Show some respect, little one. That guy with the typewriter is Lee Falk, the creator of The Phantom and its sister strip Mandrake the Magician. Legend in the serial adventure comic business. Falk died in 1999, but his name remains in the credit box on the comic strips, I assume out of sentiment rather than because he had Bob Kane as his agent.
For some time now Tony DePaul has used Lee Falk as narrator, providing recaps and transitions and background material to readers who joined us late. I’m charmed by it. This story’s seen more of Lee Falk The Character than usual, including his speaking to the reader as though he weren’t sure what the story was. Tony DePaul has never been shy about discussing what he’s attempting in a story, as anyone reading his blog knows. So it can’t be DePaul wanting to find some way to talk about his writing process. The story as it’s told is about The Phantom himself creating a story, his audience being the Jungle Patrol. I imagine as we see more of it we’ll see some thematic echoes between Falk deciding how the story works and The Phantom working on his plans.
And that story we’ll see — well, I should pause a moment. The weekday Phantom, as well as Judge Parker, are going to be looking different for a while. Mike Manley, the regular artist, is ill and it looks like an extended absence, says The Daily Cartoonist. Bret Blevins (with lettering by Scott Cohn) have been filling in for a couple weeks on The Phantom, as they did for a while last year too. Jeff Weigel, who does the Sunday strips, is supposed to take over the weekday strips for the duration starting from later this month. Blevins has also taken on drawing Judge Parker, and I don’t know how long that’s to last.
This story, by the way, is set some time after the conclusion of the story going on in the weekday strips. This gets neatly teased when Jungle Patrol folks as John X for more information about Gravelines, and he says that story’s not yet over. I’m amused.
Somehow, The Phantom sees an angle to prove John X isn’t the Unknown Commander, and maybe burnish the Unknown Commander’s legend some, since after a couple centuries not being seen even experienced Jungle Patrollers start asking questions like “how does this work exactly?” So we learn, from flashback conversations with Diana, that he’s been going into Mawitaan and meeting people with Ajabu Engineering (“You Imagine It, We Build It”). And he’s readying some spectacle for the Jungle Patrol’s benefit.
Meanwhile, what he tells Colonel Worubu and the Jungle Patrol staff is that he’s not sure but someone he thinks was the Unknown Commander died in a mission in Ivory Lana. And, sure enough, nobody’s been picking up the daily reports in the Unknown Commander’s vault, nor has the light signalling fresh orders turned on. As John X, he tells Colonel Worubu of how much the Unknown Commander depends on him and his expert judgement. And he scouts Jungle Patrol headquarters, looking for a good way he-as-John-X can vanish and set up whatever he-The-Phantom has in mind.
How will this all pan out? I don’t know. I imagine we’ll have some insight in twelve or thirteen weeks, whenever I get back to this strip. In the meanwhile …
Next Week!
Why are we watching infomercials in Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D.? You’ll have to check back here to learn or catch up on the comics yourself. We’ll see what happens.
Saul Wynter has moved out of his apartment, the better to share his storylines with Eve Lourd (Halloween screen name, Eve Gourd). It seems like he’s got fewer obvious stories to tell, though. He’s got a new pet, a new outlook on life, a new bride. I’d like to think he has more stories left, since he’s got that charm, but if he didn’t it’s not like his life story would feel unfinished.
I hope here to get you up to the end of October 2023 in Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. If you’re reading after about January 2024, or any news about the strip breaks, I should have a more current and relevant essay at this link. Thanks for reading.
Mary Worth.
6 August – 28 October 2023.
Saul Wynter’s dog Greta was saved from the dogfighting ring. The people to thank here are Eve Lourd, and her dog Max, who did persistent searches. Also the dogfighting guy who left Greta’s cage unlatched so he could go be a drunken lout or something. Also Greta for running away. Last on the list: Mary Worth, who told Saul Wynter, correctly but without evidence, that his dog was stolen to be a bait dog.
So you understand why the strip then spent about sixteen months of Dr Jeff praising Mary Worth for the dog rescue. Also to Mary Worth saying oh, she’s just an ordinary person with particular skills in turning salmon into beige polygons. But yes, if only everyone could be like her.
Saul Wynter’s story got a new chapter starting the 21st of August. On a date at the beach he proposes to Eve. She accepts. What the heck, there hasn’t been a wedding in this strip since … earlier this year. All right, but it was a long time since the one before that.
Mary Worth happens to see the two shopping for wedding rings. It’s no surprise she spends most of her days hovering around the wedding ring store. She’s invited to their courthouse wedding, a small affair attended by the minister, the happy couple, Mary Worth, and someone appealing their ticket for having an unkempt lawn. “It’s all native flora, it’s better for the environment,” they say. They have a Mark Trail Sunday page for support and everything.
But Saul and Eve come back home, to toast each other. Saul speaks of how he never imagined marrying again.
The 17th of September saw the end of that story and the start of the current one. A large, mustached man named Keith Hillend is moving in to Saul Wynter’s old place, now that he and Eve are going to be sharing storylines. He’s engagingly befuddled by Mary Worth’s insistence on helping and inviting him to events and delivering surprise packages of beige shapes. All she can get out of him is that he’s a retired Marine and cop and that he hasn’t got any family.
Mary Worth’s not even out the door when who knocks on the door but family? Sonia Fabar presents herself, claiming to be his daughter. Mary Worth excuses herself so she can go make Tex Avery eyes at the family crisis to come.
Is there a crisis, though? They both like root beer, after all, and Kitty Fabar is someone he knew twenty years ago. She explains a bit of herself: she’s studying to be a social worker and she wants to learn how to stick it to ‘The Man’. Particularly the military and the cops. Hillend is aghast. Without the United States military some of those Latin American nations might go a century or more without a right-wing coup. And without a cop, who are you going to have shake their head sadly and say if they find your bike they’ll return it but it’ll be five business days before we have the form your insurance company wants for your claim? Sonia storms out, wanting nothing to do with a violent, oppressive killer.
Hillend, for his part, is devastated to learn he has a daughter, and the daughter hates him. He finds Kitty Fabar and meets her for lunch. She reveals she kept him out of Sonia’s life because he would want to marry her. She didn’t want to marry at all, or marry a Marine who was already married to his job. Hillend tries to argue he had the right to know she was carrying his child. Kitty leaves, saying this was a mistake and she’s sorry Sonia contacted him.
And that’s the gentle but legitimate relationship drama as it stands now, the end of October. Will Sonia come to see there are good cops who aren’t actually on any police force anymore? Will Hillend come to see why marginalized people have reasons to distrust the part of the State with guns and a code of silence? We’ll see over the next several months.
Dubiously Sourced Mary Worth Sunday Panel Quotes!
What great things did people not say, but that Mary Worth’s Sunday page said they said? Here’s the recent lineup:
“Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” — Aesop, 6 August 2023.
“The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.” — Albert Schweitzer, 13 August 2023.
“Anyone can be a small light in a dark room.” — Miep Gies, 20 August 2023.
“To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.” — David Viscott, 27 August 2023.
“My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.” — Winston Churchill, 3 September 2023.
“If you find someone you love in your life, then hang on to that love.” — Princess Diana, 10 September 2023.
“No matter how hard the past is, you can always begin again.” — Buddha, 17 September 2023.
“I want you to be concerned about your next-door neighbor. Do you know your next-door neighbor?” — Mother Teresa, 24 September 2023.
“Be curious, not judgemental.” — Walt Whitman, 1 October 2023.
“Most things in life come as a surprise.” — Lykke Li, 8 October 2023.
“You can disagree without being disagreeable.” — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 15 October 2023.
“Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.” — Alfred Lord Tennyson, 22 October 2023.
“The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.” — George Carlin, 29 October 2023.
The current story in Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley hasn’t just featured Bear, the talking bear. He’s been the protagonist. We’ve met him in earlier stories, although I don’t remember him taking a role this central. It’s one of the less realistic aspects of the comic strip in Jim Scancarelli’s tenure. But it fits with the sort of genial, slightly cornball writing he favors. It feels very like an old-time-radio setup — see the era when Jack Benny had a polar bear in his menagerie — although I don’t remember an exact parallel. (Jack Benny’s polar bear, played by Mel Blanc, mostly made Rochester very nervous.) Anyway if this is going to throw you out of the extremely soft world of Gasoline Alley it’s maybe not the strip for you.
This should catch you up to mid-October 2023 in the doings in the great forests outside Gasoline Alley. If you find yourself in 2024 or even later and want a more current plot recap, there’s probably an essay more useful to you here. And now on with the show.
From about the 1st of August the new and current story started. This focuses on Bear. Not the one whose cave Rufus and Joel have invaded, the one whose friends with fifth-generation family members Boog and Aubee and their mother, park ranger Hoogy Skinner. Bear runs across a lost kid, some toddler just old enough it’s alarming no adults are around. Bear starts asking the other animals, who don’t know anything and don’t want to be eaten by a bear.
Bear does find an abandoned campsite, and worse, one that’s started a forest fire. He runs with the kid to Ranger Hoogy Skinner’s tower. She already knows about the fire, and there’s helicopters dropping water on it already, so it’s nice that some of these aren’t big problems. The people registered at the campsite — name of Burns — are nowhere to be found. But there’s also no reports of lost children. The only hint of the kid’s name is that his shirt has ‘Jones’ written on the back, but a first name? Last? Athlete his dad likes? No one can say.
The Ranger has to contact the child protection authorities, or as the script refers to them, the agency people. Who come out, after Skinner has convinced Bear he should hang out in the woods out of sight. We follow him, so we don’t know exactly what happens except that Jones(?) cries a lot and runs away, into Bear’s arms. Bear roars, scaring the agency people off … for now.
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 20th of September, 2023. If you’re wondering how the frightened, confused young Jones there finds a real-live grown-up roaring bear to be a comforting figure, please imagine that Bear is voiced by Bert Lahr. Now you want to be adopted by him too, don’t you? If that’s not doing it for you, how about Alan Reed? Daws Butler? Don’t worry, I can roll off familiar-seeming names until one of them lands. And so can Jim Scancarelli. Ed Wynn work for you? Yes, of course Ed Wynn works for you.
They’re soon back, though. They’re happy to let Ranger Skinner watch the kid for now. I mean, this is Gasoline Alley. The last character added who wasn’t a foundling was Walt Wallet, a hundred and five years ago. But they’re coming with wildlife authorities who want to put Bear in a zoo. And they’re already here! Wallet puts her ranger hat on Bear and they whip up the first explanation that comes into anyone’s mind: pretend that Bear is a Smokey Bear animatronic. This somehow satisfies everyone in authority, possibly because they’re busy with the great Michigan’s Adventure pumpkin heist.
Now Hoogy Skinner has to watch over Boog, Aubee, Jones, and also her husband Rover. She does what you’d expect and hires Bear to babysit them all. (The pay is room and board.) And that’s our soft pilot introduction to Mr Bearvedere, coming this fall to the NBC Blue network! Looking forward to it!
The current storyline in Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant has the Prince and his son sent out to the western regions, in what’s now Wales, to sort out why it’s so unsettled that witch-hunters like Dialyodd are taking over. The problem is just enough Saxons invading that the locals can’t drive them off, but not enough that they can take over. And nobody has forces to spare so there’s no reason for the invasion not to just fester. And along the way destroy every bit of farmland to be found. Radolf, whom we’d now consider an expat Saxon, can teach the locals to feed themselves from that inexhaustible, infinite resource, the sea. But to do that, he needs people to not get hacked into bitty pieces by a war that no longer has a point or a way out.
So Valiant, Arn, and local leader Aeddan try a trick. They sneak into the stronghold, Valiant and Arn presenting themselves as Saxon emissaries carrying an urgent message for Baedwulf. The guards buy this, all right, and they’re able to get to kidnapping Baedwulf. Sneaking Baedwulf out, wrapped in a tapestry, works until a guard notices an anything, and then it turns into a chase scene that reminds us why we always ignored the encumbrance rules.
