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Gasoline Alley, 11/18/22

Big Good Some news, everybody: Rufus has managed to use his sexual wiles to help Walt make his big dream of hanging off the back of a garbage truck come true. The Sanitation Department will definitely get some good publicity out of this, unless Walt falls off and terribly injures himself, which is actually a pretty likely scenario. I mean, that’s why they banned sanitation workers from doing this in the first place, and none of those guys are supercentenarian World War I vets. In that case, the publicity will end up being pretty bad: lawsuits from the family, Denzel Washington giving a press conference disavowing knowledge of or participation in this stunt, etc.

Marvin and Dennis the Menace, 11/18/22

I find comics where the punchline is “Ha ha, lady can’t cook even though cooking is lady’s job” fairly distasteful, and have come to conclusion that I like the ones where it’s the lady’s son slagging on her cooking even worse than the ones where it’s her husband doing it. That seems a bit unfair, since a grown man could easily cook for himself and a little kid couldn’t, but you have remember that these jokes are written by and for grown men, which make the mommy issues tied up in them all the more distressingly apparent.

Gil Thorp, 11/18/22

There’s something funny to me about how “wet” is emphasized unnaturally here. “I heard you still wet the bed. Whereas me? I dry the bed. That’s what I call it when I make a real cakey poop when I’m sleeping.”

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Dick Tracy, 11/17/22

Look, I know, we’re never getting back to the glory days of “guy in gimp suit gets eaten alive by rats,” but you have to admit that we’re coming pretty close with a Dick Tracy villain named “Steelface,” whose whole thing is that he has a steel plate in his face that’s magnetic, and you’d think that he’d be know about situations where such an arrangment would be dangerous, like, say, getting into an MRI machine, and also you’d think the medical techs would ask questions like, “Say, you don’t have a steel plate under that bandage, do you?”, but it turns out nope on both counts and now he’s going to get his skull ripped apart by the MRI machine’s powerful magnets. He only ended up at this hospital because he hit his head fleeing from a police raid on his stolen car operation, so we can basically credit this grisly death to the cops, or at least that’s what they’ll be telling themselves while they stand around watching the poor hospital night shift guy scraping what’s left of Steelface’s face off the inside of the MRI machine with a putty knife.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/17/22

If you were really at a concert like this and a performer made this kind of announcement, everyone in the audience would chuckle knowingly and understand that “ice cream” and “tummyache” were code for “drugs and/or alcohol” and “unconscious.” Sadly, this is Rex Morgan, M.D., where literally everything is exactly as it seems on the surface, all the time.

Hi and Lois, 11/17/22

Sure, Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has somehow managed to survive and even thrive in a declining newspaper industry as their readership ages, but I’m hoping that this comic means they’re about to go all-in on crypto at the worst possible time.

Crankshaft, 11/17/22

Look, not every Crankshaft has to be a big “event,” you know? Sometimes it can be something quiet and delightful, like Crankshaft falling face-first up a flight of stairs.

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Gil Thorp, 11/16/22

It’s been a while since I’ve kept you up to date on the various plot threads in Gil Thorp, a strip that appears to be on a breakneck pace to cover all the Teen Issues before comics and/or teens are declared illegal, but the important thing to know here is that (a) Milford High held a hyper-realistic mass shooter drill, presumably with help from an overly enthusiastic theater department, that left Keri sobbing uncontrollably in front of their peers, and (b) a hitherto unseen Milford student named Allyson is one of three hitherto unseen Milford students who have died of a drug overdose this semester, so naturally these threads come together with a fistfight at a funeral. I’ve noticed what struck me as a fairly deliberate choice to show Keri sporting chunky rings across four fingers this whole semester and I’m quite pleased to have seen this little detail pay off so violently! Anyway, I deem this as the greatest Newspaper Comic Strip Funeral Fight (Continuity Strip Division) since the Great Rex Morgan Coffinside Strangulation of 2012.

Crock, 11/16/22

Man, sometimes you have to admire it when a newspaper comic strip manages to slip a grammatically correct but semantically absurd “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” type sentence in there. “The government gave my cousin Kyle a great buy on his farm” sure is a sequence of words, all right! Did you manage to parse out what they meant? Did you successfully interpret them to potentially mean that Kyle still owned the farm, but the government was able to do things like bury toxic waste there? I myself did not.