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Gasoline Alley, 1/5/12

I won’t waste my time or yours trying to explain the Gasoline Alley plot that led up to this — it’s all summarized in the first two panels here, and it took months, and Slim and Clovia were very angry with each other about it — but I do think it’s worth pointing out that all this drama has very suddenly been resolved with no action on the characters’ part, and with enough time left over to slip in a joke about toilets to boot. It’s kind of disorienting to see it all end so abruptly, and on a Thursday too. I’m thinking that the original ending, which involved yelling and knives, was nixed by the syndicate at the last minute. The remaining three days until the next plotline starts will just consist of Slim and Clovia standing around awkwardly.

For Better Or For Worse, 1/5/12

Ha ha, For Better Or For Worse, remember that thing? When it stopped with the ongoing storylines and became mostly reruns of young versions of the Pattersons talking in weird fake cute-speak it stopped being all that interesting to me, but I still feel compelled to read it daily. I also feel compelled to try to figure out, based on the art, whether we’re seeing old strips or new ones injected into the old continuity, and I think these are the latter, and I’m thinking: what if Lynn Johnston suddenly feels compelled to seize the reins and start aging the characters all over again, only this time John and Elly have a contentious divorce, leaving April to vanish in a limbo of never-was and Michael and Elizabeth with terrible emotional scars? Except look how they turned out when their parents stayed married, maybe they’ll be healthy, functional adults this way, who can say. Michael’s already showing a streak of self-loathing that, with years of therapy, might serve as a counterweight to his unbearable smugness.

Gil Thorp, 1/5/12

I’m extremely amused by the low-key Mudlark reaction in panel two, though you know that deep down they’re thinking that a Pokémon tattoo would be kind of awesome. They’re also playing it cool so as not to anger the disembodied claw-thing that’s casually draped itself on Punisher t-shirt dude’s shoulder.

Mark Trail, 1/5/12

“Yes, why don’t I come and hang out with you and Sally and your blind dog for a few days? Sweet Christ, I’d do anything to get away from my wife and adopted son.”

Beetle Bailey, 1/5/12

After billions of dollars were spent, the Defense Department began to suspect that Camp Swampy may not have been the best test site for its robotic supersoldier experiment.

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Curtis, 1/3/12

I do need my Christmas-to-New-Year’s break from the site to recharge my comic-mocking jets, but it does always make me sad that I end up missing most of the Curtis Kwanzaa madness. For those not in the know, each Kwanzaatime (note to self: find out if “Kwanzaatime” is a word; if so, attempt to register kwanzaatime.com) the strip takes a break from its main characters to offer up a tale, generally set in a stylized pre-modern African locale, built around some kind of lesson. It also usually features hallucinatory madness, with bat-winged bears and giant telepathic otters and whatnot. This year’s story has been not quite that level of insane, though it has featured a protagonist so traumatically ugly that his features cannot be drawn, lest the newspaper comics readership be driven mad by the hideousness. Today it appears that we’re learning the tale’s moral: even if you are mind-warpingly ugly, people will like you if you’re rich.

Apartment 3-G, 1/3/12

Since I am now becoming as mired in nostalgia as the comics I mock, there’s nothing that thrills me more than when continuity strips bring back random minor ancillary characters from the past. Take Mim, for instance! She was Lu Ann’s teenage niece who showed up at the apartment one day after she got knocked up by some dude named Chuck and then Margo tried to sell the baby but it didn’t work and then she had the baby and that’s the last we saw of her, I’m pretty sure? Along the way we learned about Margo’s unreasoning hatred of the New York Public Library. Anyway, that was in 2005, because I’m super old, and so that baby is seven now and Mim is an adult and has shorter hair and probably has some nice comforting things to say to Lu Ann or whatever. I can’t wait!

Mark Trail, 1/3/12

The last Mark Trail adventure ended with Mark not only refusing to write about the hot story that led him (presumably on his employer’s dime) to the Canadian woods, but also erasing Kelly Welly’s camera so she couldn’t write about it either. Looks like Mark finally screwed Kelly — just not the way she wanted! Ha ha! See, because Kelly desperately wants to have sex with Mark, but he finds anything have to do with “those parts” “down there” confusing and scary.

Anyway, Mark’s line in panel two would be pretty high on the extensive list of Things Said By Characters In Mark Trail That Would Never, Ever Be Uttered By Actual Humans (Ranked In Order Of Improbability). Mark’s facial expression also strikes me as just a wee bit smug. “Tommy and his wife are struggling to scrape by on a dog-trainer’s salary in this ongoing, grinding recession! But don’t worry, honey, since I write for a print magazine aimed at outdoorspersons, we have all the money we need. I can even refuse to write articles if I want to protect the privacy of weird bear-domesticating hermit ladies!”

Crankshaft, 1/3/12

I really love the look of shock on and guilt on Pam’s face! I assume that it means that the family is in fact building a prison cell for their hated matriarch.

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Hey, everybody, I’m back! And let’s get right into the horror, because when you think of the holidays around the end of the year, you think of sheer gut-wrenching terror. So, what was the most terrifying event that the newspaper comics industry belched out during my absence?

Panel from Judge Parker, 12/23/11

Was it when Randy’s language-generation unit started shorting out, producing a sentence that was almost but not quite something an English-speaking human would say?

Panel from Gil Thorp, 12/24/11

Was it when Gil stared at you with his meaty face and empty, soulless eyes, wishing you a Merry Christmas as a thousand tiny explosions twinkled behind him?

Panel from Mary Worth, 12/24/11

Was it when Mary Worth tried to make your head explode, with her mind?

Panel from Judge Parker, 12/25/11

Was it the moment that you realized that you were forbidden to even open your Christmas presents in the privacy of your own home until Sophie gave you permission?

Panel from Apartment 3-G, 12/26/11

Was it when Lu Ann started hearing Margo’s voice, even when Margo wasn’t present?

Panel from Beetle Bailey, 12/29/11

Was it when lovable Zero was revealed to be Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies?

Panel from Mark Trail, 1/1/12

Was it when we learned that the deformed child-thing known as “Rusty” was dimly aware that time passes outside the Lost Forest compound, and that humans traditionally make “resolutions” to mark the beginning of a new year? What sort of “resolutions” does the Rusty-creature “need” to make?

Dick Tracy, 12/24/11

Anyway, terrifying as all of those were, none of them could compare to the night when Dick Tracy and his wife desecrated the memory of the baby Jesus by engaging in Linus-Sally sex roleplay. Gross!

Panel from Apartment 3-G, 12/28/11

When Dan Diller scrawled “TOMMIE” on one of his old Allman Brothers 8-tracks and told her it was her new album, that was really more “pathetic” than “terrifying.”

And what does the new year have in store for us? More of Spider-Man dodging his responsibilities, I bet!

Spider-Man, 1/2/12

“I was about to tackle these hoods myself, until Thor came along! Hopefully someone will come along soon to take care of Thor for me?”

Anyway, I’m back on my usual routine tomorrow morning, promise. But, as threatened, I must use the beginning of the month to remind you of the existence of my various social networking shenanigans! If you want to keep up with my doings while you waste time on the Internets, feel free to follow me on:

• Twitter!
• Facebook!
• Tumblr!
• Google Plus!

I post more or less the same stuff to each of these, so if you should probably pick your favorite service and just follow me there rather than subscribing to all of them.

No new COTW until Friday, but still I must thanks to all who put some cash into my tip jar! And we must give thanks to our advertisers:

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