Valiant holds off the castle guards long enough for Arn and Aeddan to sneak out with their captive. And he makes a cool escape by diving into the high tide. Reuniting on shore, our heroes plus Baedwulf meet up with Gwynedd local Caitrin, her Saxon husband Radolf, and Radolf’s sister Bronwyn, who’d been one of the Saxon guards. Valiant’s goal is getting Baedwulf to agree to a peace where they can live here too, and eat and stuff, just stop fighting. Baedwulf’s suspicious, especially with the kidnapping and all. But he’s willing to talk through to dawn, when a fresh troupe of Saxon warriors find them. It looks desperate for Valiant and Arn, and the Gwynedd folk. But Baedwulf did cry halt, this Sunday.
Next Week!
According to the comic strip, next week “The Tide Turns”! But I won’t be there to summarize it. I’m planning a trip down to Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley, all going well. We’ll see how that turns out.
Leech Madsen set it on fire. The recently-concluded story in Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy climaxed, in part, with a fire at the telemarketing scam shop that the schizophrenic Audie runs. It starts in the server room. Madsen seems to have started the fire and then go to shake down Audie for the rest of the money to be had. This seems like a poor plan to me, as Madsen went and got lost in the chaos of the fire. But we have to allow even villains blackmailing other villains to sometimes make bad decisions.
Sprocket “Susan” Nitrate, onetime film scammer turned girlfriend of author Adam Austin, had a temp job working for a telemarketing scam firm. The boss, Audie, who keeps having movie-quote conversations with imaginary figures, has other stuff going on. He’d sent ‘Leech’ Madsen to pay off Anders, the guy who’d been supplying stolen telecommunications equipment. Madsen shot him, instead, and pocketed the payoff. And figures to get back to Audie and collect his own payoff too.
From there, though, we have a surprisingly direct plot. Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem hit up their street sources, looking for places that might be housing a suspicious lot of activity. This leads them to a recently-evacuated warehouse, the spot where Audie set up before moving above the TV station, the only other working building in the neighborhood. They also check security camera footage, good detective work that leads nowhere.
Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 9th of August, 2023. An aspect of this story I like is that Susan/Sprocket’s an experienced enough hand at this that everybody recognizes she should be let to run things, especially in an emergency. It’s a subtle beat of how authority will break free of formal structure.
Anders, in the hospital, recovers enough to start naming names. The cops announce their lead on the shooting to the press. This gives Sabrina, the boss’s right-hand competent person, the tip-off to evacuate. And Susan discovers another reason to evacuate: the server room is on fire! And, more, Madsen is back, holding a gun on Audie. It’s all a big confusing mess. Madsen flees, but in the smoke and confusion ends up running into Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem. Madsen keeps on fleeing, eventually running into the Abandoned Blade Runner Building. Worse, the floor he climbs to collapses. He’s lucky to not fall directly onto a heap of concrete blocks and wood shards and rebar, but because he lands in a great heap of pigeon droppings.
Meanwhile, the fire. Susan (remember her?) oversees evacuating the telemarketing lair. And she leads Sabrina and Audie through the sewers finding, in the end, an abandoned lair with power and water. They thank her; Susan promises to not remember her at all.
Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 23rd of August, 2023. Also an interesting beat: Susan gets away with her part in this scam. She’s among the few Dick Tracy villains to get away with it, and to have no obvious reason why she wouldn’t continue to. (The Pouch is the other one who comes to mind. He got away with using a popcorn maker to shoot a guy, back in the 70s, so he’s probably escaped justice? We’ll see.)
After a heck of a day at work Susan returns to her and Adam’s hotel room. Adam’s book contract thingy went well, and he’s ready to take an overseas vacation. Susan, equipped with a fresh forged passport, is ready to go too. The story comes to its happy end the 16th of September.
Although that was after a 15-day pause for another Minit Mystery. From the 27th of August guest writer Eric Costello and guest artist Mike Sagara told a little puzzle about a murder of a Knights baseball player at Weeghman Park. Get the references?
The current story started the 17th of September and it’s looking like a nice little murder mystery. Someone killed Wilhelmina Caxton, yet another friend of the mayor’s, so you know there’s pressure to get answers quickly. No sign of forced entry, no sign of struggle, just stab wounds to the chest. Missing: a late 13th century manuscript.
Also dead: Dr Aldus Manutius of the Pfister Institute, who hadn’t been seen in eleven months or so but you know how these Institutes are, everyone figured he was busy on something or other. He’s also dead by stabbing. He had been cataloguing medieval manuscripts, last anyone saw him. And that’s what we know for now.
The weekday story has just started the seventh and final part of the tremendous wrack-and-ruin story. It begins with Kit Junior visiting the Skull Cave and finding everybody but Mozz gone. Mozz is low-key freaked out because to get from Arunachal Pradesh, India, to Bangalla he must have set out more than a day or two ago. And this whole story has been the course of two nights, one in which Mozz lays out his prophecy and one where The Phantom acts on it. We appear to be in the morning after that second night.
In Mozz’s prophecy, told the first night, The Phantom should have been suffering from a near-fatal gunshot to his hips. Over the course of several days he reveals Kit Jr’s location to Savarna Devi, who goes to find him and meet her old enemy, Constable Jampa. If Kit Junior was already going to Skull Cave when Mozz had his vision, though, then — what did he see? It’s hard to imagine Kit Jr getting to Skull Cave, finding his father not there, and heading back home in time to meet Devi there. But how is he here, now, if that’s not what “would” have happened without Mozz’s interference?
Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 22nd of September, 2023. Not sure what Mozz is more upset by, Kit Jr appearing in possible defiance of his vision or that he didn’t see having an answer in mind in case one of the Walker twins should happen to pop in. Anyway wildly speculating here but I wonder if this is going to be a chance to fill in aspects of the wrack-and-ruin prophecy elided over before, such as the collapse of Kit Sr and Diana’s marriage and Heloise’s disenchantment with The Phantom project.
Last time I checked in with the daily story, the jailbreak was all but broken. The Phantom’s done everything he can to be sure if he’s injured he dies without revealing where Kit Jr is. Savarna Devi appears to be the woman of destiny. What remaining Rhodian guards are shooting at her can’t get near hitting her. She figures, why not try shooting even more people?
The Phantom arranges for the Bandar tribe to accompany the liberated prisoners. Most of them drive to Bangalla for an asylum I’m sure won’t cause further crises. But he, Devil, Savarna, and Babudan are on their own. And the warden who’s just seen the greatest jailbreak in Gravelines history catches them. Devil, Devi, and Babudan escape untouched. The Phantom, no; he’s shot in the hip, exactly as in Mozz’s vision. The Phantom’s done everything he can to make sure he dies, since he can’t get Babudan to leave him behind.
The weird thing is he doesn’t die. The wound is around where he expects, but it’s not as deep as it “should” be. Even without the Bandar wound powder it’s healing up. He’s able to get back to Hero, his horse, and to ride to the Bandar camp. Where, among other things, Guran’s given Diana a tea to make her sleep. Between the amnesia powder and the sleep tea he’s got a potion of dubious consent for everything. Anyway, The Phantom’s back in safe territory and isn’t dead from his wounds or in danger of revealing anything he doesn’t want to. And that, the 16th of September, finishes “Dungeons Undone”, the sixth chapter of this story.
The seventh, “The Journey Home”, began the 18th and my clickbait introduction tells you everything going on there. So now there’s not much to do but look to …
I’m not positive. The space adventure that brought Alley Oop and company to the center of the Milky Way featured aliens shooting at Our Heroes. Our Heroes fell into another universe, where the counterpart aliens blew up. But then back in our universe again the aliens weren’t upset at all. The writing suggested this was a changed timeline, but Our Heroes didn’t do anything to change the timeline. Unless this was some alternate-universe shenanigans that went over my head I think the writers just lost track of what had been done. Sorry.
The USS Gomblex, carrying Our Heroes plus a crew from Warth, was under attack. Their best plan to escape destruction was doing some tech stuff to the Time Cube and project the whole ship two hundred years back in time. It’s a brilliant success. They see the center of the Milky Way and, as should be, a giant cork plugging up the black hole that’s otherwise going to drain the galaxy.
Qqqc, the Warth captain, deploys a fleet of probes to reduce the pressure on the cork so it won’t be dislodged. What do you know, but this is exactly the thing that pulled the cork two hundred years ago, creating the crisis that the USS Gomblex picked up Alley Oop, Ooola, and Doc Wonmug to fix. It’s a nice bit of time-loop logic.
Unfortunately, the USS Gomblex falls into the black hole. It emits them into the Opposite Universe. The aliens are in the opposite universe too, and attack. When the Gomblex’s shields go down, the alien ship can’t help but explode with a !GNAB. It’s a bit of a confusing universe but it’s all dealt with soon enough. Another trip through the black hole and they get back to where they were … except there’s no black hole sucking the galaxy down. And the alien ship isn’t attacking. They want to talk.
Eric, from the Andromeda Galaxy, explains things. The USS Gomblex is on trial for trying to destroy the universe by opening the Milky Way Black Hole. They’re guilty, even if it was well-intended, and get fined two kilograms of gold. Still, it’s a reasonably happy end, and Qqqc makes kind noises about maybe working together again. I’d be up for it.
And with the 31st of July the current story starts. Doc Wonmug, following a lead from Myc, thinks he’s figured the secret to immortality: moss. Particularly, the moss found on a secret tropical island which they helicopter to. After landing on Eternal Island, the helicopter explodes, threatening Our Heroes with a lifetime of living on a beautiful tranquil island.
There’s strange things about the island, though. Alley Oop gets what seem to be responses from the plants, everything from playing tic-tac-toe with him to dropping fruits in Ooola’s hands. Plus there’s a boar trying to point out how the animals talk too.
This doesn’t stop Doc Wonmug from finding the immortality moss. He bites it and disappears, to Alley Oop’s and Ooola’s perspective. To his perspective, everyone else stops. Or moves impossibly slowly, at least. He lives in this incredibly accelerated speed for five years, his time; for five minutes, Alley Oop and Ooola’s time. In that time he has a lot of wild adventures, albeit without any human interaction.
Ooola decides to give it a try. When she eats the moss, though, she experiences a strange alternate space. It seems to be an infinite expanse occupied by nothing but the occasional polyhedron. She can’t feel anything — even touching herself — and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else there.
Next Week!
The Ghost Who Walks has managed not to get himself killed breaking out of Gravelines prison! But are there sinister forces trying to drag him back to a lost grave and the end of the Walkers? And how is this going to set up the storyline going in the Sunday installments of The Phantom? Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom gets some attention from me next week, according to prophecy.
Among the characters brought back to Shadia Amin and Randy Milholland’s twice-a-week Olive and Popeye comic is Patcheye. Patcheye is a pirate ghost, introduced by Bud Sagendorf into the comic book back in 1963. Bud Sagendorf imported Patcheye into the main strip in a 1971 story. Comics Kingdom conveniently reran the whole story again late last year/early this year. So it’s easy to catch the whole thing if you want to read it yourself and have a subscription.
Patcheye’s deal is that the ghost of Popeye’s great-great-great-gran’pappy, waiting for a boy in the family to want to be a pirate. Swee’Pea declared that wish and so we got a couple weeks of Patcheye training Swee’Pea into piracy. Patcheye puts together a crew of Swee’Pea and Olive Oyl and in a rowboat takes on a battleship. It then becomes a story of getting Swee’Pea out of jail on the piracy charge. Patcheye then disappears from the story, returning only to leave in disgust when Swee’Pea is spanked as a naughty little boy instead of hung as a pirate. An underwhelming use of a neat idea? That’s the Thimble Theatre Plot Promise.
Last time, in the Shadia Amin Olive-focused side of the strip, Olive Oyl and Petunia (Whaler Joe’s daughter) were spelunking in the Soulful Cave. (Whaler Joe is the guy who raised Popeye after Poopdeck fled and Popeye’s Mom, Irene, was lost at sea.) But Olive Oyl got attacked by a giant leech, and Petunia pulled her body out. Her dead body.
Luckily, as Linden (the Sea Hag’s intern) explains over the phone, it’s the Soul Full cave. It’s chock full of all kinds of soul and soul-location-management tools. Petunia’s able to find an altar of some kind that puts Olive’s soul back in … well, Petunia’s body. But Olive Oyl’s able to get this sorted out fast.
