly I can’t get enough of it. Keep losing, losers!

Dustin, 11/10/22

Look, I don’t care if Dustin dies first or his dad does. But one of them has got to go. At least one. They can’t keep taunting me like this.

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Monday is for grudging respect

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Slylock Fox, 10/31/22

The thing I absolutely love and respect about Slick Smitty is that every time we see him, Slylock and the animal cops have him absolutely dead to rights, yet he still has the shit-eating grin on his face that says that he doesn’t believe he’ll receive any consequences for his actions or simply doesn’t care about them if he does. That’s true even in circumstances like today’s, when he’s dressed in an extremely stupid costume in order to pull of an even stupider crime, and hooked up to one of those lie detector machines that the animals have advanced from the current level of “not a lie detector, just a detector of elevated heart rates and other physical activity” to “detects lies, but unable to understand low-level ‘truths’ and ‘falsehoods’ as part of a larger semantic context.”

Dick Tracy, 10/31/22

I’ve had my differences with Vitamin Flintheart in the past, but I respect his theater company’s total commitment to verisimilitude. They have access to an extremely lifelike robotic dog that can talk, and yet they’re still trying to find a trained real dog for the non-talking scenes! You don’t want the human actors to start worrying about getting replaced by robots, now do you.

Gasoline Alley, 10/31/22

Say what you will about Gasoline Alley, but as its name implies, it began as a strip about people talking about motor vehicles, so I have to respect the amount of panel space it’s dedicating to people going into great detail about the different kinds of garbage trucks in use today.