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Archive: Gasoline Alley

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Animal antics

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Baby Blues, 6/29/20

I don’t want you think that I’m constantly raging against Marvin’s incessant piss and shit jokes is because I’m against bathroom humor per se. It’s the “incessant” part that really gets me; of course some judiciously applied poop humor is an important part of any comic strip with child characters. Today’s Baby Blues genuinely made me laugh, for instance! I particularly like the expression on the dog’s face in panel two. He just wanted to poop on his walk like he always does, safe in the assumption that his owner would clean it up, and now he’s embarrassed! He never asked to be part of this!

Gasoline Alley, 6/29/20

You know what didn’t make me laugh? Today’s Gasoline Alley, which is about desperate homeless people breaking into circus animals’ cages to eat their food! I’m not even going to bother describing the plotline we’re in the middle of here, because it doesn’t actually provide any context for today’s strip, which, I can’t emphasize enough, is about people so poor and hungry that they need to eat circus animal feed to survive, Jesus Christ.

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“If only there were a way for me to … eat my cake but also somehow have it, at the same time”

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Mary Worth, 5/28/20

I am dying at Mary saying it’s always OK to love someone … or something … presumably to set the groundwork for her next romantic meddle in Dawn’s life. “Dear, once Jared inevitably dumps you, have considered loving something that … isn’t a person? Like a dog, or a tree, or a bridge. Or an abstract concept! Dawn, an abstract concept could never leave you! A dog, now … well, let’s not take any chances.”

Gasoline Alley, 5/28/20

Ahh, thought Walt Wallet, finally. It had been a long century, to be sure. His bones were tired. So tired. But the process he had put into motion in the trenches of World War I, which eventually catapulted America to a global dominance uniquely dependent on fossil fuels, was finally bearing fruit. Sure, the consequences would be terrible a few decades after he was gone, but now, at long last, he felt warm enough.

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“Maudlin Parrot” would be a good name for a band

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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.