Shadia Amin and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye for the 25th of July, 2023. Amin’s page here. Much of the story has been in a lighthearted, bouncy tone for stuff about death and unquiet ghosts and all that. (For example, Olive Oyl gets back in her right body by threatening the Soul Altar Or Whatever with a hammer.) This is one of the quieter panels and unusually affecting. A bit of this sells the whole drama.
But not without a change. Olive Oyl can see the spirits of the dead around her. Not just the ones who won’t shut up being around, like Patcheye. She decides she needs to convey messages from lost souls to the living. And she puts together a gang to sail around Sweethaven and take care of this. Mae as bodyguard, Sutra as the person who knows Linden in case of annoying occult business, Petunia as marine biologist, Cylinda Oyl as assistant. (Cylinda Oil had been Castor Oyl’s wife but was written out of the strip in 1928, that is, before Popeye was introduced to it.)
On the Popeye side of things, there’s also an expedition going together. It has a less clear purpose. Mostly, Whaler Joe has been missing the sea, despite the pleasantness of Sweethaven and being with Popeye again. So they’re setting out on a little journey to see Sir Pomeroy, 10th Earl of Vauxhall, who I never heard of before this either. Turns out that apart from a guest appearance in the Bobby London era, he’s been out of Popeye since writer Ralph Stein left the strip in August 1959. He apparently was a British explorer with exaggerated mannerisms, which I’m sure hasn’t dated one bit since the end of the Anti-British National Liberation War/Malayan Emergency.
That’s the big development. The rest of the Popeye side of the strip has been about roping all of the sailor man’s family into a bunch that’s staying at Sweethaven. This includes Poopdeck Pappy, and Pappy’s mother, Popeye’s mother Irene, Popeye’s aunt Agnes Jones. Maybe even Agnes’s husband, Davy Jones, the spirit of the sea.
And in the main, Sunday-only Thimble Theatre Presents Popeye strip? Nothing much. Some fun one-off gags, with a nice mix of characters we know well and characters we haven’t seen since Herbert Hoover was President. Even an appearance by the long-forgotten Other Katzenjammer Kid. So that’s all fun but nothing that doesn’t explain itself. Except that a bunch of the Sundays have featured the wealthy Mr Kilph, last seen in the 1930s. He started as a philanthropist setting up Popeye boxing matches. He mutated into a villain setting up Popeye boxing matches, possibly because Elzie Segar forgot what Kilph’s deal was. Or because rich villains are fun to write and fun to beat. I don’t have any way of knowing whether Milholland is planning to go somewhere with this, but we’ve seen he is willing to do stories in the mother strip.
Next Week!
Who yanked out the plug at the center of the galaxy so everything could drain into the black hole? And how will Doc Wonmug, Alley Oop, and Ooola avoid responsibility for it? Also: hey, how about a trip to Creepy Animate Plant Island and some moss that makes you immortal but really fast? It’s time to look at Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop if the spacetime continuum doesn’t get all broken yet again.
No, absolutely not. And I think even people who can’t stand Francesco Marciuliano’s characterizations would agree that the characters are, at least, presented with rather good emotional intelligence, which maybe the most important kind. Still, the last couple months of story hinge on characters making decisions that the uninvolved onlooker might call wrong.
But these are also decisions characters made in the immediate aftermath of a car crash, one that totalled both cars. Even the smartest of us will be off their game right after that. And even if one is smart, one sometimes makes mistakes, especially in unfamiliar circumstances. I’ll get to the curious mistakes in time, but I also want to flag that just because a character screws up doesn’t mean they, or their author, is stupid.
Abbey and Sam were smooching again. It’s part of a whirlwind of ambivalence both feel about splitting up over a freak event. Sam suggests, and Abbey accepts, a romantic getaway. Or at least a getaway, in a remote cabin beyond the real of cell phones, Wi-Fi, or anything but the chance to figure if they do want to be fighting.
They’re barely outside cell phone range when their car smashes into another. Sam insists the other driver swerved into them. It seems unlikely to be on purpose. The other driver flees the car. In the backseat is an unconscious child. Sam decides on the best of their limited options: leave a note, take the child, and hike the fifteen or so miles to their cabin. There’s a land line there that should work. Not considered: hike the mile or two back to where there’s cell phone service. It’s a mistake, but one that’s very easy to make in the circumstances. They’d been heading to the cabin, they think of the cabin as safety, so the decision was made without being thought out.
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 27th of July, 2023. Meanwhile, here, given the information Sam and Abbey have? I think they made the best choice they could have. Possibly walking back to where there was cell signal would have been wiser, although in that case the kidnapper would still have got them and they wouldn’t have been saved by the bear. Maybe by Mr Grey, though.
Another thing not thought out: what is a kid going to think when they regain consciousness being hauled into the woods by strangers? They’re going to run away, of course, dashing any hopes of getting to the cabin before it’s too dark. Sam and Abbey try and explain that they only took her because her father was gone. The kid says she wasn’t being driven by her father but by someone who works for him: “he was going to make my dad pay”.
So, a kidnapper. Who has now come back, ready to grab the girl again. Not answered: why did he run away from the car without the kid, only to come back for the kid? Since we know so little about the kidnapper’s personality, or available information, it’s hard to say. My best guess is he panicked after the crash and then tried to put something back together. It’s also not clear why he drove the car into Sam and Abbey’s. But if he was fleeing with the kid, and thought nobody was ever on this road, the accident is understandable.
The kidnapper’s facing them now, though. Abbey thought she heard something following them in the woods as they searched for the kid. It wasn’t the kidnapper. What she heard was a bear. The kidnapper did not learn the lesson of Mark Trail’s story about Sid Stump and his bear-fighting ranch. That lesson, you’ll recall, is “don’t get eaten by a bear”.
While fleeing from this trauma Sam almost runs into a car. It’s driven by Mr Grey, the stepfather of Gunther over in Luann. The kid — Alina — recognizes him as Lev, someone who has something to do with her father. Lev Grey drives them all to the overly-guarded mansion of Alina’s father, Pavel. Pavel may or may not have a last name. He does have an oppressively jovial sense of hospitality, and gratitude for saving his child. He’s already learned something about Sam and Abbey, from the note left on the wrecked car, and has decided to give them a job. He wants them to bring someone close to them to him. He shows the picture. It’s Wally West. They have no idea who this is.
Pavel showed the wrong picture. He wants April Parker’s Mother. She’s murdered enough people in Pavel’s criminal organization he wants revenge. But with the CIA watching April Parker’s family around the clock, they can’t grab her. Ah, but if Sam and Abbey happen to see Ma Parker there? And take her to somewhere that Pavel’s men can kill her? Yes, that’s what their job is now.
Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 20th of August, 2023. I don’t know why Pavel assumes that Ma Parker is going to come to her daughter’s house. Anyway, between the Deputy Mayor’s drone coverup thing, and maybe making the deal with Norton to get Alan Parker out of jail (I forget if it was him or Randy Parker and it’s too hot and muggy to check my notes) and now this, Sam Driver is finally a compromised enough attorney that Rudy Giuliani is telling him to unwind some of this, fast.
Mr Grey brings Sam and Abbey back home, which is probably as well for their romantic getaway. They have no idea what to say about being roped into a crime spree like this. Sam consults Suspended Detective Yelich, who’s still got friends at the Federal Department of Backstory. Turns out Pavel might not have a last name after all, but he’s got enough of a crime network that he’s incredibly dangerous to cross, and any of Sam and Abbey’s family is likely in danger too. There’s nothing they can do besides sit tight, play along, and hope that Francesco Marciuliano jumps the action ahead enough months, see if maybe Marie or Sophie’s roommate from college is running for Mayor of Cavelton. And that’s where we are now.
My realization was that Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp is more narratively complex than, oh, Mary Worth. Not to diss Mary, just to compare to a comic strip with a strong single-story tradition. The strip has gone to a more fragmented narrative, often with two or more characters having their stories advance every week. My recap will be more coherent if I separate it out by character, then, and note how these lives interact.
Gil Thorp finished his first year in Henry Barajas’s tenure pretty strong. The boys baseball team won the championship in fine, riotous form. Hold that thought. Gil is named the Jack Berril Coach of the Year again, and this time his family is at the dinner for the awards. Missing from Gil Thorp’s acceptance speech is Mimi Thorp, who’s out at the bar with new golfing best friend Ericka Carter. Mimi and Ericka have been spending a lot of time together. One late night Gil Thorp asks Mimi whether she and Ericka are in love. We haven’t heard that answer.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 12th of July, 2023. This summer also saw Gil Thorp and Ericka meet for the first time, and seem to get along well. I’m not sure what to take of Ericka warning that they were missing Gil Thorp’s speech, rather than Mimi. The Thorps do seem to be getting along enormously better than they were last year this time.
Also at the banquet? Ex-Coach Luke Martinez, there to declare his surrender to Gil Thorp. Thorp notes that he never accepted Martinez’s bet, last year, to have the Coach of the Year run the other out of town. And, come to it, has a coaching position Martinez might be able to fill. Everyone else thinks that’s a terrible idea. Emmett Tays asks whether Martinez can be worth this much trouble. Characters from other comic strips come in to tell him this is gonna be a disaster. “Fair dinkum onya innit,” asks Ginger Meggs, who could use a job himself. “Blooming Perth!” But why should this be a disaster other than Martinez’s inability to be even a little bit normal about Gil Thorp?
And that comes to the final baseball match between Milford and Valley Tech, the championship. Martinez’s Korean exchange student, Kwan Tak, had five solid innings.Pedro Martinez, having surrendered to his father’s demands that he play obediently, relieves. He also lets two runners on base. Martinez goes out to demand to know if his son, his son, is throwing the game. The question is received as well as you might think. As the fight grows more heated the rest of Valley Tech’s team walks off the field. Whether they forfeited or simply forced the coach to leave doesn’t matter. Milford won and Valley Tech fired Martinez. (Valley Tech hired assistant coach Kim as athletic director.)
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 27th of June, 2023. Later in the summer we see Luke Martinez sleeping on the sofa in the living room and admitting he’d done something stupid. It seems independent of this, although his wife does warn he’s on strike two. I don’t know who that is recording this to be a viral video about a coach going nuts on his own son. But I know it’s someone recording correctly, in landscape format, so it’s probably someone old.
But Gil Thorp likes fixing up people. And he got to know what it’s like working with Martinez over several weeks coaching kids at Milford Juvenile Detention. This lead up to a streamed, charity football match that between donations and sports betting raised $150,000. A fraction of it’s even going toward paying kids’ restitution fines. Gil Thorp is glad people might benefit, but ever-angrier that the jail was profiting off the kids. Tobias Gordon offers a touch of wisdom straight from the heart of my Generation X. He’s “just preparing us to play college ball”.
Also, Toby Gordon and Rodney Barnes are in juvenile detention for several weeks. Marty Moon finally ran that story, supported with his pictures, of Toby and Rodney selling vape sticks. While they keep socializing it’s the tense way that friends who are justifiably pissed do. Toby is angry he gave in to Rodney’s plea to sell “one last case” of vape sticks, the one that got them caught. Rodney is angry Toby told school principal Dr Pearl they were saving to buy a car, rather than athletics fundraising. As Jacob Mattingly picked up, before I did, no sense dragging the sports teams into their scandal.
Over on the side of things where I’m not sure who’s coaching, girls softball also did great in the playdowns. They went to state championships thanks to a hit the bottom of the last inning by Keri Thorp’s bully/crush Dorothy Wolfe.
The new school year started, our time, the 7th of August. Kwan Tak is staying in exchange another year. And talking with Inma, who probably has a last name, about how she’s the first person he could come out to. Her parents are way overdoing Inma’s birthday party, renting out the museum for a sleepover. Luke Hernandez Jr and Jami Thorp look forward to have time to continue their Dungeons and Dragons campaign sometime. They’re young. They’ll learn. Mimi Thorp is off on the golf circuit.
And Luke Hernandez shows up for his first day as Milford wrestling coach. In the suspiciously well-funded athletic department he spots a photo of a random old guy hung in a spot of reverence. Commenter Charks explained Pop was the school custodian, from 1958, the original storyline. Pop welcomed Gil to Milford, and encouraged his rebuilding of the team, the year its only win was against unbeaten Valley Tech. It’s where Gil Thorp learned to be okay with losing.
