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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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Hagar the Horrible, 9/19/16

Just to prove to you the lengths I go to in order to make my silly jokes about comics on my blog, here are some fun facts I learned while researching today’s Hagar the Horrible:

• The common origin story of coffee cultivation — that an Ethiopian shepherd noticed goats getting jumpy when they ate certain berries — is probably a myth. The first written record of coffee being drunk comes from Yemen in the 1400s, which explains why there’s no coffee for Eddie to drink, five centuries earlier and thousands of miles to the north.
• Anxiety and worry are the end products of parallel linguistic evolution: both ultimately descend from words (in Latin and proto-German, respectively) that mean “to strangle.”

Anyway! I don’t know if those facts add up to much, except that maybe Eddie — who Hagar has already turned his back on in that final panel — has felt phantom hands around his throat for a long time, and it has nothing to do with caffeine withdrawal.

Gasoline Alley, 9/19/16

I’ve been reading the non-adventures of the chumps in Gasoline Alley for more than a decade and while I’m vaguely aware that they’re all part of a huge, sprawling family, I still couldn’t tell you how any of them are related to any of the other ones. Beardy Dude and Ranger Gal are thus connected by a tenuous web of kinship, though that didn’t come up when he guided her forest birth; it’s sort of coming out now, not that I can really follow what the hell’s going on in panel two. Are they visualizing … each other, but younger? Each visualizing his younger self? Why does the kid in the rightmost thought balloon have three legs? Why does he have three legs? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY DOES HE HAVE THREE LEGS

Slylock Fox, 9/19/16

I just want to point out that Slylock is a compulsive ratiocinator. Like, he does it to solve crimes when he doesn’t even need to. “So, I saw the whole thing go down with my own eyes, all you need to do is take down the information. The ape parked his car in the deale–” “IT’S THE ONE WITH THE LICENSE PLATES!!! Right? Right? I said it before you said it! IN YOUR FACE, RABBIT!”

Marvin, 9/19/16

Guys, it’s Monday, so I just want to leave you with an uplifting image: an infant with a thousand-mile stare, openly worrying that someday — maybe someday soon — he’ll become unmoored from any conventional system of morality and perpetrate unspeakable horrors. Let’s all have a super week!

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Spider-Man, 9/12/16

Ugh, you guys, I know this isn’t a fun thing to hear me whine about first thing in the week, but Spidey’s use of “tariff” bothers me so much here. A tariff is a tax on imports or exports, and I’m pretty sure J. Jonah Jameson doesn’t pay every month to import his sweet penthouse in from whatever low-labor-cost country penthouses are made in now, devastating Ohio’s traditional penthouse-manufacturing industry. I guess he pays either rent or a mortgage and Spidey didn’t know Jonah’s real-estate situation so decided to come up with … another word that means paying for things?

I’m not bothered at all by JJJ’s choice to sleep with a shotgun leaning up against the side of his bed, as this seems like a particularly hilarious and ineffective method of self-defense. I certainly hope that he wakes up in surprise and just starts firing every which way at an extremely tiny target that he can’t possibly hit, sending shotgun shell after shotgun shell into what appear to be the floor-to-ceiling windows of his penthouse.

Slylock Fox, 9/12/16

I’m not saying it’s OK to just go around stomping on other creature’s carefully tended flower beds — far from it! But I do think this is a good opportunity for all the herbivorous inhabitants of post-animalpocalypse Earth to acknowledge that they have it pretty good compared to their ancestors. Imagine a world where the biggest complaint a rabbit would have about a wolf is that the wolf crushed her flowers (instead of, say, eating her) and then her reaction is to call in a fox who proceeds to use ratiocination to solve the crime (instead of, say, eating her).