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Gasoline Alley, 10/17/16

Part of Gasoline Alley’s schtick is the Picaresque Idiot Duo (PID), pairing an illiterate English-mangling leader with an improbably even more hopeless sidekick. These roles are most often played by Rufus and Joel. But Harold and Stick are here to remind us that it’s PIDs all the way down. From an apex somewhere around the Beverly Hillbillies’ Jed and Jethro Clampett, the line passes through Hootin’ Holler’s Snuffy Smith and Lukey, the two Gasoline Alley crews here, and then descends inexorably toward the Beavis Horizon.

Pluggers, 10/17/16

Joke-a-day strip Pluggers experiments with serial narrative: behold the pluggernovela. We’ve long known that Henrietta Beak is married to Earl Houndstooth and Andy Bear to Sheila Roo. Now we discover they’re next-door neighbors. The affairs begin innocently: a little bit of harmless robe-gazing and rake-play, some “accidental” pouch-flashing. But things spiral quickly into unnatural chicken-on-bear and dog-on-kangaroo depravity, threatening the very foundations of strait-laced plugger society. Claude Manx watches heartbroken from his mansion on the hill: Andy will never be his.

Slylock Fox, 10/17/16

Why suspect Shady? Maybe because he showed up to gloat? Seriously Sly – he’s standing right outside the greenhouse with a big grin on his face. More to the point, he’s Shady Shrew, for crying out loud. Why do you even waste your time with these “clues”? If this were Dick Tracy, the guy would already have been broken on the wheel.

Mutts, 10/17/16

Dude – have you ever even met a dog?

— Uncle Lumpy

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Beetle Bailey, 7/24/16

[holds flashlight under chin] And in those days … people … did not have constant access … to erotic images … whenever they wanted it! they had … to walk … to a different room … sometimes in an entirely different building!!!!!

[everyone gasps]

[the flashlight is my phone]

[we’re not in a campground, we’re in an underground city, because this is the future and we’ve badly polluted the surface of the earth]

[everyone goes back to looking at porn on their phones]

Mary Worth, 7/24/16

Oh, wait, now I get where they’re going with this. It’s not “drugs are bad,” it’s “people who attempt to manage their emotional problems without asking Mary for advice will inevitably screw it up and become pill addicts.”

Funky Winkerbean, 7/24/16

I’m not sure if the joke here is that “you could raise a child and send them to college for what it costs to buy a life-size statue of Doctor Doom” or “women don’t have sex with men who buy life-size statues of Doctor Doom.” Either seems pretty accurate, though!

Hi and Lois, 7/24/16

I was going to go on a long diatribe about how promoting a campaign to get more people to play golf is the most legacy-newspaper-comic-strip thing you can possibly do, but then I got to the last panel and found out that I’m three years older than Hi from Hi and Lois, so excuse me while go lie down with a pillow over my face for the next six to fourteen hours.

Mutts, 7/24/16

I know I don’t talk about Mutts on this site very often, but then again Mutts doesn’t usually do a joke in which the lovable lisping cat fantasizes about capturing his owner in a giant web, to eat.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/13/13 (panels)

What is the relationship between art and reality — among the dreamer, the dream, and the dreamed? Magritte gives us one viewpoint, Snuffy Smith another.

Snuffy reveals how the artist not only creates a work but selects its audience, source of his reputation and claims to authenticity. He is his own best example: once a mere usurper in Barney Google’s strip, he now asserts his own membership in the very elites who read his Sunday “throwaway panels” in their expansive flatlander newspapers or on high-falutin’ electronic devices. With a delicate hanky-dab at his nose, he rises — refined and redefined, “Snuffy” no more!

Judge Parker, 10/13/13 (panel)

Boy, this lady sure hates hats, doesn’t she?

Beetle Bailey, 10/13/13

You know, there are plenty of attractive and willing human partners around, like Sarge’s Sgt. Louise Lugg, Beetle’s Miss Buxley, and Killer’s groupies, but it’s all surrogates with these guys: robots, trees, and again with Beetle’s beloved pillow here. I’m just saying that’s kind of messed up.

Mary Worth, 10/13/13 (panel)

We had to wait a long time to see Mary’s head impaled on a fish, but I think we can all agree it was worth it.

Mutts, 10/13/13

Mooch ignores the comics’ prohibition of “FLICK” to imply that Earl has sex with his own parasites.

— Uncle Lumpy