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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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Spider-Man, 10/13/16

Superhero comic trufans (of which I am not one, but I hear things) know that each iteration of a long-running beloved character, in different continuities across various media platforms, has slight variations when it comes to the nature of their powers. What, then, can we say about Newspaper Spider-Man when it comes to his famous spider-sense? We know it can’t warn him about some pretty important things he might like to know about, like that he’s about to be hit in the back of the head with a club or a brick. So what is it good for? Well, keep in mind that Newspaper Spider-Man is both a risible dolt and keenly sensitive to anything he might perceive as humiliation (earning less than his wife, a famous actress, for instance). And so, today, it’s finally coming out that Spidey and Ant-Man have been captured because Peter knew Egghead was out to catch Scott, and then went and tracked him down anyway. He knows that everyone’s gonna start yelling at him soon, and he deserves it, and his spider-sense is going nuts.

Gil Thorp, 10/13/16

Traditionally, soap opera strips end on a cliff-hanger every day to keep readers hooked. Unfortunately, it’s harder and harder to work this magic on young people, what with their Snapchats and so forth, so now Gil Thorp is experimenting by ending strips dramatically in mid-sentence.

Pluggers, 10/13/16

Pluggers have so many emotions and nobody they feel safe expressing them to :(

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/4/16

So the Morgans seem determined to buy a bloated modern house instead of a fusty, antique-cluttered Victorian with bad romantic karma. But even soulless McMansions from the ’90s have a little character, as Sarah is discovering in the delightful little “hidden” “awesome” “kid-sized only” “playroom” under the stairs that someone less whimsical might call “storage space” or “a terrible accident waiting to happen.” Anyway, note the little “SECRET CLUBHOUSE FOR KIDS ONLY SIGN” already hanging up on the wall, indicating that the “little character” I mentioned in the previous sentence is the ghost of the six-year-old who died after getting trapped in there in 2004.

Shoe, 10/4/16

Haha, I absolutely love the emotional turn this strip takes in the final panel. It would’ve been easy to have our lady bird deliver the punchline with heavy-lidded, languid bitterness, and maybe that was her intention; instead, upon just thinking about her ex-husband, her eyes bug out with anger as she realizes, in a rush of emotion, that she isn’t past the awful end of that relationship, and probably never will be.

Pluggers, 10/4/16

Little-known fact: about ten years ago, I made a list of signs that will indicate that we live in a truly degraded age, and “Pluggers does a Viagra joke” was pretty close to the top! Anyway, pluggers gave up on sex years ago, and their main hope for a big romantic encounter is that their joints stop hurting for a few hours, at least enough so they can focus on what their date is saying.