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Gasoline Alley, 4/12/24

It’s not news exactly that conflict is the engine of good stories, but I have to say that Gasoline Alley feels like it’s rediscovering this for the first time in years. When it was just Walt and Sheezix on a quixotic quest to stop Electric Acres from happening? Snoozeville. But now that I know it’s turning brother against brother, and fiancé against fianceée? This is it. I’m all in. I hope it devolves very quickly into graphic and gratuitous violence, while Walt wanders around shouting “What’d you say? What’d she say?” until a hurled piece of debris finally puts him out of his misery. It’ll be the sort of thing where Rod Serling steps out of the shadows and explains that this world may be more like ours than we care to admit, until he too is killed in mid-sentence by a hurled piece of debris.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/12/24

And yeah, sure, that sounds like it would be a lot to process, emotionally, but don’t worry, if the anxiety gets too much you can always turn to Rex Morgan, M.D., which just started a storyline about little kids making brownies. It will be extremely uneventful and last six to fifteen weeks.

Mark Trail, 4/12/24

I don’t know, this doesn’t seem like it requires some kind of big investigation. Horses are big and pretty off-putting — they run fast, they have razor-sharp feet, their teeth are real nightmarish if you look too closely at them, and so forth. They’re nice to watch run around, I admit, but I don’t trust them, so why would I want them near my company? And why would it be bad to ask the Bureau of Land Management to help clear them out? The horses are on the dang land that they’re supposed to manage! What do I pay taxes for?

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Gasoline Alley, 4/10/24

You know, after all these years, I still experience the joy of discovery from reading the newspaper comics. Or, well, at least sometimes I read something like today’s Gasoline Alley, sigh heavily, and then Google “gasoline alley family tree” in hopes of making sense of it, but then am just a little bit charmed when I find a graphic like this:

That comes from a page on Hobbylark dot com that also includes an annotated timeline of important events in the strip lore, such as “Wilmer admits to being a sap, a wart, and a drip, but claims the Army did a job on him!” (November 20, 1945), “Corky and Hope move into a new apartment – landlord is Pert!” (May 6, 1954), and “Melba decides to take advantage of leap year to move Rufus along towards a wedding” (July 5, 1976, and yet somehow Melba is now the mayor and still hasn’t sealed the deal). Anyway, from this documentation I have confirmed that Sheezix and Corky are brothers, and Corky runs the diner (in fact, according to that timeline, 1950 was the “year of the Diner”). And because Corky has decided to embrace the town name change, that means that the coming Gasoline Alley vs. Electric Acres civil war will literally pit brother against brother, so I guess I’m finally coming around to being interested in it.

Judge Parker, 4/10/24

“He’s going to kill your mother, April. Then he’s going to kill you! The he goes after Charlotte, your daughter! It never ends! He’ll just keep going after you or your female relatives! Your male relatives will be fine! Certainly any of your relatives who happen to be the title character in the strip are safe! But it’s the principle of the thing!”

Hi and Lois, 4/10/24

Big news, everyone! Trixie seems to have grasped the concept of the linear flow of time! Also, Hi and Lois did a strip without a joke, but I guess that’s not “big news” per se.

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Gasoline Alley, 4/2/24

I realize that a lot of fiction essentially consists of making up a guy to get mad at so you can be happy when he loses, but I feel like Walt and Skeezix seething with rage and despair because a town name change has been proposed by a guy named Elbert Imeswine is a little much. He’s not going to do it, guys, and he’s not going to get elected! This is the sort of thing that wouldn’t happen in real life and extremely wouldn’t happen in a strip that has the same name as the town in question, especially when all the strip has keeping it alive as a media property is the fact that its name is deeply engrained enough in our collective consciousness as to elicit vague feelings of recognition from people who have never read it, or read a newspaper.

Pardon My Planet, 4/2/24

Halos are derived in origin from an artistic practice in many cultures of depicting holy or divine figures with a glowing circle behind their heads, implying an internal radiance. Things got weird as artists learned how to create more naturalistic perspective in their work, and these circles became a sort of floating disk (as in this 15th century painting) before evolving into the glowing hula hoop we know and love today. Anyway, it’s nice to see the disk form making a comeback in today’s Pardon My Planet, but that’s about the only thing that’s nice about it. Hey, Pardon My Planet, you familiar with Matthew 22:30? “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven”? Heresy much?

Pluggers, 4/2/24

Oh my gosh, this plugger seems to have discovered the Holy Grail! I’m sure that newspaper includes information that will transform our knowledge of history and religious studies; commodities prices are probably among the less splashy bits of data it contains, but they’re still important for helping us understand the time period.