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Gasoline Alley, 11/18/22

Big Good Some news, everybody: Rufus has managed to use his sexual wiles to help Walt make his big dream of hanging off the back of a garbage truck come true. The Sanitation Department will definitely get some good publicity out of this, unless Walt falls off and terribly injures himself, which is actually a pretty likely scenario. I mean, that’s why they banned sanitation workers from doing this in the first place, and none of those guys are supercentenarian World War I vets. In that case, the publicity will end up being pretty bad: lawsuits from the family, Denzel Washington giving a press conference disavowing knowledge of or participation in this stunt, etc.

Marvin and Dennis the Menace, 11/18/22

I find comics where the punchline is “Ha ha, lady can’t cook even though cooking is lady’s job” fairly distasteful, and have come to conclusion that I like the ones where it’s the lady’s son slagging on her cooking even worse than the ones where it’s her husband doing it. That seems a bit unfair, since a grown man could easily cook for himself and a little kid couldn’t, but you have remember that these jokes are written by and for grown men, which make the mommy issues tied up in them all the more distressingly apparent.

Gil Thorp, 11/18/22

There’s something funny to me about how “wet” is emphasized unnaturally here. “I heard you still wet the bed. Whereas me? I dry the bed. That’s what I call it when I make a real cakey poop when I’m sleeping.”

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Gil Thorp, 11/16/22

It’s been a while since I’ve kept you up to date on the various plot threads in Gil Thorp, a strip that appears to be on a breakneck pace to cover all the Teen Issues before comics and/or teens are declared illegal, but the important thing to know here is that (a) Milford High held a hyper-realistic mass shooter drill, presumably with help from an overly enthusiastic theater department, that left Keri sobbing uncontrollably in front of their peers, and (b) a hitherto unseen Milford student named Allyson is one of three hitherto unseen Milford students who have died of a drug overdose this semester, so naturally these threads come together with a fistfight at a funeral. I’ve noticed what struck me as a fairly deliberate choice to show Keri sporting chunky rings across four fingers this whole semester and I’m quite pleased to have seen this little detail pay off so violently! Anyway, I deem this as the greatest Newspaper Comic Strip Funeral Fight (Continuity Strip Division) since the Great Rex Morgan Coffinside Strangulation of 2012.

Crock, 11/16/22

Man, sometimes you have to admire it when a newspaper comic strip manages to slip a grammatically correct but semantically absurd “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” type sentence in there. “The government gave my cousin Kyle a great buy on his farm” sure is a sequence of words, all right! Did you manage to parse out what they meant? Did you successfully interpret them to potentially mean that Kyle still owned the farm, but the government was able to do things like bury toxic waste there? I myself did not.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/9/22

Oh, sorry folks, I haven’t been keeping you up to date on the antics of “Mud Mountain Murphy!” Well, after doing some mild flirting at the diner, Mud Mountain Murphy ate a truly superhuman amount of food — and, like, I mean that, it was cartoonish, no real person would or could eat that much — with seemingly no ill effects. I say seemingly because that hesitation and those beads of sweat say that we might, in fact, be in store for some ill effects! It would be easy and juvenile to make a joke about a “mud mountain” in Mud Mountain’s pants, but honestly that’s a best case scenario for him, especially given that Rex Morgan, M.D., occasionally remembers the M.D. in its name and we might be about to see a massive on-stage coronary event.

Beetle Bailey, 11/9/22

Sure, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries appears to be one of the few newspaper-adjacent entities still comfortably in the black, but I think it shows some hubris to do a whole newspaper comic strip where the joke is “Newspapers are literally garbage, good only for wiping up spills, and everyone but doddering old men know it!”

Gil Thorp, 11/9/22

In an earlier time, when only a few major media outlets dominated small markets like Milford, it was easy for Gil to cement his dominance and protect his career: he simply had his allies in the press publish stories proclaiming his victory in games he had lost! You begin to see why Marty Moon acts like he’s such a crusader for truth: you may not like his methods, but at least he’s offering an alternative voice out there.