And now I think you’re all caught up.
Milford Sports Watch!
One thing I know I am doing is keeping track of what other schools Milford is facing down. This gets easier over the summer. The season as I make it out looks like this.
Valley Tech (26 August) I know, that seems like a long gap to me too, but most of the interim was purely Milford or Juvenile Detention stuff. Summer, you know?
Kelly Knight has been the longtime babysitter for the Morgan kids. She and her boyfriend Niki Roth, and their friends Justin and Russell, were introduced before when Terry Beatty took over the writing. Maybe even before he took over the drawing. I have only dim recollections of those times but believe they came in as nogoodniks straightened out by the good influence of the Morgans. Their talk about high school feeling like a decade is a gentle tap at the fourth wall, and how even story strip characters only age sometimes.
We don’t learn Justin’s last name, by the way. At graduation he’s announced as “Justin … I have no idea how to pronounce this last name”. I trust this is an extension of the joke Terry Beatty enjoys where we don’t see Edward’s ugly Dog. But I can offer this testimony as someone whose last name people somehow don’t know how to approach: yeah, this happens. Or, more often, my name is read out as “Joseph … [ panicked silence ]”. When I did graduate college we were given a card and asked to write a pronunciation guide to help the poor readers out.
My last check-in with Rex Morgan, M.D. was at the end of the Mud Murphy/Rene Belluso story. The next week we got to see Kelly Knight, teenage babysitter for the Morgans for ages now. Graduation is worrying Sarah Morgan, who doesn’t want to lose her babysitter. Also, Kelly is worried that she and Niki will drift apart or worse when they go to college. Also, Niki doesn’t think he wants to go to college. At least not right away; he’s been doing auto body work and is thinking to work in vintage car repair and restoration. It’s a small niche, yes, but one that pays well. Someone should warn him that yeah, but your customers are all Vintage Car Guys.
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 29th of June, 2023. Well, besides Vintage Car Guys, Niki could also expect to get some customers who are impoverished college students asking for help nursing their ’04 Saturn Vue along and were told the vintage car guys have the mechanics who can really fix up what’s wrong. It is the alternator.
The 3rd of July starts the middle story of this. It’s the 4th of July story, with the real action coming enough later that the Morgans are annoyed someone’s still setting off fireworks. And then one of the firecracker explosions is followed with howls of pain.
One of their neighbors, Travis, got a firework in his eye. Rex and June examine it and then rush him to the hospital. (We learn that Travis, his wife, and kid, make a living in social media, having gotten into the toy-unboxing craze early. Rex Morgan is a bit stuffy about how is that a thing. But I appreciate the strip presenting that some people have weird jobs and it works for them.) At the hospital, in-between rounds of explaining that fireworks are dangerous and people get injured by them, Rex Morgan learns the hospital’s short-staffed. All those firework injuries plus some folks on vacation. The best chance to save any of Travis’s eyesight is for Rex Morgan to scrub up and do some eye surgery.
The interesting thing is he enjoys this, and realizes he’s missed it. So he talks with June, and then with Dr Jacobs, the head of surgery. He’s going to be taking up some surgical shifts, as many as he likes. It’s a prospect of medical scenes we haven’t had in a while.
That bit, mostly promising future stories, wrapped up the 30th of July. Since then we’ve been in the current story, which started with intellectual property agent Buck Wise and his family. His young girl Angela has a new favorite cartoon, “Li’l Fergus, the Boy with a Beard”. It stars an amiable-looking bearded kid who sings twee songs that her father doesn’t get. Then there’s a knock at the door.
It’s Mud Murphy, last seen in the story that wrapped up my last plot recap. He’s come to Buck Wise to apologize for having been such a jerk. Buck is stunned, since who ever heard of someone apologizing for being a jerk? But Murphy means it, and he explains how his life got turned around by “Doctor Mirakle”, Rene Belluso’s self-help scam that he found true wisdom in.
Much as Buck can hardly believe it, Angie can hardly believe Li’l Fergus is here! Talking with her! And being just wonderful! And here Terry Beatty connects a line that I missed. The guy on the CRUISE SHIP who approached Mud Murphy about this cartoon was Buzzy Cameron. We saw him a little trying to get the cartoon rights for the Kitty Cop books.
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 5th of August, 2023. So far as I know Terry Beatty doesn’t write or illustrate children’s books. But when he has put forth kiddie entertainment it has sounded plausible as stuff kids could go for. But I say this with very little interaction with kids and only a loose idea what they like anymore. Pokemon? Pogs? Dinosaur cars? Something, anyway.
The Glendale swing of Mud Murphy’s apology tour has mixed success. Buck Wise is up for it. Lou, owner of the club where Murphy upstaged Truck Tyler by feigning sickness, is not. When he does approach Truck Tyler, a man who calls people “galoot”? Truck makes a big enough scene that diner owner Wanda, a woman who describes things as a “ruckus”, threatens to kick Truck out.
And this is where we’ve gotten this week. What’s up next?
To pronounce my last name correctly, whether or not you’re apologizing, say “Knee”, as in the leg joint that aches, and “bus”, as in the omnibus. Stress on the first syllable. To pronounce my last name incorrectly, mimic anyone trying to read my name off a card.
Of course there was. There was soaking in an interesting place. There was seeing aspects of The Phantom’s world, and lore, that we hadn’t. It didn’t lead to a big dramatic battle royale, no. Nor the destruction of a lost world, like you’d see in a 20th-century movie about a Dr Moreau-esque city.
But it’s also been a more literal sort of fantasy, especially in the Sunday strips. In the Lee Falk days the Sunday Phantom was always running into, if the recent run of vintage strips on Comics Kingdom are a guide, unusually tall people. My mind may be blurring this with The Phantom’s sister strip Mandrake, which has also had a long run of giants in its vintage Sunday strips. But then both the Sunday and the weekday Vintage Phantom stories are about giants scamming the villagers.
This isn’t the first time even Tony DePaul has put nonhumans into the strip. There was a sequence … I want to say around 2010 … with the Ghost Who Walks transplanting some amphibian humanoids to the safety of a more remote island. But putting so much time and attention on the subject does make it easier to bring back later, should a story be able to use them well. And, as DePaul notes in his essay, this also serves as a chance to retire the Bandar amnesia powder. The stuff doesn’t always work and it screws up someone’s life when it doesn’t. So as easy a way as it is to clean up loose ends, DePaul’s Phantom now has reason not to use it.
Braun wants to stay in The Domain. She considers herself to be doing good scientific work, even if she can’t imagine telling the outside world about it. The outside world wasn’t all that accepting of her half-remembered experiences from this place before anyway. The Phantom, convinced Braun is there by her own choice, accepts all this. He wants only to map out the locations of all known exits to The Domain. At some point someone is liable to try visiting the location of the viral video where Dr Meier got mauled. He should know how to get there. The Phantom also leaves Braun directions on where to mail a letter if she gets into trouble. Diana points out how if Braun could get a letter out from The Domain, she could probably get herself out from the trouble. This is true, but, what else is there to do?
Tony Depaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 11th of June, 2023. I don’t know why Mina Braun is crediting The Phantom and Diana with her being a scientist again. When we first see Braun she’s gathering vegetables. But Teydra insists consistently that Braun wants to be where she is. And there is much to learn from studying what people eat and how they get food. Much of this story is told in inference, so perhaps we’re to take that The Phantom and Diana’s fuss elevated Braun’s standing. But it does seem like not much time passed between meeting Braun in the fields and going to dinner. Thanking The Phantom, I get, in the roundabout way that if he hadn’t brought her home she couldn’t have got back here. I can’t figure Diana’s role. Maybe she figures The Phantom does everything with Diana.
Meanwhile, Teydra convinces The Council that The Phantom may be the Champion Of Old. The one who fought and survived a ferocious battle centuries ago, one that the Third Phantom did his best to underplay in The Phantom Chronicles. The Council rules that The Phantom will be welcome in their city. But also they’re going to try working out whether he is the still-living Champion of Old. This was resolved in one of the top-row, “throwaway” panels. So it’ll need reintroduction should Teydra and her city feature in a story again. It’ll probably be the lede question for one of these What’s Going On In The Phantom essays.
The current story began the 23rd of July. It’s set sometime after the events we’re seeing in the daily strip, a rare explicit relative dating. The mysterious John X is back, and has news for Colonel Woruba.
Once again and not at all suspiciously Tony DePaul shares his thoughts about John X. This is another secret identity The Phantom developed, during a (weekday) story in 2015 where he joined the Jungle Patrol while amnesiac. The story, DePaul teases, is going to be all about misdirection. DePaul does confirm that this is the real John X/Phantom and not an impersonator, though, a possibility I’d considered. The story’s planned to be something like 39 weeks in all, but the last quarter isn’t yet written. Things may change.
John X’s news is about the Unknown Commander, the guise The Phantom takes to secretly run the Jungle Patrol. It’s that “we may have lost” the Unknown Commander as part of the impromptu raid on Gravelines Prison.
It’s several interesting misdirections. We readers know The Unknown Commander is right there. Why would The Phantom want the Jungle Patrol to believe the commander was dead? How does the Jungle Patrol handled succession in their Unknown Commander, who’s been unseen for four hundred years now? And why is the title of the story “The Commander Will See You Now”? The answers come from people or from time, take your choice which you prefer.
Next Week!
Terry Beatty will have a wonderful Sunday panel explaining three months’ worth of Rex Morgan, M.D. just in time for me to scrap 850 words writing about it! Watch it unfold here! I don’t mind!
If you are on the fence about whether to read this, I’ll admit there is some wonderful funny stuff the past twelve weeks of the strip. But you should not read stuff if all it does is upset you. You have enough troubles. It’s 2023, for crying out loud. In any case, as the strip itself is transitioning to the next story, you can most likely read the comic again if you want to take it as it happens.
Mary Worth.
15 May – 5 August 2023.
The last couple months of Mary Worth started with a surprising moment. Dr Jeff felt all sad about another couple at the Bum Boat texting their way through dinner. And Mary Worth said if they enjoy spending their time together without talking, fine. Other people not acting like you does not mean they need to be fixed. Before Dr Jeff can ask about the pod people we’re off to the main story, Old Man Saul Wynter and his beloved New Dog Greta. Here I put the cut so you can choose whether to hear any more.
I don’t know. The current Mark Trail story has Mark Trail’s father recognize an elderly woman. Mark Trail’s father is loosely a representative of pre-Jules-Rivera continuity Mark Trail. So does a character that he recognizes from the 70s represent someone from some story I never heard of in like 1978 or something? And I don’t know. I haven’t seen anyone calling out the easter egg, at least.
Also, being more loose about this, Mark Trail’s father has been presented as, roughly, the Jack Elrod-era Mark Trail. Mark Trail’s grandfather has been the soft-reboot representation of the Ed Dodd-era character, and Dodd wrote the strip until … well, 1978. So if you were to tell me this is a 45-year-deep pull, I would believe you, but I have no way of confirming.
Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 11th of May, 2023. Also, like, you’re probably hip-deep in raccoons and I’ll just say it. Getting mauled by raccoons is not going to help you in your quest to get mauled by bears. There.
It’s a dumb plan but Sid Stump, tech bro, has in fact a dumber one. He’s of the idea that you can’t be great unless you exert your dominion over Nature. You know, like by fighting bears. So the whole camp is shoddy and badly-run because you have to overcome enormous amounts of common sense to draw bears in. In the absence of both bears and the common sense that God bestowed upon gravel, Sid will fight Mark Trail. Mark Trail is up for fighting back too, until an angry mother bear breaks things up. Jebediah Jeter, journalist, insists it’s his friend Millie the Bear. Millie the Bear insists they’re not friends. They exit, provided cover by Andy the St Bernard.
With the 22nd of May Mark Trail gets back home and summarizes the whole scheme and scam. And, hey, the wounded Professor Bee Sharp picks up a job advertising railroad safety for transport tycoon Chet Chedderson. Hold that thought. Keep holding it; I’m surprised he hasn’t turned up again yet, but the story isn’t over.
