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Gasoline Alley, 3/18/20

One of Gasoline Alley’s most prominent characters is a World War I veteran, so it’s a strip that’s admittedly somewhat untethered from our timeline, but I was still prompted by this strip to look up when the international whaling ban went into effect and was surprised to learn it was 1986 — much more recently than I expected! So it’s not too unrealistic for Baleen to have worked on a commercial whaling ship in her youth, or maybe even on the Icelandic, Norwegian, or Japanese ships that continue the practice despite the ban. The important thing is that “glabella” is like Proust’s madeleine for her, the mere word immediately evoking the image of firing a bolt of metal between the eyes of some majestic, intelligent, endangered sea beast, shattering its skull and pushing on right into its brain.

Six Chix, 3/18/20

Now, I don’t want to criticize here, because you’re a tiny robin that mastered human speech and that’s pretty impressive, but … it actually sounds like you do care which game he puts on? It sounds like you care quite a bit, honestly!

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/16/20

“Ha ha, get it? His name is Les Moore, which is sort of a play on words? Anyway, long story short, your father maybe forgot you were coming home from college or maybe just didn’t care and definitely didn’t bother telling you about his big trip! So glad I married into this close, loving family.”

Crankshaft, 3/16/20

Trust me, Lillian, I know exactly what a podcast is, and I can tell you that it isn’t exciting at all.

Family Circus, 3/16/20

I apologize for implying last week that there were Freudian implications to Little Billy’s ongoing cartoon torture of his father. In fact, as the panel I highlighted then and today’s panel both demonstrate, he’s drawing on the Jungian archetypes that are ingrained in our folk memory and appear in the dark fairy tales our ancestors used to terrify their children.

The Lockhorns, 3/16/20

Amazing: the multi-month lead time in comics publishing has transformed Leroy from a cheapskate who never takes his wife anywhere nice to a true hero of public health! (Well, strictly speaking, he should be ordering delivery, but still, this is better than flying directly into a quarantine.)

Six Chix, 3/16/20

Looks like scientists have finally designed an artificial intelligence that can beat human players at poker … and it’s [record scratch] A WOMAN??? You go, girlfriend! Get that paper! [snaps fingers supportively]

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Mary Worth, 2/25/20

Remember, folks: Mary is never not being passive aggressive, and while normally we’d expect something sarcastic about what a shitty job Dawn did on the scarf, as near as I can tell she actually did a pretty good job on the scarf, so Mary’s got to take a different tack. Personally, I would’ve gone with “How lovely, and such a wonderful gift for me, an inhabitant of Southern California, where it’s almost always warm,” but Mary is upping her game and apparently implying that knitting is a great outlet for your sexual energy now that you’re not able to spend all your time fornicating, an activity that frankly is quite audible through the regrettably thin Charterstone walls, dear.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/25/20

Oh, huh, I guess yesterday’s Funky Winkerbean literally didn’t have a joke at all, but rather just existed to set up today’s “joke,” which is that Funky missed the exciting overtime period in the basketball game, because he stepped out of the living room just long enough to pour some hot chocolate. This seems odd, since both NBA and NCAA basketball overtime periods last a full five minutes of playing time — and obviously longer in real time — so we have to ask: does Funky Winkerbean think basketball overtime is played as sudden death, with the first team scoring winning? Have they set up possibly a full week of jokes predicated on a misunderstanding about the very thing they’re joking about? Stay tuned!

Six Chix, 2/25/20

Are Christians more likely to pray around Christmas? Or is the implication here that this lady is praying to Santa?