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Gasoline Alley, 2/18/14

Oh, hey, Gasoline Alley! I haven’t been bothering you to keep you up with Gasoline Alley, so here’s the deal: the government agents called in to try to figure out how Walt could possibly still be alive were followed by a newspaper reporter, for whom Walt spun a fanciful tale of having discovered the Fountain of Youth in an Egyptian tomb, though given his current state of decrepitude it would’ve been more realistic if he had claimed to have found the Fountain of Eternal Life That Keeps Your Aged And Increasingly Frail Body Alive Beyond Its Natural End Point. Anyway, once word got out people, reacted pretty much as I explained they would when Six Chix did a Fountain of Youth joke, only the canny Walt is using the opportunity to personally profit from others’ gullibility. Should be all fun and games, until the angry mob tears him to bits!

Six Chix, 2/18/14

Speaking of Six Chix, today’s Six Chix has an important lesson for us: that no matter how hard life gets, we should marshall our resources and just hang on and endure and wait for the one thing in life that we want more than anything in the world, which will probably kill us.

Dick Tracy, 2/18/14

Speaking of things I haven’t been bothering to keep you up with, Dick Tracy exists! I’m going to continue to not bother to keep you up on the plot, but I do want to point out that this lady with the off-the-shoulder sweater has been in the strip repeatedly for weeks and this is the first we’ve seen that she goes around barefoot in tattered jeans all the time. Is this what Dick Tracy thinks a hippie looks like? Probably! Anyway, “You see, as Mother Earth’s creation, I must touch her” is a good thing to say to someone if you don’t want them talking to you ever again.

Slylock Fox, 2/18/14

As you all should know, I’m very interested in the moment when the Slylockverse was born, when the animals rose up and overthrew the humans who had reigned over them for far too long. We often catch glimpses of this in the Six Differences strips, though today’s isn’t particularly subtle: a bear, probably a juvenile by the size of him but still plenty big and strong, has burst through the front window of this suburban home, and is about to just start up and mauling some people.

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Pluggers, 2/7/14

Writing a blog post about the daily comics pretty much every day for more than nine years has honestly given me quite a bit of sympathy for cartoonists who have to come up with a fresh variation on their basic gags daily, so I’m willing to forgive the bizarrely convoluted caption to this cartoon (would you be a non-plugger if you said “no” but then your granddaughter didn’t follow-up with this question? why does your granddaughter get to determine your plugger status?). I’m not willing to let the extremely and unjustifiably smug expression on the plugger-grandpa’s face slide, though. What exactly is going through that man-dog’s noggin? “Heh heh, look at this little girl, her life on earth so brief to this point that she doesn’t really understand the concepts of social and technological change over time. Why, all of existence is just one continuous present moment to her! It takes years of experience as a plugger to understand that life is a slow transformation of the world and your place in it, until one day you wake up and the things young people take for granted are baffling and scary, and everything makes you angry and confused. She’ll learn some day! Oh, she’ll learn!”

Six Chix, 2/7/14

It’s hard to tell because it’s so crudely drawn, but I’m thinking that bear is looking a little miffed. “You know, I have lots of opinions on ways we and our clients can work together to add value to both companies’ offerings. But, yeah, sure, just call me in when you need someone mauled. HEY, I’M STANDING RIGHT HERE, I CAN HEAR YOU TALKING ABOUT ME.”

Hi and Lois, 2/7/14

Hey, Ditto, at least your sister has a normal name she can use! At least she isn’t named after a primitive means of reproducing printed material that went out of vogue in the 1980s! You’re playing with fire here, Ditto.

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Apartment 3-G, 1/27/14

Here’s the thing about me and the soap opera strips: after years of reading them, I’ve just sort of normalized their usual low-level absurdity, and so they have to get really absurd before I sit up and take notice. So, last week, when Tommie saw a deer get hit by a car and found a little baby deer and felt bad about it, with the whole thing narrated by Tommie without us ever actually seeing either deer? Low-level absurd. Tommie bringing said baby deer, who looks a lot more like a kangaroo or something, back to her small New York City apartment, to live? VERY ABSURD. This week’s going to be great! Tommie tries to figure out what the baby deer will drink from a bottle and eventually calls La Leche League! Tommie tries to laugh off all the lacerations on her hands and face from the deer’s tiny but still sharp hooves! Tommie takes the deer for a walk, on a leash! The deer poops and pees all over the apartment, despite the fact that Tommie’s been taking it for walks! OH MY GOD MARGO OH MY GOD WHAT WILL MARGO SAY I AM SO EXCITED YOU GUYS

Mark Trail, 1/27/14

Speaking of things I’m excited about: we all know Mark Trail recycles plots from its past, sometimes directly, sometimes piecing together characters and art and plot points from multiple sources to create a dreamlike world of eternal return. Anyway, one of the first great Mark Trail storylines this blog covered, more than nine years ago (ugh, I am so old) involved Birdie, a kindly, animal-loving vet who was married to a taxidermist who was using taxidermy as a front to smuggle drugs and Mark figured it out and Birdie and her husband knocked Mark unconscious and threw him in the water where he encountered some sharks. Will bird-helping Jessica Canupp’s taxidermist boyfriend also be a drug dealer? Let’s hope!

Six Chix, 1/27/14

Can you imagine if some substance that magically restored youth were discovered, but it only existed at one place on Earth and you had to travel there to get it? As soon as word got out, thousands or millions of people would quit their jobs and jump in the car, overwhelming whatever transportation infrastructure existed in the region. But the traffic jams would just be the beginning: whoever discovered the fountain and initially tried to control access to it would immediately be overwhelmed by the influx of desperate people, greedy for eternal life; similarly, whatever government ruled the territory would struggle to simultaneously maintain order in the region and fend off neighboring states for whom the temptation to conquer this miracle land would be overwhelming. Within weeks or even days of the fountain’s discovery, global society would inevitably collapse into violent anarchy. So, yes, there’s some good world-building going on in Six Chix here, though I’m not sure what the “joke” is supposed to be per se.

Luann, 1/27/14

Oh man, I had assumed this was just a rerun of the last time the boys and the girls at Pitts High had weird, unsettling bathroom conversations, but now it appears that Knute actually has some sort of official bathroom-cleaning duties, to give the whole scenario some vague context outside someone’s very specific fetishes. Hey, remember during the 2012 Republican primaries when Newt Gingrich said that poor children should work as school janitors to make money? We should send him a copy of this cartoon and watch him weep bitter tears at the horrifying unintended consequences of his schemes.