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Gasoline Alley, 6/30/16

Hey, remember when Gasoline Alley went on and on and on about scrapbooking, for no discernable reason? Well, you’ll beg for scrapbooking hijinx once we get five weeks deep into … NUMISMATICS FOLLIES!!!!!!

Spider-Man, 6/30/16

Spider-Man’s spider-sense (the relative sense of a spider) is generally interpreted as offering a vague premonition of danger, so you think it’d be useless for helping him figure out magic spells. But this plotline was in real danger of becoming the most boring thing in Spider-Man history, so his powers were spot-on in bringing it to a close as quickly as possible.

Mary Worth, 6/30/16

Good news! Mary Worth is here to help, by asking the groundskeeper to carry some heavy objects! Please do not ask Mary for further help or make eye contact again with her in the future. Thank you for your time.

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Spider-Man, 6/10/16

Haha, has it really been a month since I updated you on Spidey’s dumb adventures? Well, here’s what happened: Xandu used the Wand of Watoomb to defeat Nightmare and bring his scary nightmare-dimension to New York’s Washington Square Park, and then used the Wand of Watoomb to take over innocent New Yorkers’ minds and have them beat up Spider-Man. But then Spider-Man started winning. How could this be? Could Spidey actually be using his super-powers to defeat an enemy??? No, don’t be ridiculous: he was merely a puppet being used by Doctor Strange, a much more powerful and talented superhero. This has got to be his most relaxing victory to date! He didn’t even have to do any of the work! The only way it could’ve been better if he had been able to watch TV during the process, somehow!

Gasoline Alley, 6/10/16

I don’t know what’s funnier here: that there was concern that this plot-advancing untruth might cast improper aspersions on Gertie’s pie-baking skills, or that we’re expected to believe that anybody edits Gasoline Alley.

Mary Worth, 6/10/16

I sincerely hope that this is the first Mary Worth comic that at least one person in the world has seen, and that that person assumes the strip is about an unusually cheerful woman who works in a prison library.

Pluggers, 6/10/16

You’re a plugger if you take decent care of your car but you’re dying of heart disease.

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Gasoline Alley, 5/26/16

Gasoline Alley seems a little too square to engage in metanarrative chicanery, but how else should we interpret today’s strip? After weeks and weeks of a boring, convoluted prison break storyline featuring some of the strip’s most irritating recurring characters, we suddenly switch back to Walt, complaining that the ceremony in which he received the Golden Cane Of Agedness from the mayor, which we never saw in the strip, wasn’t covered properly in the media. Poor Walt! Anyway, I’m very intrigued that whatever municipality he lives in has an expensive object that can literally only be taken from its owner by prying it out of their dead, cold hands.

Mark Trail, 5/26/16

OK, let’s be real: the last few weeks of “Mark ’n’ friends try and fail to escape from the cave” have been super boring. But today at least Chekhov’s rock-climbing gun, which was prominently mounted on the wall of the set in the first act, finally goes off. We also some mid-air derring do, as Mark and Carina almost tumble to their death off a cave waterfall but Mark saves them at the last minute by jamming his rock … climbing … axe … thingy into the cliff wall. And kudos to the strip for taking as much care to acknowledge the biology of Homo sapiens as it does for the other animals it covers; whereas most action movies feature characters grabbing onto things in mid-fall and suffering no ill-effects, Mark has saved himself and Carina at the cost of shattering his rib cage, just as he would in real life.

Family Circus, 5/26/16

Haha, I love PJ’s look of heavy-lidded disdain here. “God damn it, Jeffy, enough with this ‘everyone has a valid perspective’ bullshit. Kill the wolf! Kill it!”