As has often happened, Cherry Trail gets her own storyline, told one week out of every three. Her local concern is that bee colony rescued from the statue of The Forest Pioneer. It’s suffering colony collapse disorder, caused by (we learn this week) Varroa mites. She needs something to take her mind off the sad news. To her regret, she gets it.
That starts with a call from Mark’s no-longer-estranged father, Mark ”Happy” Trail, who wants to take his son fishing. I need hardly tell you all the role promised fishing trips serve in Mark Trail. Happy Trail wants to go to a father-son fishing event. And he wants to go by railroad. He’s got travel points! You have a relative like this too. Tragically, the United States hasn’t had passenger railroad service since 1948. While waiting for a dead engine to get replaced Happy Trail reveals the true purpose of the trip. The lodge was to present an award honoring Mark’s grandfather, Mark “Forrest” Trail, muckraking environmental journalist who set the Trail family legacy.
Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 22nd of June, 2023. Comics Kingdom’s Vintage Mark Trail has reached the 1970s. Right now it’s telling the story of Tobey and Tillie Beaver, from 1973. I’m eager to see if there are actual instances of Mark Trail with sideburns in some wonderful attempt to update the character. Also in the previous story Mark Trail — Forrest Trail, I guess — out-competed a logger in a logging contest and accidentally broke a kid’s leg, setting up a reconciliation between the kid and his father who doesn’t see why he should play guitar.
Still, it’s a nice chance to bond over family lore. And, at a scheduled stop, see a train explosion up ahead. It is, yes, a take on the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this year. This all way down to the train carrying a load of vinyl chloride and that the authorities set the derailed train on fire. This report comes from stunt-driver-turned-animal-wrangler Rex Scorpius, who’s in town visiting his mother.
The Trails get some cell phone footage of the fire. Transit cops demand the phone, so Mark Trail throws them his detachable tail (it’ll regrow in weeks) as a distraction and flees. They figure to ask some hard questions of State Senator Sam Smalls, who’s happy to take questions about how awesome he is. Mark Trail asks a slightly undergrad-newspaper-y question that amounts to “will you admit to covering up the scandal now or wait till you get home?” The Senator — I’m not clear whether state or federal — orders Mark Trail arrested for trying to instigate a riot. Happy and Mark Trail fight their way out of custody, and into the waiting car of accomplices-after-the-fact Rex Scorpius and his mother.
Well, Rex, an experienced stunt driver, out-drives the cops. In fact, since his mother was a stunt driver in the 70s, he can jump the car over an incomplete bridge like he was on a dumb action-comedy show at 9 pm on a Friday night. Still not sure how this is going to keep them out of jail. Guess we’ll see.
Sunday Animals Watch!
Eastern Box Turtles, 7 May 2023.
Injured Animals, 14 May 2023.
Mallards, 21 May 2023.
Ghost Fishing, 28 May 2023.
Jellyfish, 4 June 2023.
Bees, 11 June 2023.
Wildlife Railroad Crossings, 18 June 2023.
Atlantic Killfish, 25 June 2023.
Dogs in Summer, 2 July 2023.
The Oregon Whale Detonation, 9 July 2023. (??? Yeah, I don’t get this one either. It hasn’t got anything to do with the storyline and it’s not close to the anniversary of the event.)
Pink Dye, 16 July 2023.
Vinyl Chloride, 23 July 2023.
Varroa Mites, 30 July 2023.
Next Week!
It’s a rich blend of platitudes and pet endangerment as I look at Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. So you may want to be ready early in case either of those are likely to disturb your recreational reading.
I imagine they’ve decided that four years and four months is a long enough cycle of repeats that most readers won’t feel like they remember this story well enough to be put off. They’re probably right. I have to be among the most attentive readers of the strip and while I could remember the general gist of things, I couldn’t tell you many details of a plot to come. And I’d do lousy at answering, “OK, this is the Rocket Raccoon/Ronan The Accuser story; who do they deal with next?” (That guy in the swamp maybe? Oh, maybe they go to Los Angeles next so it’s Melvin and the mole people?) I’m still surprised they aren’t willing to pay someone one day’s work to add that sort of ‘Peter dreams of good times … ‘ panel to a strip from 2011 or something.
All a pity, of course. There’s not enough action/adventure strips out there, and superhero comics have a particular energy not matched by, like, Judge Parker.
This essay should catch you up on Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for late July 2023. If, for you, it’s after about October 2023 and you want to know what’s happening you should be able to find my most-up-to-date plot recap here. Otherwise, well, we’re looking at a nicely contained story recap here. Hope you enjoy.
Gasoline Alley.
1 May – 22 July 2023.
I last checked in right at the transition between stories. In the days after my finishing off the story Jim Scancarelli focused on Rufus and Joel. And the rainstorm following them home. They get through the heavy rain and floodwaters to their junkyard home, only for Rufus to slip in the mud and knock his head on a plank of wood.
He spends the night more unconscious than usual. Come morning Joel worries that Rufus isn’t breathing. He takes Rufus’s cell phone and shocks everyone by having a cell phone. I mean, in Gasoline Alley. I know everybody’s had them for like twenty years now but this still feels like Grover Cleveland getting a fax.
The poor 9-1-1 dispatcher is unaware Rufus and Joel live in the slapstick, cornball universe of, oh, The Phil Harris/Alice Faye Show. The ambulance slide off the road and get stuck in a ditch near Rufus and Joel. So does the fire truck sent after that. So does the wrecker sent after the both of them. This leaves the creek dammed high enough Joel can just take Rufus by mule-cart, like normal, to the hospital.
Turns out Rufus has amnesia. And again the hospital staff doesn’t know what genre they’re in, so they don’t just suggest dropping another coconut on his head. They instead turn to medicine and we get a fair bunch of the sort of medical jokes you’d expect for CAT scans and how much fun it is to be wheeled on hospital carts and all. They examine Rufus’s head and, finally catching on to the vibe of these guys, find nothing. They put him back in a room for further care.
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 21st of July, 2023. Also speaking of character design I like: the medic robot’s dialogue appearing on screen on their chest. I was at a nearly appropriate age for Shirt Tales to impress on me the neatness of clothing with changeable words and that’s never left me.
The hospital sends a small, vaguely Twiki-ish robot, to give Rufus his pills. This seems too advanced until you remember Gasoline Alley’s hospital takes care of Walt Wallet, a man so old he remembers when there were only eight commandments. Rufus is terrified of the thing, and the thing fries its circuits trying to understand his resistance. Some good news, though: the stress brings back Rufus’s memory! We get to learn Joel’s last name — Smith — and it looks like they’re busting out of the hospital this week.
Next Week!
Ooooh! Someone’s in trouble and you know who I bet it is?
And the worst part is it’s airplane sleep so he’s somehow more tired than when he started.
The explanation. When The Amazing Spider-Man comic strip went into repeats, in March 2019 it was addressed in-story by Peter Parker dreaming of past adventures while on the plane to Australia. The repeats started with a story from late 2014, an encounter with Mysterio, the supervillain whose powers include practical and special effects and a ball on his head.
The repeats have continued in the same order as the original strips, and we’re now up to the last week of this. I don’t know what to expect next Sunday. It might start the repeat cycle from late 2014 all over again. It might go into stories from even farther back. If the comic does that then I’ll have to decide whether to do recaps of it, too. I’m inclined against — I don’t do recaps of other running-in-perpetual-repeat strips like Mandrake or Flash Gordon — but I’m open to thoughts. The Amazing Spider-Man was always a fun strip to recap. It had a good blend of serious and goofy. We haven’t had something quite its like.
The current storyline in Prince Valiant has taken them to Gwynedd, which I learned was not just a place name but an actual spot in Wales. This brought me to a journey of discovery of Welsh local government which, believe me, I had to push myself away from lest I be late for bed and for this essay. When I’m getting into the Lord-Lieutenants you know it’s time for me to stop.
King (retired) Arthur had a mission for Prince Valiant and Valiant’s son Arn. Father and son haven’t been getting along well since Arn became co-regent of Camelot in Arthur’s absence. Arthur’s mission was that they explore what’s going on in the far west and what kind of mess Dialyodd made before turning to witch-burning.
In Gwynedd, the far northwest of what’s now Wales, they find wrack and ruin. They capture a band of 1d4 + 1 Saxon invaders, holding one as hostage to guide them away from Saxon encampments and letting the others go to spread word that Camelot is coming. Valiant and Arn enjoy this, bonding over a little light torture, at least until their captive gets killed by a stray spear from an ongoing battle. The Britons, winning in overtime, give Valiant and Arn much-needed backstory about Dialyodd’s madness.
Arn takes it hard. He’d seen Dialyodd as a way to shore up Camelot’s western frontier against Saxon intruders. Dialyodd saw their deal as a pledge Camelot would join the war once it started. When nobody came to support his war against the demon Saxons, Dialyodd blamed witches and vowed to cleanse the world of them. Setting fire to uppity women was at least something he could accomplish. Valiant offers to his son that they can at least make it better.
Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant for the 4th of June, 2023. I appreciate Valiant’s gentleness with his son over the issue here. I am also curious whether Arn — and Maeve — could have reasonably known that Dialyodd was planning to use Camelot’s endorsement to turn Saxon raids into something terribly like total warfare for the time, though. If I understand the timeline right, Arn’s deal with Dialyodd came before anything obviously dangerous happened. But perhaps Maeve would have been able to probe Dialyodd’s character better.
A woman, Caitrin, approaches the two asking for help. Her husband refuses to believe there can be peace; can they talk with him? They’re up for seeing what trap this is. In Caitrin’s basement Arn catches a large Saxon man before he can attack. Turns out the man is Radolf, Caitrin’s husband. He’s been hiding since Dialyodd stirred up all this Saxons-are-demons talk.
Radolf’s been living in the area for years, though. And he knows some things that would really help the people if they’d stop throwing spears around. That there’s edible seaweed to harvest, for example, or all sorts of tidal critters that haven’t been burned out by battles on the land.
While Arn learns all this, Valiant’s learning about the Saxon raiders. Their leader’s a fellow named Baedwulf, and they’re holed up in a castle that’s strong enough that they can’t be forced out, with a force not quite strong enough to take over the countryside. Valiant thinks that he, with his knowledge of Saxon ways — recall that he’s from Thule, not Britain — can make progress where armies can’t. And that’s what sort of plan he’s thinking of as we look to next week.
Next Week!
Has Rufus got over his amnesia yet? Is he still kind of acting like the same guy anyway even if he doesn’t remember who he is? Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley follows up the epic with the screwball, and I hope to see you in a week to talk about it. Or less than a week to talk about other things. We’ll see.
In late May Dick Tracy spent a week focusing on Silver Nitrate. We saw many old Tracy villains in the background as Silver narrated for the audience. One of them was Mumbles, whom we last saw out and hanging around a furry convention. It’s not clear why he’s in jail; we haven’t seen anything he’d done. I think the least bad reconciliation of these facts is supposing the panel is recollections. That it’s not the present immediate situation. But maybe Mumbles is up to stuff we haven’t heard about, too. [ Confidential to C.L.: ping me about this. ]
Last time in Tracey Town, the new villain Gameboy was on the loose. He’s a game-themed villain committing the most archetypical supervillain crime: themed property theft. Special guest star That Guy From Pawn Stars has an idea what Gameboy’s next target will be. The target is … a printer’s proof of the 1930s promotional giveaway map for a then-new-time radio show. It seems off-theme. “Shouldn’t this be a story Jim Scancarelli puts into Gasoline Alley?” asks Tracy. Ah, no, Pawn Star Guy explains. Jim Scancarelli would just have the old-time-radio characters show up. Tracy tugs his collar loose and makes an embarrassed ‘glurk’ noise before saying, “Let’s explore that some time that’s not now”.
Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 23rd of April, 2023. This particular strip is about making sure B.O.Plenty and Chick Tracy’s appearance later in the story doesn’t come form nowhere. But there is possibly another story setup being done here. Simmons Corners was the setting for the Li’l Orphan Annie radio series, as you surely inferred from Gameboy’s note. The ap was a real one, printed in 1936. But in the Dick Tracy continuity Little Orphan Annie isn’t a once-popular comic strip/radio/musicals star. And, as you can see, the real map has drawings of Annie and Sandy that we don’t get a clear look at in the comic. I don’t know how this is to be reconciled; the easy supposition is that the Dick Tracy universe map is about an Annie-like character who filled her pop culture niche. But it could be stranger than that. I don’t know the story; I don’t get scoops on comic strip news.
