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Dennis the Menace, 9/14/21

I am absolutely in love with the idea of Mr. Wilson’s identity as a jazz hepcat suddenly becoming another weak point that Dennis can use to send him into paroxysms of rage. I’m not sure which interpretation of today’s strip would be funnier: that Dennis was letting loose with some wild, atonal acid jazz when Mr. Wilson just wants to jam out to Dave Brubeck, or that Dennis was playing square, Lite FM Kenny G bullshit that Mr. Wilson thinks sullies the good name of jazz.

Gasoline Alley, 9/14/21

I do not care about the current Gasoline Alley storyline and refuse to explain even the basics to you, but I do love the final panel here, which in a more interesting world would be the capper of a storyline in which in adorable, aw-shucks talking bear finally answers for his crimes against humanity at the Hague.

Shoe, 9/14/21

“Ha ha, get it? But seriously, they keep running a bunch of tests but can’t figure out what’s wrong with me. They’re pretty sure I’m dying, though.”

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Gasoline Alley, 8/3/21

Folks, let me confide something in you. I was relishing the prospect of just tearing in to today’s Gasoline Alley for using a “joke” that, I was very sure, had been passed around by old people via Facebook and emails with “Fw: FWD: Fw: Re: Fw: Its good to laugh” in the subject line for years if not decades. I even went through the trouble of confirming that Rufus and Joel’s mule was indeed named “Betsy” so I could joke that Betsy looked absolutely furious about this shameful reuse of mediocre folk humor in a professional syndicated comic strip. All that remained was for me to do a little advanced Google searching, narrowed by date, to figure out exactly how old this joke was. But at the very beginning of my quest, I was confronted by something that truly shook me to my core:

There it is, everybody: proof that somehow, this goofy line about GPS standing for “getting places sooner” (and yes, I also checked “gettin’”, same results) was apparently invented by the Gasoline Alley creative team, and yet it has the feel of the sort of thing down-home salt-of-the-earth folks have been saying to each other since GPS was widely commercialized in the early ’00s. I hereby retract anything cruel I may have said about this strip’s cornpone vibes. Gasoline Alley is in fact frighteningly efficient and accurate about its mission in ways I never could’ve dreamed of.

Pluggers, 8/3/21

Meanwhile, over in Pluggers, I think we’re finally ready for Pluggers to just settle in with a series of increasingly baroque versions of “pluggers are old, meaning that they were born in years that are earlier than most other people’s birth years.”

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 4/28/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because Grimm wants to murder a cat! No, wait … it’s funny because … Grimm is doing mafia cosplay, and has announced his desire to murder a cat using gangster patois? There’s no wordplay or anything, it’s just funny when a dog pretends to be a gangster, to lend a thin veneer over the murders he already wants to do?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/28/21

Remember a couple years ago when we learned that war hero amputee Jordan actually did a little light stolen valor? Anyway, I’m excited to learn soon that Michelle wasn’t working with COVID patients at all, just doing regular checkups, but really any patient these days could have COVID, if you think about it, oh, and also she was doing all her sessions on Zoom.

Gasoline Alley, 4/28/21

Incredibly, these two met just eight weeks ago and are already married! That’d be a quick courtship in any context, but is especially crazy in Gasoline Alley, given that the strip once spent eight weeks explaining how cool scrapbooking is.