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Gasoline Alley, 2/4/20

Gasoline Alley is in the middle of a story where Baleen the waitress has some sort of will-they-or-won’t-they thing going on with the short order cook, whose name is, uh … OK, look, I know I read the comics so you don’t have to or whatever, but I refuse to keep track of what the ancillary characters in Gasoline Alley are named, OK? I just … I only have so much brain space and I’ve apparently decided to dedicate a lot of it to an encyclopedic history of Mary Worth storylines so you can look it up yourself, I dunno. The point is that I guess the guys in panels one and two are supposed to be inspiring jealousy in our short order cook man, and maybe they’re supposed to be handsome? Possibly? The gentleman in panel two has a certain Carter-era Donald Sutherland charm, I have to admit, but the first guy is just kind of grimace-winking and it is not erotic or appealing, in my humble opinion.

Hi and Lois, 2/4/20

Hi and Lois is of course about 60% still stuck in the Mad Men era, aesthetically, which is kind of interesting for assessing the whole look of our receptionist here whose mild flirtation has sent Hi into such a sad, sad tizzy. Like, she could be a hip young thing circa 1961, or she could be doing a rockabilly revival look from the ’90s, or she could be from right now, when I think this aesthetic is making kind of a comeback! Lois’s subtle contempt is, of course, timeless.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/4/20

Ahhh! Andrzej is a wrestler! Or, as Aunt Tildy, an aficionado of the squared circle would put it, a rassler! This love connection is gonna happen, I just know it!

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Mary Worth, 2/3/20

Folks, remember when Mary Worth storylines would be about randos who drifted into Mary’s orbit for a few months? Remember Delilah and Charley, and the guy who kept trying to convince his wife to eat more, and Nola the office sexpot, and Entertainer Esme? But for the last couple years, the strip has almost exclusively revolved around Wilbur and — I’m not afraid to say it! — people who are sex adjacent to Wilbur, i.e., Estelle (currently having sex with Wilbur), Iris (previously had sex with Wilbur), Dawn (would not exist if someone hadn’t once had sex with Wilbur), Tommy (the knowledge that at one point his mother was having sex with Wilbur on the regular almost certainly was one of the underlying causes of his drug habit), etc. Why can’t this strip stop rubbing it in our face that Wilbur fucks? It’s so bad that when we took a detour last year in a plotline that asked us to consider Ian Cameron a potential object of sexual desire, it came as a relief. Anyway, I assumed that Hugo would quietly fade out of the strip, just like he would quietly fade out of Dawn’s life, but it looks we’re going to get a plot where Wilbur has decided see what all the fuss is about re: the hot French guy his daughter’s fucking. Hopefully this time around he’ll have the courage to ask him “Are you a professional? Or into illegal activities?” to his face.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/3/20

Meanwhile, Rex Morgan, M.D., is doubling down on old people. Remember Aunt Tildy, and how she was convinced she ws dying? Welp, Rex ran some tests and it turned out she just had a fairly basic set of mild and easily treated age-related problems. Meanwhile, here’s Andrzej who’s healthy as a horse, maybe because the years he spent as partisan in the Polish forest as a teen fighting Nazis toughened him up, or maybe he just eats right and exercises, who can say, but the point is that Aunt Tildy could use more of his can-do attitude. Could Rex and June play matchmaker between these two? That might help Tildy find a real emotional grounding that will improve her outlook about her health, or at least get her out of the Morgans’ house.

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Crock, 1/22/20

One of the dangers of doing a syndicated comic strip for years is that you either subconsciously repeat a joke or just submit a strip you drew years ago hoping your editors won’t notice; and one of the dangers of writing a blog making fun of comic strips for (gulp) 15-plus years is that I’ll see one of these repeats and make more or less the same joke about it that I did long before. Sometimes I miss it, but sometimes as I’m about to hit “publish” a little voice nags at me that it all seems too familiar. So it was today, when I had a joke about how the characters in Crock aren’t in North Africa at all, but rather are parasites who reside on the flesh of some unimaginably huge creature; but then I got that aforementioned nagging feeling, and went walking through my archives, and sure enough, back in 2007, when the creator of the strip was still alive, I made basically this joke about an an entirely different strip that made basically this joke. Anyway! More proof that the Crock characters are all inhabitants of some awful living planet made of meat, or something! This is Crockiverse canon, and you have to think about it every time you read the strip!

Shoe, 1/22/20

Shoe, meanwhile, is relatively “with it” for a long-running legacy strip today: The Wiz is, after all, an expert in all things computers, and it would be unrealistic for him to try to convince Shoe that there’s any viable revenue model for online journalism.

Dustin, 1/22/20

You know, if you’re going to do a strip about a middle-aged character picking up some youth slang, it might behoove you to be really, really sure you know what said youth slang means, since “ghosting” refers not to dropping a text conversation with outstanding matters still unresolved, which is what from context the Dustin clan seems to be talking about here, but rather ending a romantic relationship with someone by wholly and abruptly cutting off communication with them. Granted, what with how the rest of them treat Dustin, it’d be fully believable that he’d finally get fed up and ghost them in the correct sense of the word!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/22/20

“Can’t people just die of old age anymore without having to make a big production out if it? I mean, come on.”