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Gasoline Alley, 4/8/20

“Josh,” said nobody, absolutely nobody, nobody real and nobody you could even conceive of as being a vaguely believable fictional character, but for this bit imagine that there might, in some bizarre parallel universe, be a person or persons who would ask the following question, “What’s going with the thing in Gasoline Alley where they were going to save the farms or whatever?” Well, the save-the-farms meeting has devolved into absolute chaos, and not even the fun kind, just the kind where nobody’s really in charge and they’re definitely not sticking to the ostensible topic, which is probably fine because none of these dopes has any idea about how to save the farms, that much I can guarantee. Anyway, the strip’s extremely non-beloved wacky parrot character is here stirring up shit, and is today apparently stealing valor! The nerve! Can’t wait for him to go to prison.

Pluggers, 4/8/20

Despite the contempt I regularly shower onto Pluggers, I would be very sad if it went away! And yet I can’t really see where it has to go after today’s installment, “Pluggers sure plug up the toilet a lot, with their poops.”

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Gasoline Alley, 3/31/20

I’m going to ignore panel three here, which makes the frankly offensive suggestion that Snuffy Smith somehow has an ownership claim over entirely common turns of English phrase, and instead focus on panel two, which I love very much. “Figure out an equitable way to cushion family farmers, who are committed to an increasingly economically unviable business model today, at the tail end of a century-long process of agricultural industrialization?” says Boog. “I doubt it! I’m, like, twelve years old!”

Dennis the Menace, 3/31/20

There’s actually a couple different kinds of menacing happening here, as Dennis dreams of a machine that can control the weather and thus impose its master’s will upon a terrified world, but is also stupid enough to think that that’s what he’s looking at right now.

Curtis, 3/31/20

While it’s not quite explicit here, I think we have to give Curtis the award for the first syndicated newspaper strip to acknowledge the coronavirus pandemic and the prolonged social distancing necessary to fight it. I don’t really have much of a joke here, other than that Curtis and Barry are definitely going to murder each other before this thing is done.

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Gasoline Alley, 3/18/20

One of Gasoline Alley’s most prominent characters is a World War I veteran, so it’s a strip that’s admittedly somewhat untethered from our timeline, but I was still prompted by this strip to look up when the international whaling ban went into effect and was surprised to learn it was 1986 — much more recently than I expected! So it’s not too unrealistic for Baleen to have worked on a commercial whaling ship in her youth, or maybe even on the Icelandic, Norwegian, or Japanese ships that continue the practice despite the ban. The important thing is that “glabella” is like Proust’s madeleine for her, the mere word immediately evoking the image of firing a bolt of metal between the eyes of some majestic, intelligent, endangered sea beast, shattering its skull and pushing on right into its brain.

Six Chix, 3/18/20

Now, I don’t want to criticize here, because you’re a tiny robin that mastered human speech and that’s pretty impressive, but … it actually sounds like you do care which game he puts on? It sounds like you care quite a bit, honestly!