The map is going to be at the Metro Toy Faire, and it’s rare, so why not? Well, someone in a Gameboy mask crashes the Faire, stealing a nothing game. While everyone’s distracted someone else makes off with the old-time-radio map. Gameboy’s got to have a hobby, you know.
Meanwhile, B.O.Plenty is back in the story. He’s got a hen, Chick Tracy, who’s lined up for a modeling job for Chic’N De-Lites. She’s a clever chicken, able to do tricks and be photogenic. More on this to come.
The Chief has an idea for Gameboy’s next target. It’s a World War II prisoner-of-war edition of Monopoly. These were sets made with secret compartments holding files, compasses, silk maps, and foreign currency to aid escapes. The Chief claimed the Red Cross distributed them. He’s wrong, but in an understandable way. I’ve read pop histories mentioning the games and making the same claim. (I would have sworn it was in this history of the Parker Brothers I read once, but I can’t find the book again.) Other aid organizations, custom-created for the purpose, distributed them. This way if discovered the useful service of a true neutral organization could go on.
Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 12th of May, 2023. We never get, by the way, a definite statement about whether Gameboy had legitimately turned the Milton-Bradley ‘Time Bomb’ toy into an actual toy or whether he was bluffing. I feel sure the elderly man observing ‘Oh look! A time bomb!’ is referencing something, but I’m not sure what. The closest match to my mind is the bit in Doonesbury where an elderly Cambodian couple testifies that the war criminals Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s “secret” bombs were no secret: “Look honey, here come the bombs” he said. Still, there is something Jay Ward about this man’s declaration.
The Chief’s instincts are right; Gameboy can’t resist the target. While another fake Gameboy steals a cheap game loudly, the real Gameboy reveals what he claims to be a real bomb. Luckily, Chick Tracy — there for a promotional stunt — mistakes the bomb for a toy and tugs the string that deactivates it. Gameboy’s captured and all is well.
The 14th of May starts a weeklong diversion. The rarebit fiend Dick Tracy has an adventure with Fearless Fosdick, his parody from Li’l Abner. It’s a reference many commenters didn’t recognize. GoComics needs to expand its selection of Li’l Abner strips to repeat.
The current story starts the 22nd of May, with Silver Nitrate narrating his and his sister’s backstory. They were making film forgeries. Last time they were out, Sprocket escaped, taking on a new life as “Susan Keats”, girlfriend of novelist Adam Austin. Sprocket is thinking of taking a temp job at a place that claims it won’t mind her barefoot-everywhere in-touch-with-mother-Earth vibe. (I don’t know whether Adam Austin knows about Susan’s past.)
Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 7th of June, 2023. I’m not sure that Susan’s talk here is that good, but it is an economic way of showing that she can talk people past their immediate concern, needed for any sales position. Also, I mean, she’s being considered for a telemarketing scam organization. The actual bar is likely “doesn’t blurt out ‘I love my job at the FTC!’ during the interview”.
What the job is, is telephone scams. But she’s good at that — it’s not far off the work she and Silver used to do — and her supervisor seems nice. And the boss, Audie, is always wandering around quoting old movies at nobody in particular. So she’s working for an Internet nerd, though mediated by a human.
And then storylines intersect! It turns out the scammers are targeting B.O.Plenty and his wife Gertie pretty hard. Only the intervention of Chick Tracy can stop them falling for every call. Tracy agrees to tap the Plentys’ line and see if they can figure something out.
Which, with the aid of detection, they do! In what is unmistakably an act of scientific detection, Tracy finds a distributor who reported a hijacked shipment of telecommunications gear and a would-be recipient who didn’t. They ask the shipper for information on the buyer. They’re barely out of the office when the manager, Mr Anders, calls someone to say Tracy’s on to them and he’s got to get away. Tracy and Sam Catchem can barely find the false address of the “buyer” before Anders is found murdered.
And in another unmistakable act of super-detection, Tracy searches Anders’s office and finds … a bit of shaped stucco. Now where in town is there old shaped stucco? Well, the Nomar shopping area, built around fifty years ago, during the great Art Deco era of the … early 70s. They prowl the area. They can’t find which of the many buildings in the neighborhood is missing a thumb-size chunk of stucco. But Anders’s murderer, Madsen, sees them prowling and thinks they’re on to him.
Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 6th of July, 2023. And a note to head off future confusion: Madsen here is lying. He shot Anders dead and, I assume, kept the payoff. That’s what we’re seeing the gun for. Yes, I know this is a lot of “unreliable” narration this recap — Madsen lying about what he did, possibly Silver Nitrate having a montage rather than interacting with something in the present, possibly Gameboy faking a bomb — but Madsen we at least that he’s lying and have a good idea why.
Madsen meets up with Audie, claiming to have paid off Anders and that, once Audie pays him off, he’ll be out for good. No links for the cops to find. Audie says he doesn’t have that in petty cash, he used it all to pay Anders to get out of town. And, meanwhile, Sprocket/Susan is figuring she’ll be out of here in a few days, when Austin’s book business meetings get done.
And in a weeklong interlude starting the 12th of June, Diet Smith discovers a Space Coupe in his backyard. He shouldn’t have one; his was lost somewhere in deep space when a couple guys hijacked it, and he doesn’t have plans to build another. It’s a gift from the Moon Governor. Smith asks Tracy if he knows where the Lunarians are. Tracy doesn’t answer.
John X is yet another alias of The Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks, Kit Walker, the Unknown Commander, et cetera. Jungle Patrol cares because they know him. In a story back in 2014-15 The Phantom got a case of jungle-poison-induced amnesia. Jungle Patrol found and nursed him back to health, and gave him the placeholder John X name. The Phantom’s plot amnesia didn’t suppress his incredible physical talents, and with not much else to do, “John X” joined the Jungle Patrol.
At his induction ceremony his memory came back: he wasn’t some new patrolman. He was the Unknown Commander. So he disappeared when he could, and as the Unknown Commander left a note that John X was on special assignment. Since then, the Jungle Patrol folks have enjoyed having the mystery of what is John X doing for the Unknown Commander to agree they’ll never know. Agreeing they’ll never know who the Unknown Commander is gets old after a couple centuries. Getting hints is thrilling for them.
The Phantom calls the Jungle Patrol. The word spreads fast that the Unknown Commander is on the phone of all things. Also that he’s in on some kind of action. The Phantom demands the analysis of the prisoner roster that he’d snagged in, reader time, 2021. He wants Jungle Patrol’s analysis of what prisoners in Gravelines are probably there on legitimate grounds. That is, things that a non-fascist state would jail someone for. I’m pleased the strip addressed the question of what to do with the people who “fairly” deserved jail. I think my argument from last time, that in a fascist state it’s impossible to be “fairly” convicted of a crime, stands. But I also understand the need in the moment to keep the situation down to freeing people not likely to make the situation more confusing.
So, after thrilling Jungle Patrol with the promise that John X is there, yes, it’s off to prisoner-liberation. The Phantom picks Viola Odhiambo, schoolteacher, to start with. He sets up directions for everyone not on the list of “the worst of the worst” to be freed and assist in freeing other people. Also, everyone who can pick up a gun or drive a military vehicle? They should do that. Yes, he acknowledges not everyone is able to do that, physically or emotionally.
But they will need guns to do that. The Phantom talks that sergeant, the one left in the office, into opening the armory, by pushing his head into the door. Having seen reason, the sergeant is eager to ask: is this a coup? If it is, you’ll remember I helped, right? If you win? Right?
There is a grim beat in the midst of all this merry prison-fighting. One prisoner, excited to be released, begs to be let out next. He’s described as “one of the most feared men in Gravelines”, which is not to say that he’s on the list to be left behind. Through the bars he grabs Odhiambo. Babudan slashes him with a poison-tipped arrow, killing the prisoner. I know you can hardly credibly do this sort of story bloodlessly, but it’s still a slap to the reader.
The major, the one who runs, or ran, Gravelines, calls The Phantom, promising reinforcements are on the way. The Phantom calls his bluff. He’s got the Bandar warriors with him. Also a growing cadre of former prisoners with weapons and grudges against the Rhodian government. Also Savarna Devi, who while we weren’t looking grabbed the BFG9000 and is running around like she’s got the cheat codes. Which she might: she’s filled with a sense of destiny, that somehow she will survive this night, and return to her native India. It’s a heck of a bet to make. But when the guards waste whole belts of ammunition without getting her, you see her point. She can’t get enough of this. She asks The Phantom why stop here.
Alley Oop, Ooola, and Doc Wonmug are on a spaceship from the planet Warth, the other intelligent species in the galaxy. The Warth ship has found a crisis in the center of the galaxy and needs Our Heroes, and their time-travel abilities, to resolve it. And who is it attacking their spaceship, if Earth and Warth are all the species in the galaxy? That has, as of my writing, yet to be revealed.
This should get you caught up to Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for late June of 2023. If you’re reading this after about September 2023, there should be a more up-to-date plot recap here. I’ll also keep you posted on breaking news, should it break. Won’t fix it, but I’ll let you know about it.
Alley Oop.
3 April – 24 June 2023.
My last plot recap came near enough the start of the story, so let’s not consider that old stuff. Alley Oop and Ooola were back in ancient Moo, ready for some quiet time. Alley Oop’s cave is blocked up by all sorts of official-looking signs he refuses to read. He supposes if it matters someone will come talk to him. Someone finally does. He’s from the bank, and they’re foreclosing his cave. Also, Moo has banks now, and foreclosure. Also they’ve shifted from a rock-based to a coin-based economy, wiping out Alley Oop’s fortune. So, the bank tows Alley Oop’s cave away.
In the impound lot Alley Oop discovers a lot of Moovians have lost their homes. Or, well, had their homes swiped out and now they’re impounded. Oop’s first thought is punching, of course, but there’s a limit to what you can do with that. He goes to our time to get help from Doc Wonmug. Uncharacteristically for a STEM jerkface, Doc Wonmug sees someone else’s misfortune as a chance to get smug and lecture as if poverty were a moral failing.
So back to the past, then, and punching. Alley Oop decides he’s going to destroy banking. Since there’s only one bank in the world that shouldn’t take long. It’s a little confusing starting. But Wolfa, inventor and manager of the bank, sees reason quickly, and shuts the thing down. She goes on to build new homes for the unhoused, although it takes a long time to chisel out a cave.
And that resolves things. In the transition week we learn while she was offscreen Ooola started a bank, a nicely underplayed punch line. The new and current story started the 22nd of May. Mysterious gifts have appeared in the Time Lab: a “Space Pilot Test” arcade game. It’s not a test of their abilities as space pilots; it’s a goodwill gesture from Qqqcgg of Warth. Qqqc for short.
Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 21st of June, 2023. So, first, I like Qqqc’s design, and most of the design of the Warth spaceship stuff. I think Sayers and Lemon might too; the past month has had a lot of spot jokes about spaceships and future-y tech like virtual-reality volleyball and stuff. It’s also avoided being particularly snarky or wacky, and I’ve enjoyed this nicer-but-still-silly tone.
Warth scientists have discovered the black hole in the center of the galaxy. Big deal, so have we, right? Ah, but: up until recently the black hole was plugged up. Someone or something pulled out the cork and the whole galaxy will drain in a couple years. I know, I know, this sounds like a Larry Niven “Known Space” story but I’m not going and checking either. Anyway, Warth has the starship technology to get there. Doc Wonmug has the time travel technology to … not quite sure. But when the Warth spaceship USS Gomblex comes under attack, it sure seems like time travel’s a convenient way to escape. But will they be able to? And will they be able to go on and save the universe? Only time travel will tell.
Next Week!
Yeah, I’m surprised I’ve never used that line before too. Anyway next week, I get back to Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom, weekday continuity. We can see whether the Ghost has walked out of Gravelines Prison. Also, who has walked with him. And whether they’re alive to speak of. Join me for more tales of Captain Savarna blowing people up in a week, if all goes to plan. Thank you.
