Gasoline Alley by Jim Scancarelli for April 21, 2013

Yeah . . . for the mouse!

Yesterday, Firebrand1 said, “Great strip today The punch line was telegraphed butstill enjoyable. Sad that passing by snobs sneer at great comics.”I couldn’t agree more. This strip started in 1920 & still survives. Some people see it as simple, and see that as a bad thing. I see it as innocent / non-controversial. It’s just uncomplicated & entertaining in its own way. As kids, some of us liked Sesame Street or Captain Kangaroo. As we grew older, maybe we outgrew them, but that didn’t mean they were stupid when we watched them. What’s wrong with a new generation of fans liking Gasoline Alley? I’m still enjoying the ride.

Rufus looks weird without his hat on.

I’ve said it before, having spent time reading strips from earlier decades, I find the current writing very disappointing. There is a difference between simple humor and lame humor, and I’m afraid the humor is usually of the latter variety. And who says every story arc has to be funny anyway? And often the story arc leads nowhere. King, Perry, and Moores all had stories that were humorous, but they also had stories that were topical and serious. I do wish the writing were on the same level as Mr. Scancarelli’s masterful draftsmanship.

“Subtle” is not an adjective I would use in regard to the humor here. “Weak,” “labored,” and “awkward” are more accurate from what I see.

So many complain because they can’t enjoy life for what it is. If you find any strip unappealing, stop following it and go somewhere else to search for your misery. Life is too short to waste on anything so simple. I, for one, like the comics I follow and the ones I don’t like, I don’t follow. Wake up and smell the roses people.

I wonder if Rufus has read about the parasite spread by cats that might well cause a mouse to recklessly cross a cat’s path: http://tinyurl.com/cagylq7

Agreed.

One thing you have to remember looking at a lot of the old comic strips – not just Gasoline Alley but pretty much all of them – is how wordy they frequently were. That went away a long time ago, along with the willingness to allow story lines to go one for more than a few weeks (I think with Dick Tracy the creative team is allowed 6 or 8 weeks per story, with a true epic being given a couple of extra weeks). It’s as if the editors, publishers and syndicates (and maybe the readers) took the attitude of the Emperor in “Amadeus” and said “too many words.”

Even Blondie had long storylines way back when. The story strips have fallen away. I still love the Phantom, but rarely see any real stories in the strips. Arlo and Janis does it well at times, when it’s not a gag-a-day— which it also does well.

Old Gasoline Alley is great. It’s hard to get the sense of the pace, however, reading in the books. I wonder how that glacial pace would play today.

The strips are up against all sorts of options today that didn’t exist in their heyday. Everyone read the comics. Now, relatively few. Heck, empirically few.

And it is not a big money game the way it used to be.

Nor any other colour of cat, Rufus.

“The only ‘superstition’ I have is that of avoiding black cats — of course I also avoid white, grey, striped, spotted, … cats. How did you think I made it to 2000 years?” — Max The Mouse

I wonder if Joel attends services as well? Not sure if he would. I do not readily see him in the audience.