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Gasoline Alley, 4/10/24

You know, after all these years, I still experience the joy of discovery from reading the newspaper comics. Or, well, at least sometimes I read something like today’s Gasoline Alley, sigh heavily, and then Google “gasoline alley family tree” in hopes of making sense of it, but then am just a little bit charmed when I find a graphic like this:

That comes from a page on Hobbylark dot com that also includes an annotated timeline of important events in the strip lore, such as “Wilmer admits to being a sap, a wart, and a drip, but claims the Army did a job on him!” (November 20, 1945), “Corky and Hope move into a new apartment – landlord is Pert!” (May 6, 1954), and “Melba decides to take advantage of leap year to move Rufus along towards a wedding” (July 5, 1976, and yet somehow Melba is now the mayor and still hasn’t sealed the deal). Anyway, from this documentation I have confirmed that Sheezix and Corky are brothers, and Corky runs the diner (in fact, according to that timeline, 1950 was the “year of the Diner”). And because Corky has decided to embrace the town name change, that means that the coming Gasoline Alley vs. Electric Acres civil war will literally pit brother against brother, so I guess I’m finally coming around to being interested in it.

Judge Parker, 4/10/24

“He’s going to kill your mother, April. Then he’s going to kill you! The he goes after Charlotte, your daughter! It never ends! He’ll just keep going after you or your female relatives! Your male relatives will be fine! Certainly any of your relatives who happen to be the title character in the strip are safe! But it’s the principle of the thing!”

Hi and Lois, 4/10/24

Big news, everyone! Trixie seems to have grasped the concept of the linear flow of time! Also, Hi and Lois did a strip without a joke, but I guess that’s not “big news” per se.

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Family Circus, 4/9/24

The “fun” of a Dolly Family Circus gag, to the extent that such a thing exists, is often about the gap between her smug, know-it-all affect and her actual knowledge; we see, in a single panel, both her hubris and her comeuppance. The other stock Dolly joke is just her tattling on someone, which is even less fun. Today’s panel is of the first variety, but I’m sorry, this is barely a darnedest thing we’re dealing with here — “hitter” and “header” sound very close or even identical in many English dialects, including in the Baltimore-Philly corridor that is the Keane clan’s ancestral home, and you easily can see why the sense confusion between the two words arises in this context. Sorry, I will not be cruelly mocking an innocent child for this one! (Open to cruelly mocking her at other times, especially in the tattletale strips.)

Crock, 4/9/24

It’s wild that this strip was written probably in like 2004 and was extremely incorrect in its terminology usage then, but today if you just changed “iPod” to “AirPod” it would be exactly right and probably along the lines of what the author was originally thinking of. If we went back and analyzed all the old strips, would we find that Crock was prescient of coming trends? No, absolutely not, why would even think that, get outta here.

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Dick Tracy, 4/8/24

In a lot of ways, it has to be a real pain in the ass to be a criminal in the Dick Tracy universe — like, you have to have some kind of gimmick, and if someone in your family has already established a gimmick, you have to try to riff on it, even if the result is incredibly labored. What if this lady doesn’t even like crop-tops? What if she dreams of wearing comfortable, loose-fitting blouses, but instead she has to do business with her belly showing, and then feels obligated to stick to a rigorous diet and workout regimen to keep her abs shapely and wear a navel ring to draw attention to it to boot? On the other hand, in other ways it’s actually pretty easy to be a criminal in the Dick Tracy universe — like, you can just walk into a bar and say “Hey, I’m doing some crimes, anyone else want to do crimes with me?” and a lot of people will cheerfully sign up.

Judge Parker, 4/8/24

Wow, big news, everybody! Randy is sick of this same story happening over and over and over again, so he’s shutting down the Judge Parker newspaper strip. RIP Judge Parker, 1952-2024, you taught me it was OK to be weird, but not in, like, an interesting way.

Mary Worth, 4/8/24

HE’S NOT LADY, HE VERY MUCH IS NOT, PLEASE DO NOT ENCOURAGE AND/OR HAVE SEX WITH HIM