Well, probably not forever, no. But a development in Shadia Amin and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye has seen her body limp on the ground, with a ghostly form standing over it. This is what convinced me I needed to do a recap of the last couple months of story there. All my plot recaps for the twice-a-week Olive and Popeye strip should be here, however long I run them. If enough keeps happening, I should do another plot recap somewhere around September 2023, unless plans change.
Olive and Popeye.
28 March – 20 June 2023.
So the big jaw-dropping development came in a pair of Tuesday strips, ones done by Shadia Amin, starting the 6th of June. Olive and Petunia are on some expedition in a cave — Popeye wanted a break — and some giant wormy monster grabs Olive from above. Petunia beats it off with a stick, and it drops Olive Oyl’s body. But she’s … ghastly?
One of the magic cave leeches ripped her soul out of her body. Should be something they can put back. Also, while there’s no reason to think the comic will do this? It suggests that it could do a body-swap story, a kind of story that as far as I know hasn’t been done in Popeye before. Could be fun. (Yes, of course I remember the Jack Kinney cartoon I Yam Wot I Yamnesia. That one sure acts like a body-swap story, but the ending makes sense only if it’s a personality-change story … I’m not sure. It’s a Jack Kinney cartoon, of course the logic flies off the rails.) Anyway it’s at least rare for Popeye and conceivably a first for the comic strip.
Besides that … well, it is hard to say anything’s quite so important, is it? A lot of it has been Popeye’s surprisingly large family for an orphan getting settled in together. Poopdeck Pappy and Whaler Joe continue their tussle for the affections of Swee’Pea. And he sees the advantages in having two jealous grandfathers. Popeye’s mother Irene, Aunt Jones, and father Whaler Joe are keen to spoil Swee’Pea, but only to a point. He’s still figuring out what his bounds are.
The other development, the one that would be the lead if Olive Oyl weren’t ghostificated, involves Brutus. That may need some explaining. For the 1960s cartoons King Features created Brutus, a character legally distinct from Bluto, to be Popeye’s nemesis. This because King Features didn’t realize that Bluto had appeared in the comic strip first, and therefore was not the property of Paramount Cartoon Studios. In the late 2000s Hy Eisman decided that Bluto and Brutus were brothers and both could appear in the strip. The difference between them has settled on Bluto being the aggressive one, and Brutus being sort of well-meant but hapless.
Brutus and Olive Oyl have the idea Olive’s cousin Sutra Oyl (one of Bobby London’s characters) and Linden (Randy Millholland’s character) would be a cute couple. Linden is the Sea Hag’s intern. And, turns out, they do like each other. Nice to see.
This by the way adds to the count of story comics featuring lesbian relationships ahead of Mary Worth.
Besides all that, there was an eight-week ongoing story in Randy Milholland’s Sunday-only Thimble Theater comics. This story, “The Secret of Goonhalla”, saw all Goons everywhere — every kind, including Sea Goons, Moon Goons, and the off-brand Goons from the Gene Deitch cartoons — kidnapped by Trivicus, “cosmically appointed collector of all obscure knowledge”. He wants the location of Goonhalla, a thing nobody has ever heard of before. This because Trivicus’s boss, the Grand Archivist, keeps making up stuff for Trivicus to find. It’s to get his underling out of his hair, but Trivicus keeps finding the named things somehow. Alice the Goon and Popeye work together to snag Trivicus silly, and foil the whole plan. And, Trivicus and the Grand Archivist get assigned to organizing the Library of the Goons. Or, Goonhalla Library, as they’re naming it. So Goonhalla’s been found after all. I like the logic of this punch line.
I apologize for the warning on this being a little late. I suppose I hadn’t realized the comic strip was actually going there.
People who are sensitive to pets in danger might want to take a pass on reading Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for a couple weeks. The story under way has seen Saul Wynter’s dog Greta abducted being used as a bait for dogfighting matches. I expect that everything is going to turn out all right, at least for the dogs given names on-screen and shown to us. The strip just isn’t that dark [*], you know? But getting to all right seems likely to go through some distressing moments, and you should consider whether you need that in your recreational reading. (I’ll have a similar warning when I get around to the plot recap for the last couple months.)
[*] Yeah I remember Aldo Keldrast, who stunned us all by dying. But that was a long time ago. And he was set up to be a person you would feel relieved was dead, even if you wouldn’t wish that and would feel bad for feeling that relief. The strip is not going to do a thing to make you feel relieved that someone’s pet dogs die. Anyway, if you’re sensitive to this kind of animal endangerment, think about whether you want this in your comics.
A shade-wrapped CIA agent offered April Parker her freedom last month in Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker. She accepted. April Parker has obvious reasons not to want to be in Secret CIA Jail for spy crimes. Agent Shadewrap’s motives are revealed to us, and to her assistant. She has some kind of special job she wants April Parker to volunteer for. Shadewrap also wants Parker to feel she has no choice but to work for her. So April Parker has to give up on her outside life, which won’t happen while April fantasizes about being free and having everything go swell. So this release is meant to drive April into despair. Also the arms of yet another CIA type building their little fiefdom of personally-loyal operatives.
Neddy, in Los Angeles, is torn between emotional peaks. Her and Ronnie’s show was cancelled, just as the series about the secret life of April Parker was in preproduction. But Ronnie and Katherine Bryson married at last. And a guy who seems pleasant but is named ”Declan” talks with her. No signal where that’s leading.
Sam Driver, in-between finding excuses to hang out at Abbey’s, partners with Gloria Shannon for his … investigative lawyer stuff or whatever he does. And Shannon, showing remarkable grace toward a guy who got her husband killed, suggests hiring the suspended Detective Yelich. They need help with some client we haven’t heard anything more about.
So what have we been hearing more about? Shade-wrapped agents in CIA Secret Prison, for one. Agent Shadewrap, who’d arranged April Parker’s arrest, has an offer for the framed super-hyper-ultra agent. The CIA, in their first intelligence screwup and boggling failure of oversight in history, missed April Parker passing her cache of secret documents to Randy Parker. That cache was what Neddy and Ronnie used to start their second season. The CIA, having finally got around to their Tubi account, discovered the show and wants it buried. Leaning on the producers to cancel the show is easy enough. For April Parker, though …
Agent Shadewrap’s offer is April Parker can go free. If she can keep her mouth shut about all this, then they’ll find a use for her talents. Or she can stay in Secret Prison forever. April accepts the offer and calls Randy Parker, who … can’t talk right this minute. This was, for me, the high point of the story as it’s the sort of fumbling awkward thing that’s comic yet real. Randy doesn’t want to talk to April, agenda unknown, while Charlotte can hear. (She hears anyway.) It takes longer than April and Agent Shadewrap figure for him to drop Charlotte with his father and get some privacy. Good comic action there.
Less comic: Charlotte doesn’t want anything to do with her mother. Randy says she needs time, and leaves her with Abbey, who’s really getting back into foundling-care. But April sees Charlotte’s point. She despairs that between the whole CIA thing and then taking Randy and Charlotte to live in secret with her mother for a year has wrecked life forever. This we learn was Agent Shadewrap’s plan: when April learns there’s nothing for her on the outside, she’ll be a wholly committed Sith Agent.
Is the plan going wrong? Because Charlotte nags Abbey to bring her back home, and Randy sees this as a family triumph. It’s not smooth, but April has reason for hope.
Meanwhile Abbey, enjoying the part of kids where you interact with them for a while and then they go home, turns the Spencer Ranch into a day camp. The first day goes great, and Sophie comes in to talk about how terrified the kids are of horses to find Abbey and Sam making out. And that’s where we stand in mid-June.
Next Week!
I wasn’t sure all that much was happening in Shadia Amin and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye … but then something startling dropped today. So I’ll look at that twice-a-week strip next week, if all goes to plan. I mean my plan. Anyone else’s plan is their business.
One thread in the baseball-season story in Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp is that Valley Tech coach Luke Martinez isn’t giving his son, Pedro Martinez, chances to pitch. He’s got a foreign-exchange student, Kwan Tak, who’s hogging all the glory. But you need more than one starter for a baseball team, and Pedro Martinez was bred to be a hall-of-famer. He’s got allegedly a 90 mph fastball; between Kwan and Pedro, Valley Tech should be winning games they aren’t even in. I saw one Gil Thorp commenter ask whether Henry Barajas even knows how the game is played.
I imagine Barajas does. There are a couple things going on here that you might miss if you aren’t reading three months’ worth of story at once. While you need multiple starters, there’s the starter you give the most important games and there’s your second-chair. And that hurts. And Luke Martinez is busy screwing up his relationship with his kids, including Pedro Martinez. The last we saw him on-screen, Pedro was upset that his father had made their win against Milford all about his coaching, rather than Pedro’s playing. Pedro didn’t play basketball for Valley Tech, a gap you might have thought was just because not everyone plays every sport. Except that last month Marty Moon asked Martinez why Pedro didn’t play. That attention makes the picture clearer.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 19th of May, 2023. I understand the desire, to avoid apparent conflicts of interest, in Coach Martinez deferring to his assistant in formally deciding to replace Pedro with Kwan. However, Kwan is still Kim’s cousin, so the problem remains. Anyway, between this and the Marty Moon line about Pedro not playing basketball we get that the relationship between Pedro and his father is getting explosive.
The picture: Pedro Martinez is angry at his father. He didn’t play basketball, either on Pedro’s or Luke’s initiative we don’t know. Now? It appears Coach Martinez wants a more compliant pitcher than even his own son. Whether he’s actually not playing Pedro at all, or whether he’s benching Pedro for the bigger games, is ambiguous so far. Pedro’s sense of rejection is understandable to me.
So this should catch you up to early June 2023 in Gil Thorp. All going well, I’ll have another plot recap by September 2023 at this link, so look there if you’re reading this in my far future. And if you need to catch up more quickly. Now back to the sports department.
The competition will be a tough one: Valley Tech versus the undefeated Milford for the 2023 Boys Basketball Championship. The game starts, reader time, the 24th of March. (Marty Moon says he’s joined by “the legendary Lachlan Maclean”, a name unfamiliar to me. A commenter at GoComics found that he’s a Louisville, Kentucky, sports reporter, so counts as our third celebrity guest star! Let’s give him a big hand and congratulate the strip on more celebrity ‘gets’ than Dick Tracy managed this cycle.) It’s a hard-fought match, both teams playing well and Coach Martinez not being all weird about Gil Thorp. It’s either team’s game until an accident with one minute left to play. Rodney Barnes — who with Tobias Gordon was selling vape sticks to support the sports program — collides hard with a Valley Tech player. He’s knocked out hard enough Tobias starts giving CPR. Rodney’s taken off by ambulance, and he’ll be in the hospital until the next storyline starts.
After Rodney’s taken away — and they get the news he’s conscious — the teams agree to finish the game, telling one another it’s what Rodney would want. So he would: Milford gets the final basket and tops a perfect season with the local championship. Martinez congratulates Gil Thorp on a good game, “but know this … this ain’t over,” causing people in adjacent comics to roll their eyes. “C’mon, mate,” Ginger Meggs chides. “You don’t have to be all weird like this. Cricket wallaby billycart.” But he does, and he’s only going to ramp it up for the baseball story.
The baseball story — also, Chapter 3 of Henry Barajas’s first year here, “The Prestige”, begins the 12th of April. There’s miscellaneous little pieces of business. Coach Thorp’s kids are still hanging out with Luke Martinez’s kids. Martinez’s younger kid wishes his dad were nice like Gil Thorp. Marty Moon asks Luke Martinez why Pedro — signed up to be Valley Tech’s star pitcher — didn’t play basketball. Marty’s so used to being told “because shut up is why” he doesn’t even register there’s a story there. It’s right up there in my prologue.
But he does find the long-simmering story of the vape sticks. A leading comment from Gil Thorp sends Tobias freaking out that someone knows what they’re up to. He’s swears that he’s out, even if Rod won’t quit yet, just as Marty Moon snaps pictures of their dealing.
Mimi Thorp’s on the golf circuit. She gets a bouquet of roses and a supporting card on the start of this tour. They’re from Ericka Carter, who’d been giving her lessons.
