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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.

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Slylock Fox, 4/21/21

Man, usually even the non-Slylockverse Slylock Fox True or False strips involve, like, animal facts of some kind. Yes, it’s technically true that people are also animals, and the weird, gross interiors of our ears are among the most distressing evicence of the repulsive biological foundations of our existence. Fun fact, I almost started googling about the microscopic creatures that I assume live in our ear canals for this post but then realized there might be pictures and wisely pulled myself back from the brink. But anyway, my point here is that this is a fairly odd subject for a Slylock strip, and has me wondering if it was made possible by a generous donation from Big Otorhinolaryngology, or maybe from Big Lollipop, since I suspect that retail sales of lollipops are quite low and now most people only get them when they’re handed out as a reward for seeking basic medical care.

Dick Tracy, 4/21/21

Oh, wow, I guess the members of the Apparatus in Dick Tracy are going to stop trying to kill Dick Tracy, which seems like it would take a lot of the oomph out of this strip, not gonna lie. I guess this is the sort of cautious movie you’d expect from a crime lord who puts on a ski mask to talk on the phone to one of his own allies. Fortunately for fans of ultraviolence everywhere, Dick Tracy is definitely not going to reciprocate and stop trying to kill the members of the Apparatus.

Gasoline Alley, 4/21/21

[my entire afternoon is derailed as I drop everything to write a multipage screed to Tribute Content Agency, LLC about induced demand]