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Gasoline Alley, 9/10/13

As usual, I haven’t been keeping you up-to-date on the extremely low-stakes antics in progress over at Gasoline Alley, and as usual I don’t feel a bit sorry about it, because as usual you’re not missing much. The short version is that Slim’s daughter Gretchen has an Italian boyfriend named Guido who’s supposed to be flying in to meet up with her and her dad today, only it turns out … he hasn’t! And in response to Slim’s fairly straightforward and perhaps largely rhetorical question, Gretchen gives an extremely horrifying answer. “Where’s Guido? I’m not sure, but it’s a good bet that he’s still safely contained by a layer of healthy skin! Yep, we can be reasonably certain that Guido’s empty skin-sack isn’t hanging in a display case in some monster’s nightmarish trophy room, while Guido himself is somewhere else entirely! The chances that his entire body has been flensed by some madman, leaving him a shambling, screaming open wound, wandering around oozing blood everywhere, are probably no greater than one in four!”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/10/13

Speaking of everyone’s worst nightmares of horror and madness, I’m sure the real reason Bull goes through the lost and found box every morning is as some sort of coping strategy to avoid thinking about how depressing life in Westview is for him and everyone he knows, but I do want to point out that he appears to be a holding aloft a severed human hand in the second panel.

Hi and Lois, 9/10/13

You hear that, world? Hi and Lois may be a bland legacy strip that nobody has any sort of strong feelings about one way or another, but at least it’s not going to lower itself to Marvin’s level and do an endless series of poop jokes.

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Slylock Fox (panel), 8/11/13

In a neglected roadside nature museum sits a dusty diorama labeled “The Eagle.” But there is no eagle — just the shattered skeleton of a fox lying on a patch of bloodstained dirt near a few tufts of reddish fur and what might be part of an ear. The yellowing card reads, “The diet of the American Bald Eagle is almost entirely fish. An eagle will not attack a fox unless it competes for the eagle’s food or otherwise provokes it.”

What I’m saying is don’t piss off the eagle, Sly. I mean just look at him, Jeez.

Beetle Bailey (panels), 8/11/13

Oh look, it’s Beetle’s Dad! Did you know he’s also the father of Lois Flagston from Hi and Lois? His wife starves him until he completes the work she’s assigned! Just like in the Army!

Hi and Lois, 8/11/13

No starvation for Hi — Lois keeps meat on those bones with a steady diet of nutritious soups. But his family’s relentless petty demands give him no peace, and drive him by degrees to the farthest margins of his home. Lois is blind to his suffering — this is just the way families are, isn’t it?

Judge Parker (panel), 8/11/13

I’ll spare you the cheesecake, money porn, and blocky “romantic” banter (well, most of it) in today’s Judge Parker, but floating there in the final panel is proof that Randy’s fianceé is an original badass. That’s right — the minute she and Randy split up to evade the mystery woman in the floppy hat, CIApril confronted her and stone-cold threw her hat in the water. Final warning, too: if she stalks them even one more time, April will tell all the girls in homeroom Mystery Gal’s a total skank.

— Uncle Lumpy

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Edge City, 8/6/13

Oh hey it’s Edna and Morris Not-Ardin, off to visit America’s battlefields in their new RV. I hope they have fun and all, but what is the deal with this guy’s face? Has he got two mouths? An extra ear, with teeth? Is he some kind of weird Mr. Magoo/Popeye hybrid? Is that an enormous chaw of Mail Pouch parked in what just might be his cheek? For me, his image keeps flipping back and forth like one of those ambiguous figures from Psych 101:

Edna lets it all pass. She’s got her own problems, coping with the oral aftermath of her horrific trombone accident.

Hi and Lois, 8/6/13

And then one day, Hi Flagston just gave up. “Fetch me the gin, Lois.”

Apartment 3-G, 8/6/13

Margo snuffs out an alarming flicker of empathy as she spins around the room.

Judge Parker, 8/6/13

I only read Judge Parker for the articles, but here’s some eye candy — and a challenge — for the oglers in the audience. The challenge is this: do oglers of pretty comic-strip women ogle other representations of pretty women, such as mannequins? If so, would they ogle drawings of mannequins, such as those presented in panel one? Are features like heads and knees essential to this exercise? And how far does it go, the ogling: would it extend to a photo in a cartoon of a sketch of the shadow of a statue of a woman? What role does the quality of representation play, relative to the attractiveness of the original subject? I have to say, Judge Parker wouldn’t have been my first source for a deconstruction of male gaze theory, but there you have it.

Rhymes with Orange, 8/6/13

Lady, your problem is not the obsolete phone — it’s the renegade car.

— Uncle Lumpy