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Gasoline Alley, 3/14/14

Well thank goodness the violent chaos is over in Gasoline Alley! Now we can get back to the strip’s stock in trade: long, drawn-out hyperrealism that hammers home the ennui of middle-class American life. Look forward to the next six weeks of “There’s a problem with Sheezix’s tickets,” which ought to rival the mannered intensity of 2012’s “Sheezix tries to return a DVD player” and 2011’s “Sheezix tries to fix his washing machine.”

Mary Worth, 3/14/14

Wow, this strip is suddenly leaning pretty hard on the “Tommy’s salvation is a post office job” thing. Are potential employees so afraid that the financially troubled agency will collapse that it’s being forced to woo the unemployable to apply for jobs with paid storylines in Mary Worth? “Ex-con? Ex-drug addict? Career opportunities in the U.S. Postal Service await you! If you can make mail-related puns in your mind, we want you!”

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Oh my goodness, it’s a new site design! Your eyes do not deceive you: I’ve tweaked the design of the site, by which I mean that the amazing Adam Norwood tweaked the design of the site, after I gave him vague and sometimes contradictory instructions on how to do it. In addition to a refreshed look that features fewer ads per page, the site also has a couple minor functionality improvements. When you want to check out older posts by date, either using the menus at the top of the page or on the advanced archives page, there are now separate menus for month and year, so you don’t have to hunt through an enormous 120-entry drop-down list. And comments on older posts are now visible! (I had turned off the ability to comment on posts older than ten days, because I was getting waves and waves of comment spam there, but that had the negative side effect of hiding the old comments from view; now you can glory in comments from yesteryear once again.)

Anyway, if the site looks weird or jumbled on your screen, it may be because your browser has cached the old version of the site; please hold down the shift key and reload the page a few times, and if that doesn’t work, try deleting your browser’s cache. If you’re still having problems, email me at bio at jfruh dot com, and be sure to send a screenshot and tell me what browser and operating system you’re using.

OK! Now: comics!

Mary Worth, 3/12/14

Look, just because I haven’t been featuring the current Mary Worth Tommy storyline on this blog daily doesn’t mean I don’t wake up every morning and give thanks for it to Karen Moy, Joe Giella, the Hearst Corporation and its wholly owned subsidiary King Features Syndicate, Inc., and whatever God(s) may be responsible for any of the previously mentioned entities. Today we have Tommy returning to the art form that is truly his métier: the unnecessary thought balloon. Remember when he got arrested and thought-ballooned “groan”, presumably keeping silent so as not to further antagonize the enraged populace? Well, today, he’s willing to get a little petulant about his mother’s overbearing attempts to make Wilbur his personal headhunter, but he won’t cross the line into full-on sass and say “sheesh” aloud.

Spider-Man, 3/12/14

It’s obviously not at all surprising that J. Jonah Jameson has become drunk with power and is now glorying in his new supervillain/hero status. But turning his back on photography and print media to bask in the adoration of TV news? That’s just cold. That’s a betrayal of his own embattled industry. At least he’s not clicking through slide after slide of the “Iron Jonah Foils Tank Heist” slideshow on the local Patch site.

Heathcliff, 3/12/14

Heathcliff’s word-helmets are getting increasingly abstract.

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Gil Thorp, 3/10/14

Uggg, you guys, Gil Thorp has been so boring this basketball season. One of the Lady Mudlarks used to be a dancer, and there are videos of her dancing on YouTube, including one where she has an unspecified “wardrobe malfunction,” and people are gross to her about it, and that’s it! And that description, I realize now, makes it sound a million times more interesting than it’s been in practice. I mean, this is an Actual Serious Issue facing Kids Today, but it’s been so weirdly linear and repetitive, and so focused on dancer girl’s brother’s attempt to protect her and/or her sexual purity, that I can’t be bothered to take much of an interest. At last, though, we’ve reached the point in the season where the Coaches Thorp have to make a half-assed attempt to solve their kids’ problems, so they’re going to … force everybody to upload embarrassing/sexually explicit videos to YouTube? Sure, why the hell not, nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan vis-à-vis high schoolers’ fragile egos and a series of lawsuits against the Milford school district.

Apartment 3-G, 3/10/14

This “oops, Tommie’s brand-new fiancé is dead” plot is pretty rushed and underbaked, without much for us to get interested in, and Margo is treating it with exactly the amount of emotional investment that it deserves.

Mary Worth, 3/10/14

“I’d invite you in, but Tommy may be asleep. And when I bring paramours back to the apartment for loud, kinky sex, I want him awake to hear it! It’s the only thing that will motivate him to get a job so he can earn enough to get his own place.”

Slylock Fox, 3/10/14

How would you describe the relationship between Max and Slylock? I’d say Max is Sly’s “assistant” or “long-suffering sidekick” or … wait, what? “[Max’s] hero, Slylock Fox”? Oh, man. Oh, that’s … man. Is he even getting paid for all this?