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Gasoline Alley, 7/19/23

I always respect Gasoline Alley’s commitment to doing shambolic, pointless plots that seem to go on forever, and we’re in the middle of a real stemwinder at the moment. To recap: Rufus is still in the hospital due to his head injury, still has amnesia, and is still showing more skin than I’m comfortable with. Today’s strip is noteworthy because of the comical terror in which these two rustics regard the Automatic Robotic Techno-nurse. This can’t be the result of sheer ludditism, since they’ve taken technological advances like CAT scans in stride in the course of their medical adventure, so it must be that they’re shocked that anyone would go through the trouble of building a humanoid robot that carries pills and decanters in its hands for this purpose, when an automated and wheeled cart would be much more efficient and easier to implement.

Dick Tracy, 7/19/23

Speaking of plots that go nowhere, Dick Tracy is in the middle of a plot that has been going so nowhere that I haven’t bothered featuring it here much, though I will tell you that there was a whole week where Dick became obsessed with a chunk of plaster found at a crime scene that was from a very specific Art Deco decoration on the front of a very specific building. Anyway, you’d think a guy that much into historic urban architecture would at least consider that the story behind moving trucks showing up in a largely abandoned warehouse district might be “gentrification” rather than “crime.”

Judge Parker, 7/19/23

Good news, everyone! A sweaty guy in a suit holding a surprisingly large knife has shown up in Judge Parker, and there’s never been a soap opera plot that couldn’t benefit from that kind of development.

Gil Thorp, 7/19/23

Gil Thorp has an intermittent tradition of doing wacky summer plotlines like “Coach Kaz becomes a rock star’s bodyguard” or “Marty Moon gets grifted at golf” or “Gil does a charity pro wrestling match with a guy whose angle is that he has Alzheimers.” But will any of those be able to hold a candle to 2023’s Summer Of The Throuple?

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Judge Parker, 7/11/23

Josh, the world cries out with one voice, how’s Sam and Abbey’s sex vacation going? Well, they just had just gotten out of cell phone coverage range when someone intentionally (?) rammed their car and ran off, leaving an unconscious toddler behind, who Sam and Abbey decided to carry with them on the miles-long walk to their cabin, where a landline awaited them. So, uh, the sex vacation was not going great, in other words! But good news: the little tyke woke up and, understandably, immediately started screaming and fleeing into the woods away from the total strangers who were taking her who knows where. So … sex vacation is back on? More on this story as it develops.

Gil Thorp, 7/11/23

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy (with Gil’s entire family no-shows at his big awards ceremony), the second time as farce (Gil’s kids there to cheer him on but Mimi off somewhere else, presumably banging her golf coach).

Mary Worth, 7/11/23

Now, you might think the implication here is that Mary was only one of many people who reported ambiguous but suspicious dog park adjacent behavior to the police, but let’s look at the facts. Mary is a careful and methodical person and she doesn’t pop a bunch of popcorn in order to gloatingly eat it in front of the 6 o’clock news on the off chance that one phone call did the trick. No, I think that just off panel, there are pile of burner phones and an electronic voice-altering gadget that helped her make sure that justice was done.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/11/23

Sorry to have misspoken last week: Rex and June’s loutish neighbor lost an eye to his post-July 4th fireworks, not a hand, and the whole family was too drunk to drive themselves to the hospital so Rex volunteered to do it. Anyway, Travis is “turning that frown upside down” by thinking about how understaffed emergency rooms are and all the delicious pills they probably just leave out unattended!

Dustin, 7/11/23

Man, this sort of dead-eyed literalism is more menacing than anything Dennis ever came up with. I guess it’s what you’d expect from a child who’s decided to make exactly one friend, and that friend is an adult, and that adult is Dustin.

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Dustin, 6/24/23

Being a diagnosable Twitter addict, like I am, is not particularly rewarding, but it does provide you with a few fairly useless special powers. The ranks of Twitter addicts are fairly small — the number of daily users has never matched networks like Facebook or Instagram or TikTok — but is disproportionally made up of journalists and academics and tech “thought leaders,” so ideas and memes that originate on Twitter often eventually leak out into the real, non-Twitter, world, so one of those aforementioned useless powers is the ability to spot one of the aforementioned ideas/memes and think “Oh, no, this bastard is inflicting a bad Twitter thing on the hapless normies.” For a while, one of the bad Twitter things has been accounts that post pictures of Eastern European models in various contrived everyday situations accompanied with text like “You encounter this beautiful woman in the market. What is your romantic approach?” The goal for these accounts is either to push pickup artist bullshit or just get enough followers so that they can eventually pivot to crypto scam artistry, and I regret to inform you that it appears that at least someone at Dustin HQ has been sucked in.

Dick Tracy, 6/24/23

Dick Tracy hasn’t gone in for nightmarish ultraviolence in years, but current the creative team still likes to unsettle and disturb in their own way, like by offering unpleasant closeups of normal human mouths in action.

Hi and Lois, 6/24/23

This is a good addition to my “Hi and Lois is embracing Thirsty’s characterization as the neighborhood drunk” files. Honestly, the combination of the bright red nose and the fact that he’s clearly passed out in his lawn chair with his mouth hanging open while children gawk at him is a little too much! Getting a little grim! Might want to ratchet it back!

Judge Parker, 6/24/23

Good news, everyone! Sam and Abbey are going off on a trip together to have sex! Sam’s wearing a dumb baseball hat and they almost-matched their ecru shirts because that’s the sort of bland shit that really gets them going, I guess. Hopefully we’ll be treated to the same uncanny flavor of sexuality that marked their last recorded erotic encounter.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/24/23

“Oh, wow, you’ve managed to parry exactly one question with a confident but unquantified assertion. I’m sold!”