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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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Mary Worth, 2/17/14

YESSS YOU GUYS TOMMY’S BACK TOMMY’S BACK TOMMY’S BACK THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING

Tommy’s being all contrite now, but time will tell whether or not this is all just an charade to distract from his future meth-dealing activities. Frankly his hand gestures, culminating in the shirt-grip in panel two, seem a little showy to me. I do like the way even his hair (his sweet, sweet hair, always the source of his power) gets in on the act, his perky flip drooping submissively to show how very sorry he is for everything.

Anyway, Tommy’s back and this is going to be great so be sure to refresh joshreads dot com constantly for Tommy updates.

Apartment 3-G, 2/17/14

The other soap strips, realizing the world’s attention is focused firmly on Mary Worth, are just sort of going through the motions, though I have to admit that I’m actively charmed by what a nothingburger today’s Apartment 3-G is, plot-wise. “We went shopping and got some, uh, stuff! Look, these random multi-colored boxes! ‘They’ were giving things away! Isn’t that nice! Let’s have a good laugh! Ha ha ha!” Meanwhile, everyone ignores the piteous mewling of the baby deer, who hates the indoors but is woefully unprepared for life in the woods where Tommie’s going to dump her next week when she finally gets tired of cleaning up the deer poop.

Slylock Fox, 2/17/14

You know, the thing I always like about Reeky is that he could not possibly care less about you or what you think about him, when it comes to how he dresses or who he steals electricity from or whatever incredibly half-assed excuse he’s come up with about stealing his neighbors’ furniture and burning it for heat. That’s why this elaborately staged alibi is so disappointingly earnest, from my point of view, and it sickens me to think of Reeky stealing a bunch of newspapers from the coin-operated box, laying them out just so in front of his trailer, and setting the empty suitcase by the door with a grin, ready to pick it up and wave it about meaningfully at a moment’s notice. It all implies that he respects other people’s opinions, and also frankly reveals the limits of his abilities to plan anything more elaborate than busting open a mailbox with a baseball bat. We don’t even need to see the headlines to know this is a put-on, because we know that the only people Reeky finds more contemptible than the ones who travel to wussy non-America countries to go to museums or whatever are the ones who think they’re so smart about current events that they need to get newspapers delivered just to show everyone what big brains they have.

Funky Winkerbean, 2/17/14

Haha, wow, well, this is one way to deflect an unwanted cheeseball sexual advance! “My, you certainly are attractive!” “Yes, but my soul is fundamentally broken and repellant.” Naturally, since this is the Funkyverse, our lothario’s lust has only been inflamed by this response.

Family Circus, 2/17/14

“Oh, right, it was about the ‘home!’ Grandma already has a home, mommy, why are are we makin’ her move into another one?”

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Crankshaft, 1/13/14

One of Crankshaft’s beloved/tiresome running gags is “Lena’s snack food is extremely poorly prepared and thus largely inedible,” but I don’t particularly remember her coffee being a punchline before. At first I thought it was the same gag, but note that Mary is taking another deep swig even after having spun into pin-eyed freakout mode in panel one. Clearly, while Lena’s brownies are dangerously unchewable, Lena’s coffee is dangerously addictive, with only a single sip of the pure stuff capable of turning you into a mindless junkie, drinking huge gulps even as your mind turns to mush.

Blondie, 1/13/14

Boy, Dagwood looks awful cheery for a guy who knows he’s going to die at five o’clock today! One can only assume that he has this attitude because he’s chosen this death; probably it will take the form of a spectacularly gory and public suicide capping off a killing spree in the office he hates so much. But as a final fuck-you to his employer, he’s going to dick around on the Internet on the company’s dime all day before he murders everybody.

Archie, 1/13/14

Mr. Weatherbee’s thousand-yard stare in panel two is the proper result of sudden, terrible knowledge: he realizes that we are well into the second generation of food’s transformation from a craft to commodity. Soon nobody left alive will remember a meal that was formed by your own hands or the hands of someone you loved. Whether or not we have any particularly fond memories of family dinners from our childhood, the marketing construct of “Just like mom used to make!” is so embedded in our brains that we’ll repeat it to each other endlessly as we scarf down machine-shaped corn byproduct extrusions dusted with MSG flavor crystals.

Apartment 3-G, 1/13/14

I’m not sure what’s sadder: that Margo doesn’t know anything about Tommie’s car situation, despite the fact that she’s her roommate and ostensibly one of her closest friends, or that Tommie thinks she can drive to England to see her fiance.

Slylock Fox, 1/13/14

Oh my God … that Footprints Jesus poster … it’s really a crime scene