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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.

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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

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Slylock Fox, 4/27/20

OK, fine, you know what, “throwing ice cubes at a parade” is an extremely low-grade crime, so I can understand why Slylock did not feel like he needed to personally follow up on the tip they got from a busybody rabbit neighbor or whatever, but: the suspect’s still a wolf, you know? A wolf who could eat Max in one very efficient bite, should he, say, catch the poor sidekick rodent attempting to open a refrigerator door that weighs easily 20 to 30 times more than he does. And yeah, I guess he’s a wolf who’s idea of sinister behavior is throwing ice cubes at a parade, but he’s also a wolf with a visible ham in the fridge who lives in a society where pigs are citizens with rights, so he might be more dangerous than you think.

Six Chix, 4/27/20

Look, it’s not secret that newspaper cartooning isn’t as lucrative as it once was. Sure, we’d like to think we have artistic integrity and all that, but if a nice man from the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association called you up one day and explained how some well-intentioned but overzealous laws about chicken living spaces are really hurting America’s family farms, then suggested a joke for a comic and floated a tidy little sum that might be sent your way upon publication, well, would you really argue that much with him? It’s a pretty good joke!

Dennis the Menace, 4/27/20

The US Postal Service — for which Mr. Wilson worked — began home delivery in 1905, so I don’t think this is true, on any level? Unless … is Mr. Wilson immortal, an eternal being kept alive over the centuries by pure grouchiness? It would explain a lot.

Gasoline Alley, 4/27/20

You know what would really help farmers out? Slavery! Child slavery.