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Gasoline Alley, 11/18/15

One of the things I really respect about 115-year-old Gasoline Alley patriarch Walt Wallet is that he has no more interest in remembering anything about the minor characters in this strip’s sprawling cast than I do. Also, as corny as the dialogue on-stage that we’re getting a glimpse of is, at least it’s more like the sort of thing a child would find funny than, say, rambling shaggy dog stories about ancient statues and alien weapons depots.

Mary Worth, 11/18/15

Thank goodness Mary is taking Olive out to have snacks at various New York tourist attractions! At last, her parents can have a little alone time. In panel two, her dad has already put on his Flesh Glasses to prepare for whatever unspeakable acts they have planned.

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Mary Worth, 11/17/15

At last, the crossover distraction is over with and we can get down to the hot Mary Worth action we’ve all waited for: Mary’s weird and off-putting relationship with a psychic child she flew all the way across the country to hang out with. Olive’s parents, always polite, want Mary to come with them to the many after-hours nightspots in the neighborhood of their tastefully appointed apartment. All the hottest clubs are just up the street! Perfect for when you’re rolling on molly and don’t want to drive and are afraid you’ll start freaking out on the subway!

Apartment 3-G, 11/17/15

The countdown to the death of Apartment 3-G is ticking away and … we’re still talking about Diane the fake psychic, I guess? Haha, isn’t it funny when a person claiming to be psychic can’t actually predict the future? This is definitely a clever joke that people haven’t heard before.

Hi and Lois, 11/17/15

I was going to make some joke about “the newspaper, are you kidding me,” but this is exactly the sort of lesson an out-of-touch high school civics or history teacher would give, taking the students’ moans of dissent as just more evidence that kids today are terrible, rather than evidence that kids today literally all have mobile computing devices that they can use to get the latest news at any time. Anyway, I think the way Chip is carrying that paper — with just his fingertips, away from his body, as if it were something mildly disgusting — is a pretty accurate depiction of the relationship between teens and legacy media.

Herb and Jamaal, 11/17/15

Most people giving thanks to God for the day usually frame it in terms of nothing bad happening to them, rather than the other way around. Herb, though, is particularly aware of the indelible stain of sin that marks all of humankind, and marks him in particular. Someday, he knows, he’s going to do something awful. Today is not that day, or at least not yet.

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Slylock Fox, 11/16/15

Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and say the answer to today’s mystery is a little grim. “When the animals rose up and seized human civilization, they gained control of our machines without fully understanding the legal and social safeguards we had built up to protect ourselves from the dangers of what we had created! In the first few years of the Forest Government regime, the roads were littered with corpses.”

Apartment 3-G, 11/16/15

Hey guys, a certain extremely handsome comics blogger was quoted in a New York Times from last week; the author of the article also managed to get a definitive statement from King Features that Apartment 3-G is going away at the end of the week. Now that you know that, aren’t you glad that the strip is spending at minimum a seventh of its remaining time in newspapers resolving the whole thing where Margo’s mom was being swindled by a psychic wedding planner? WE CAN SLEEP EASY NOW.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/16/15

Good news! The board has rubber stamped Heather’s Milton’s decision to not sell the company, and is about to expel Hugh to boot. This is actually good for him, because as an outsider he’ll have an easier time suing the entire board for corporate malpractice, when it becomes public that all the stuff he’s saying about his father being medically unfit and the company being run by a nanny are completely, 100% true.

Mark Trail, 11/16/15

OK, we all had fun with all the punching last week, but I’m going to go ahead and say that Ken calling his fist a “lullaby machine”, because it renders so many people unconscious by inducing brain trauma, is a little disturbing. I’m assuming that while Mark is prattling on about shoes in panel two Ken is kissing each of his knuckles, one by one.

Hi and Lois and Family Circus, 11/16/15

Billy and Ditto are generally depicted as nothing but surly and unpleasant in these strips, so I’m just going to assume that all of today’s dialogue is extremely sarcastic.