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Gasoline Alley, 12/21/12

As usual, I haven’t been keeping you up on Gasoline Alley’s desultory antics, so let me just do so now very quickly: li’l Boog has been persecuted by bullies, including one nicknamed “Bear,” and they lured him out to the woods to beat the crap out of him, but then an actual bear showed up, and now we get to today where, it is revealed, Boog speaks the secret language of bears, and can command them to do his bidding. Did he learn the ursine tongue when his neglectful grandfather let a bear carry him off, years ago? Probably! But rather than satisfyingly going all 2 Kings 2:23-25 on these kids, Boog the Bearomancer just urges this vicious grizzly to make nice with his “friends”, who have been nothing but mean to him. Unless a crippling sense of shame is a crueler punishment than bloody dismemberment?

Spider-Man, 12/21/12

Do I have an unreasoning hatred of Newspaper Spider-Man? Maaayyyybe. I was all set to go on an unhinged rant about this strip’s dastardly use of “heist” as a transitive verb — a usage I had never heard before — but fortunately I looked it up first. Turns out the use of the word as a verb actually predated its use as a noun, by about 10 years! It’s a variation of “hoist,” and was first used as a slang term for shoplifting in the 1920s. So even the world’s crappiest superhero comic can still teach me things about etymologies, which are among my favorite bits of language trivia. Thanks, Newspaper Spider-Man!

Better Half, 12/21/12

Harriet’s friend is way too sleepy for sex.

B.C., 12/21/12

Having trouble getting into the Christmas spirit? Here’s a cartoon about Santa having trouble not pooping his pants!

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Mark Trail, 11/20/12

Mark’s remarkably non-traumatizing kidnap idyl is still continuing apace, as the good people of Not Guerilla Island prepare to make a scurmptious feast from the fish Mark and Pop caught, and … say, what’s the story with that little guy in the white shirt in the second panel?

OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHAT’S GOING ON WITH HIS TONGUE? It’s not … human. Sure, you could try to claim that it’s just a weird little semi-circle crudely drawn onto a pre-existing clip art face, but I think the safe bet is that this child is an alien lizard-man wearing a meat-sack disguise, just like everyone else on the island, and once they get enough ransom money to repair their spacecraft, they’ll swarm all over Mark and Andy, their razor-sharp teeth tearing away all their flesh in minutes, leaving bleached skeletons behind.

Hi and Lois, 11/20/12

I’m not sure how we’re supposed to parse the politics here — are we intended to be patriotically enraged by cheap Chinese labor, or are the industrious low-wage workers of Shenzhen’s factories supposed to compare favorably to the smug American repairman? I do know that this is a strip that has never exactly focused on little visual details, which makes the lovingly rendered stitching on the repairman’s visible underpants all the more unsettling.

Heathcliff, 11/20/12

I’m certainly not opposed to Heathcliff being called to account for his many crimes in a court of law, but I do have some questions about the fish that the guy next to him is holding. Specifically: what’s the deal with the fish? Is it evidence in one of the many cases about to be tried simultaneously? Is it bait? Was Heathcliff, the master criminal, lured into the Man’s courtroom by some guy waving a delicious, pungent dead fish around? Because that would be kind of disappointing.

Gasoline Alley, 11/20/12

Here are some characters in Gasoline Alley! I guess you’re supposed to like them, even though their black, beady, inhuman eyes are the stuff of your most terrifying nightmares.

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So ends the Comics Curmudgeon Fall 2012 fundraiser. Thank you, generous readers!

Gasoline Alley, 11/16/12

Any hopes of social acceptance for coal-eyed monster Boog — from the cruel attentions of bullies to his prospects of a future mate — hang on the slender thread of his mother’s ability to keep his school — nay, the entire town — stuffed and brain-addled from her carbohydrate-laden snacks. Bake, Hoogie, bake! Bake like you’ve never baked before!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/16/12

Rex Morgan, M.D. plots are notorious for starting from an intriguing premise — Rex and June investigate a brothel — and then larding in so many trivial digressions that readers lose track, and eventually interest. And so we have Honey’s plumbing emergency, Ginger’s stockkeeping crisis, Edna’s heart attack and Herb’s gratitude, June’s free clam lunch (with extra free crab cakes — come back again for more free!), Dolores’s battle with cancer, Nurse Amber Thomas coaxing Rex into a TV spot for CPR training and his consequent public acclaim, Ginger’s Rex-poaching plans and backstory conflicts with the Marine-pilot wife of an former paramour and scheming clamshack waitress Rose. The shame in all this is that when the whole rickety edifice finally collapses in a hail of gunfire or ceremonial award of yet another boat, no one will much notice, let alone care.

Gil Thorp, 11/16/12

Talented and yet somehow Irish footballer Terry Gallagher has let his largely-fictional triumphs on the American gridiron go to his head! Here, the Cool Girls conspire in some vague iPhone-related plot to take him down a peg, because if the stars of the NFL have shown us anything, it’s that a deep and abiding humility is the key to football success.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/16/12

OK so Big Walnut Tech is obviously a Designated Villain in Funky Winkerbean: they routinely crush the Westview Scapegoats in football, and it was team star Frankie who got Dead Lisa pregnant (she was not yet dead at the time), so that Les could heroically give her a lift to the hospital and the Fairviews could get Darrin to adopt. And today Big Walnut Tech bests the Westview High crowd yet again, this time by remote control.

Sounds like a pretty interesting place, doesn’t it, this Big Walnut Tech? I’d like to know more about how their coach managed to maintain a consistently successful football program over so many years, and how they built an academic environment that develops clearly marketable skills in fields like robotics. And what about Frankie? Did he build on his high-school social and athletic successes to become a man of consequence? Were his dreams bigger than Westview?

I like to think of Frankie taking his final box of trophies out to the curb and drawing a last deep breath of Westview air, with its faint smell of bad pizza and flop sweat — then firing up his trusty old van, scene of so many conquests, and driving it down the sad main street out of town forever without a single glance in the rearview.

Judge Parker, 11/16/12

All along, Avery was just looking for a place to hang his hat and park his trout. He would see it clear enough if he took off those ridiculous glasses.

— Uncle Lumpy