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Gasoline Alley, 7/11/17

Ugh, fine, I guess I will supply some cursory backstory on what’s going on in Gasoline Alley, which is that this freaky-lookin’ dude was briefly irritated by two children while fishing because they thought he was weird and scary looking, and probably we’re going to learn some valuable lessons about ugly hermits with hearts of gold and not judging a book by its cover and blah blah blah, but really today’s final panel makes it look like the guy is coolly examining the unconscious kid with his single eye, trying to determine how best to cook and eat him.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/11/17

I feel like the whole “Starbuck Jones is a movie!” thing has spiraled completely out of hand in Funky Winkerbean, as it started with our sad-sack comics-obsessed characters writing for a neglected comic book hero and now they’re giving a presentation at ComicCon as part of its multimillion-dollar marketing push. It would be like if Joe Shlabotnik got called up to the majors and batted .335 and Charlie Brown got hired as his personal assistant during his team’s undefeated playoff run? Anyway, mostly I’m featuring today’s strip to point out that that, in addition to suffering the general indignity of appearing in Funky Winkerbean, famously ginger Conan O’Brien has been transformed into a blond by the syndicate colorists, possibly because they can’t tell that he and Mason Jarre as supposed to be different people.

Family Circus, 7/11/17

Ha ha, yes Jeffy, it’s there to bury the evidence! (Specifically, the evidence that you or your siblings ever existed.)

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Mark Trail, 7/10/17

Ahhhh, finally we get the payoff to this long story of the Great Water-World Disaster, a delightful panel depicting our wayward walrus giving birth in the shattered, water-logged shell of a formerly high-prestige sport utility vehicle. Given Mark’s previous downplaying of the disastrous nature of this episode, you’d think that he’d be a lot cheerier about helping this majestic sea-beast in its time of need; but instead, he and Johnny are watching the birth process with expressions of open horror. One suspects that this is the first time they’ve become truly acquainted with the procedure through which baby walruses are born, and are beginning to connect the dots to the human children they occasionally encounter as well.

Lesley, meanwhile, has purported throughout her retelling of this anecdote to be in a high dudgeon, but her expression and body language in today’s strip resemble nothing so much as Bernini’s frankly erotic depiction of Saint Teresa in ecstacy, so maybe we need to re-evaluate everything we thought we know about her attitude towards Mark and her obviously complex inner life.

Pluggers, 7/10/17

Pluggers may leave a trail of pollution wherever they go, but by God they aren’t going to SHARE THEIR CAR with SOMEBODY ELSE like BIG GOVERNMENT WANTS THEM TO like some kind of COMMUNIST

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Judge Parker, 7/9/17

Good news! Randy Parker’s mysteriously vanished wife has mysteriously un-vanished! Bad news! Randy’s still real mad about the whole wife-vanishing-and-denying-him-access-to-his-daughter thing! It all started so happily for Randy and April, really: Randy was about to make a politically expedient marriage to his previous girlfriend, Mimi, but it turned out she was in a weird cult called “Eon”, so they broke up, and then he started ham-handedly flirting with his legal secretary via suggestive chopstick instructions, which won her heart and made her all the more eager to take his “dictation.” Who could’ve guessed that that legal secretary was really a trained CIA assassin who was probably completely capable of using chopsticks both to enjoy various Asian cuisines and also murder America’s enemies, and that, eleven years, two writers, and (I think) four artists later, a grief-deranged Randy would be screaming “TO TELL ME MORE LIES?! TO PROVE OUR LIFE WAS JUST A FANTASY?!” in her face? I guess it just goes to show that workplace romances do not work out! Say, what do you all think Mimi’s up to?

Gasoline Alley, 7/9/17

One of my current objects of fascination on trips to the supermarket is Closer, a tabloid that mimics the format of other checkout-aisle celebrity-gossip magazines but focuses exclusively on famous people of interest to the elderly. It’s an example of how the logic of capitalism encourages different industries to fill various really specific ecological niches, and while it may seem that the comics pages are immune to market forces, I think the same process is at work here! For instance, Gasoline Alley began its existence as a general-interest strip, but like one of Darwin’s finches, it’s adapted to meet the needs of the old person market, and nothing makes that clearer than today’s strip, in which a World War I veteran rambles on to nobody in particular about how stamps are more expensive than they used to be and people don’t send letters or postcards anymore.