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Crock, 8/10/18

So, uh, seven years ago Bill Rechin, the creator of Crock, died, and then a year after that his son Kevin, who had taken over, said that continuing the strip made him depressed so he wasn’t going to do it anymore, and, uh, well, it’s 2018 now and Crock still appears on King Features’ website (and presumably in print newspapers, who can say, someone who still subscribes to a print newspaper, I guess) with “©2018” at the bottom, and I just have never really gotten a handle on whether they’re reruns or someone is still churning these out or what. What I’m saying is, it might’ve been just barely possible in 2011 to imagine that there was a living person who believed that “chat rooms” were a kind of online space that was common and that “Dear chat room” was a normal and believable way someone introduced themselves there. Today, though, when we have Facebook groups like “Carrion Eaters Discussion Group (Positive Vibes Only)” and subreddits like /r/eatersofthedead and probably darkweb sites where you can use bitcoin to buy meat at exactly the right level of rottedness for your needs — well, this strip needs to get with the times, is what I’m saying.

Family Circus, 8/10/18

Jeffy is at that developmental stage where he thinks that the ability to record language via writing is “hip” and “with it” but can’t actually read yet. I guess Big Daddy Keane was banking on at least one of the literate kids being with the younger ones at all times, forgetting what he ought to know deep in his bones: nobody wants to hang around with Jeffy.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/10/18

Because I hate myself, I actually dug through my archives to find the last wedding they had at Montoni’s, which was apparently back in 2014, although that was when Wally and Rachel tried to get married outdoors but were driven by a vengeful God into Northeast Ohio’s most depressing pizza parlor. Speaking of hating yourself, though, Cory and Rocky look to be actually contemplating using the family’s grease-stained sadness hole as their Plan A, possibly because it’s the only retail business in town still in business other than Komix Korner and they still have just the tiniest shred of dignity left.

Gasoline Alley, 8/10/18

“I always say — most of our material circumstances are determined by inherited wealth, and meritocracy is a lie!”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/10/18

THAT’S MY BOY! THIS IS THE HIGH POINT OF MY LIFE! MY MARRIAGE TO YOUR MOTHER, YOUR FIRST STEPS — ALL BULLSHIT! THIS IS THE BEST GAME OF PINBALL I’VE EVER PLAYED AND I’M GONNA SPEND MY FEW REMAINING YEARS WATCHING IT OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN, SO KEEP FILMING OR SO HELP ME GOD YOU’LL REGRET IT

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Mary Worth, 7/30/18

Oh, huh, so it seems that Tommy’s jailhouse conversion was specifically to Roman Catholicism, interesting! You can understand why he finds it an attractive faith, seeing as he seems to have wildly misunderstood the purpose of the sacrament of confession; apparently he thinks that if there’s something you should probably tell somebody in your life, admitting it in the confessional instead is functionally the same thing! I feel bad for this priest, who’s probably had to hear the tales of Tommy’s meth-dealing days, like, five times by now.

Gil Thorp, 7/30/18

Finally, the “spring” baseball plot is over, and now we have just a few short weeks for a wacky summertime storyline! Clearly it’s not enough time to top such classics as “Kaz gets a job as a rock star’s bodyguard” or “Marty Moon gets grifted at golf” or “Gil does a pro wrestling match for charity,” but it seems to involve the local kids getting into the latest extreme sports craze, RainCycling, so I’m excited to see where it goes.

Gasoline Alley, 7/30/18

Like many characters of color working as servants in fiction, Gertie has a sassy personality and not much of an inner life to which we’re privy. Today, though, we learn a little bit of how she passes her time in her off hours: with lots and lots of Wookiee porn.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/30/18

REX MORGAN, M.D., PRESENTS: TWO-FISTED TALES OF GETTING TO THE AIRPORT ON TIME

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Spider-Man, 7/15/18

I have, of course, persistently refused to go out of my way to learn any of the lore behind the various superheroes who dominate our pop culture and the international economy today, which is just as well because with all the reboots and so forth the characters’ pasts are ever-changing anyway, but my understanding is that Peter Parker got into the stringer newspaper photography game not because of any burning desire to be a journalist but because he knew the Bugle’s management was obsessed with running pictures of Spider-Man and he was uniquely positioned to sell them said pictures and so it was a way for him to make money without doing too much extra work. The desire to not do too much extra work is of course one of Newspaper Spider-Man’s defining characteristics, so it really fits in well in this iteration of the Spidey multiverse; being a stringer photographer for a daily paper also pays very, very little, which fits in nicely with Newspaper Spider-Man’s overall stupidity as well. What I’m trying to say is that I’m not really buying Peter’s moral dilemma here! The idea that Peter has gotten a taste of journalistic fame and now he wants more is only marginally more believable than the idea that he cares about the Iron Fist’s privacy or whatever! I reiterate an idea I put forth over a decade ago: Peter should just use his spider-powers to take pictures of celebrities and sell them to TMZ or the like. The moral stakes are lower all around, and presumably the gig will be so lucrative that he’ll eventually stop fighting crime altogether.

Gasoline Alley, 7/15/18

I don’t know that I would start my Sunday comic with a warning to the reader that, though they may think they’re safe from baffling and enraging faux-rustic wordplay, the next few panels are about to prove them very, very very wrong. But I’m not the guy currently in charge of the century-old Gasoline Alley intellectual property, I guess!