Post Content

Mary Worth, 5/12/20

A fun thing about even a pretty narratively explicit medium like the comics is that you can always fill in some of the lacunae with your mind to create the version of the story you most want to read. For instance, there’s nothing in the second panel of today’s Mary Worth making it explicit that there’s a long, lingering silence after Dawn says “I worked things out with Hugo” — a sentence that any normal human would interpret to mean that Dawn and Hugo had patched things up and would continue to operate as a couple, leaving Jared either as a side piece or, more likely, a piece of rejected romantic detritus on the side of the road — but there’s nothing that strictly speaking precludes you from imagining that silence, either. So I’m imagining it. I’m imagining Dawn running into Jared’s arms off the jetway, nestling her chin on his shoulder, and saying, enraptured, “I worked things out with Hugo!” and letting that sit there for a minute, only moving on to “We agreed to be friends!” after his big, ugly, heaving sobs have started and can’t be stopped.

Gasoline Alley, 5/12/20

In case you’re wondering, the actual line in question is “Folks these days just don’t do nothin’ simply for the love of it.” So yeah, this guy will dip into the lyrical repetoire of popular music in order to make his rhetorical point, but he’ll be damned if he submits to these punks’ grammatical barbarism.

Post Content

Gasoline Alley, 5/11/20

A problem with any kind of narrative is distinguishing between the things individual characters know and ways they interact with each other on the one hand, and ways the creator of the narrative intends to interact with their audience on the other. What I’m trying to say is that it would be very likely in-universe that this shambolic event would eventually devolve into a speaker telling the audience specifically to Google some 36-year-old Don Henley lyrics, rather than, say, actually listening to the song on Spotify or something, but it’s just as likely that Gasoline Alley sincerely intends this to be a helpful suggestion for the comic’s audience itself. Anyway, check out this long-haired young fella’s thoughts on the farming crisis, he’s got some good ideas!

Funky Winkerbean, 5/11/20

Wow, Les, act like you’ve been here before, will ya? Because you have. During your last ill-fated trip to LA to try to turn Lisa’s Story into something people might actually enjoy, the studio actually put you up at the Chateau Marmont, so you’d think you would gotten all that actress-leering out of your system! Anyway, I certainly hope that ‘Pink Entertainment’ is the newly founded studio arm of the Susan B. Komen Foundation, set up solely to create entertainment products that raise awareness of breast cancer, because that will make it all the sweeter when they reject Les’s little graphic novel as unfilmable schlock.

Post Content

Gil Thorp, 4/29/20

The current Gil Thorp baseball storyline has been almost as boring as the recently concluded Gil Thorp basketball storyline — Mike Knappe, a baseball player known as “the Mayor,” is often running late and makes weird breakfast-on-the-go combos and gives people nicknames and so far that’s been about it? — but today we have an embarrassment of riches. First off, we have NUTSO brand peanut butter; in contrast with Planters’ Mr. Peanut, which is a cheerfully foppish business success, the NUTSO mascot is an ordinary peanut that knows it’s about to be ground up into a delicious paste, and is spending its last conscious moments screaming in terror. Side note: wasn’t there some other zany peanut-snack brand in a this strip that we all had funs with a few years back? Like, called NUTZ or something like that? I’ve been spending way too much time Googling increasingly baroque variations on “nuts” and Gil Thorp and it’s killing me that I can’t remember! (UPDATE: Thank you to faithful reader Usacotts: It was NUT BOY!)

But [record scratch] all this zaniness is about to come to an end as Mike and his pals start diving into the oeuvre of Flannery O’Connor. Can “the Mayor”‘s good cheer and fundamental lack of self-reflection stand up in the face of Wise Blood’s dark musings on free will and the inescapable nature of religious belief?

Gasoline Alley, 4/29/20

TIRED: Tricking teenagers into performing manual farm labour without pay
WIRED: Tying farmers to their profession from birth to death, therefore creating a new class of feudal serfs