And Keri Thorp, playing on the girls’ team, has a strange encounter with her bully Dorothy Wolfe. Wolfe’s been pitching a great season, topping it with a no-hitter. Someone on the losing team congratulates her with an elbow into the chest. It starts a brawl, and Dorothy’s stunned when the rest of the team comes to her defense. Wolfe hugs Keri, who startles me by thinking, “She even smells pretty”. It’s a gentle open to a much-needed Pride Month. Also between this and Ericka Carter, Mary Worth has like 350 years of social catching-up to do.
The central sport of all this is baseball, or possibly softball. Someball, anyway. Gil Thorp’s having some trouble finding a pitcher. Kaz gives his old boss one more good tip by reminding him of Greg Hamm, star of Neal Rubin’s final story for Gil Thorp. And Hamm is up for a special guest appearance, giving faintly Yoda-ish lessons about how to feel the air, the sunlight, the position of the catcher. And to make your pitches count; you don’t know how many you’ll get.
Luke Martinez, meanwhile, is almost sick for choice in pitchers. His own son would be killer enough. But Martinez goes all the way to Korea, to coax assistant coach Kim’s cousin into coming over as a foreign exchange student. He offers the promise of being a hugely noticed fish in their pond. Martinez even shows off that he speaks Korean to do this. I like learning buffoon-leaning characters like Martinez have unexpected skills. I assume he’s doing all this on his dime. I can’t imagine Valley Tech has a huge recruiting travel budget for the boys baseball team.
Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 3rd of June, 2023. I’m not sure whether Coach Martinez is genuinely blown away by Kwan’s wit, or is supporting him for doing this well in wordplay in a foreign language. Absent contrary indications, I’m going to suppose Martinez is impressed Kwan is joking like a native speaker and building him up for that.
Kwan Tak, “The Korean Nightmare”, comes to Valley Tech. Martinez bunches his own son to start Kwan, raising eyebrows from Gil Thorp and scowls from Pedro. Kwan — staying with the Martinezes, for that extra dose of energy — gets along great with Coach Martinez. But also (we learn this week) feels isolated and pressured by his family. They have unrealistic high expectations for accomplishment in the field of high school baseball.
And this, more or less, is where we’ve reached by early June. I don’t know how much of this will wrap up before Barajas’s one-year anniversary of the strip, coming up in five weeks, but we’ll learn together.
Milford Sports Watch!
Who’s Milford playing? Who’s Milford talking about? These teams, and these days. If you want their win-loss record you can work it out from here.
Terry Beatty does not have any beef with me. There is maybe one chance in sixty that Terry Beatty is even aware I exist, and if he is, his opinion is “there are other people out there for me to have opinions about”. But, this is like the third time he’s run a plot recap of his own, on or near the week I had scheduled for my plot recaps of his Rex Morgan, M.D., seen here. (See January 2022 and also February 2021.)
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 28th of May, 2023. Rene Belluso, multi-failed con artist, was in the ocean because he missed while trying to shove Hank Junior in. This because Belluso suspected, correctly, that Hank Junior recognized him as the ‘Professor Augustus Mirakle’ whose snake-oil therapy had coaxed the wonderfully bombastic ‘Mud’ Murphy into being a nice, gentle person. This prompted Murphy to write and perform a lot of treacly, pointless numbers that disappointed his fans, Hank Junior and Yvonne included. I don’t care for the implication that an artist has to be screwed up to be good — it leads to the idea that it’s a good thing to make artists miserable — but it’s not a notion Beatty invented from nowhere. Anyway, Murphy has to deal with the realization that a scammer helped him to fix some of the many issues in his life. But he can use the accidental wisdom and blend that into his life. Plus a children’s TV producer thinks Murphy’s twee little musical doodlings are just what kids want to hear. So that’s all happy endings, including for Rene, who somehow escaped from the ship’s brig, to be seen in some later story.
The animal-like people in Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom‘s Sunday-continuity story, “Return to the Temple of the Gods”, came about from an Ancient Egyptian Cult that somehow developed a race of super-men. This was introduced in a daily-continuity story back in 2005. I’m considering doing a special recap of that as the Return starts its second year.
That cult, we learn, died out sometime in the late 19th century. With the lack of surface contact, the underground race of animal-men here have had to develop with their small population and resources. So things have a strong fin-de-siècle vibe.
This essay should catch you up to mid-May 2023 in the Sunday Phantom. If you’re interested in the weekday continuity, or if you’re reading this after about August 2023, I should have a more useful essay up here. And now back to the underground domain of the near-humans.
The Phantom (Sundays).
26 February – 21 May 2023.
The Phantom and Diana Walker and Devil were finally in. Teydra, a lion-like humanoid, brought them into The Domain, an underground city guarded by a gigantic mural of The Phantom. The 3rd Phantom, centuries ago, visited here … but after a terrible fight he retreated and wrote nothing in The Chronicles about a subterranean city. Why?
Diana and Kit Walker’s supposition: The 3rd Phantom never got to the underground city. Instead, after the ferocious battle, the cult built up his image as a protector and warning for and to the almost-humans.
Teydra said the Phantom’s appearance, so like the legendary warrior, would not go unnoticed. In case anyone risked not noticing she finks on him to the Council. (I assume it’s The Council.) Her suspicion: the human called Walker secretly found images of the Champion of Old, and adopted that image for his own secret purposes. It’s an interesting hypothesis, as you could argue it’s true. The Council sets Phantom and Wife in an apartment, under the supervision of a guard who’s not nearly stealthy enough. The guard quits after a good clonk in the face.
Tony Depaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 7th of May, 2023. Phantom is pretty lucky the legend has sprawled out so far as to cover cases like this. Also he’s lucky Teydra isn’t asking about Towns Ellerbee or John Doe. Also I thought The Phantom Wiki had a list of aliases The Ghost Who Walks has used but if it does, I can’t find it.
Next morning Teydra takes the humans to meet their goal. That would be the other human, the assistant missing since the mauling of an explorer that set off this whole story. The Phantom wants to know that she’s okay and that Teydra’s claim that she wants to be there is correct. The assistant proves to be Mina Braun, who was in the 2005 (reader time) story which introduced all this to the Phantom’s world. (She was on the trail of a 1945 desperation mission by Nazis to bring animal-people super-soldiers into the war on their side.) Guran, using the Bandar Potion of Amnesia, suppressed her memories of this. And yet … she recognizes The Phantom on sight. She’s relieved these muddled memories were not a fever dream during a jungle-induced illness.
Diana considers what the imperfection of Guran’s Potion means. Among other things, it makes it harder to ignore the moral problems in mind-wiping. Also that now Braun is wrapping herself tight around The Phantom. She’s overwhelmed in the joy of an island of safety in a swampy confused nightmare. That’ll probably be easy to straighten out.
The story dominating Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth since February has been about Estelle. She’s got a new boyfriend, and a new job working for him for some reason. But there’s been a lot of talk about how Wilbur Weston feels about this. A touch of this is appropriate. Estelle was fed up Wilbur’s Wilbur-ness. And the suspicion that Wilbur was creeping on her helped her interest pair-bonding with Ed the Veterinarian.
But Wilbur’s getting more mention than he needs. It may be because he is a glorious punching bag, all unjustified self-confidence and unaware incompetence. But this makes him a snarker’s delight. There’s a reason we (me included) like to talk about his mayonnaise expertise and such. So it may be that the strip is contracting self-awareness and that Moy and Brigman are playing to the fans. I hope it’s more that it’s fun seeing mildly bad things happen to Wilbur. And that they’re looking to develop more characters that hit that right level of ridiculousness. Hugo the guy who’s totally not making up being French shows they can do it in other tones.
Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 21st of April, 2023. “What you need is to do a public performance in front of a slightly drunk group of strangers who all think they could do better plus one most trusted friend watching you with steely-eyed determination to constantly judge your feelings. That’ll help you!’
Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 9th of March, 2023. I was surprised how impassive — cheerful, even — Ed shows in admitting this. His expression sells the idea that he doesn’t realize this is a bad answer to have. He looks like he thinks why should he change? The world is the one who sucks, not him.
Ed has to cancel a date. And another. And more. He’s been having a hard time at work, with a lot of animals needing care. And his assistant, Steven, can’t cope with the demands of the job, and quits. Estelle, taking the chance that Ed isn’t hiding from her, leaves a message suggesting Not One More Vet. It’s a (real) group for veterinarians who have mental health crises. Ed remembers how he told Steven he simply doesn’t balance his work and life and wonders if that means anything.
They get together for a third date and it goes great. Even their pets get along great. Stella thinks this is love, so we can only imagine what the fifth date will be like. (That’s the one with Pet Yoga.) But Ed’s looking into therapy too, and he’s prepared to admit they’re short-staffed at work. Stella offers what if she were to work as a volunteer for a couple hours a week? It’s a little weird, but she’s into weird. But she’s good at doing whatever needs doing. And she gets to see Ed doing great stuff like rescuing a choking dog. Ed talks about making this something serious: putting her on hourly.
Meanwhile, Wilbur’s coping with Estelle’s latest breakup by weeping on Mary Worth’s plates of salmon goo. She coaxes him into going out to karaoke, singing sad songs while Stella and Ed thank each other for loving them.
With all that resolved what is there to do but thank Mary Worth? And for Stella and Ed to congratulate each other on pair-bonding so hetero-monogamously. Also that Ed’s now taking enough time off to not feel burned out. So everyone’s happy, right?
And with the 7th of May Stella and Ed’s story comes to its conclusion. The 8th, Dr Jeff calls up Mary Worth to invite her to a surprise. He’s got a much bigger boat and absolutely no intentions of asking Mary Worth to marry him again. She loves both of these. And they agree how great it is Stella and Ed found each other even though Ed is so not like Wilbur. Also but they bet someone’s out there for Wilbur Weston even though he’s so “eccentric”.
Jeff and Mary Worth eating is usually a signal for a new story to start, so my recap week is well-positioned once more. What’s coming next, and will it involve cruise ships? I don’t know, nobody tells me anything.
Dubiously Sourced Mary Worth Sunday Panel Quotes!
But one thing I know without being told: every Sunday Mary Worth quotes something a person almost always did not say! If they did, it wasn’t in context, or it wasn’t that Socrates, or something like that. Here are some recent examples.
“Nightmares are releases.” — Sylvia Browne, 19 February 2023.
“Dating is … weird.” — Jennifer Coolidge, 26 February 2023.
“When things are a disappointment, try not to be so discouraged.” — Carol Burnett, 5 March 2023.
“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” — Albert Einstein, 12 March 2023.
“Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.” — Khalil Gibran, 19 March 2023.
“Patience attracts happiness: it brings near that which is far.” — Kate Phillips, 26 March 2023.
“There’s nothing like music to relieve the soul and uplift it.” — Mickey Hart, 2 April 2023.
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of another.” — Charles Dickens, 9 April 2023.
“The world needs people who save lives.” — Frederick Buechner, 16 April 2023.
“Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time and sometimes you weep.” — Carl Sandburg, 23 April 2023.
“It’s not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confidence of their help.” — Epicurus, 30 April 2023.
“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 7 May 2023.
“We can only learn to love by loving.” — Iris Murdoch, 14 May 2023.
The last few days in Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail have introduced us to Jebediah Jeter. He’s a journalist who went missing while investigating a nature retreat. Rather than being attacked by bears, though, he claims to have befriended them. He seems to be going through some stuff.
Last time I figured Mark Trail was going to do a story about the alligators in the Lost Forest. So did Mark. Bill Ellis vetoed the story, though, figuring nobody would care unless Mark Trail got eaten by alligators or something cool like that. But he does have another story, one within commuting range. Water Bear Country is this place for rich STEM idiots to reconnect with nature. But True Tech Magazine reporter Jebediah Jeter’s vanished from it. True Tech’s editor thinks he was attacked by a water bear. Mark Trail concedes the possibility but that such an attack would not be a big deal.
Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 21st of April, 2023. I, too, appreciate Cherry’s desire to be precise about the matter. And tha she wants to be intellectually honest enough about her answer not to just blame the disaster on the concrete driveway she hates.
Back to that in a moment. I’d like to outline the Cherry Trail story, which gets to another round of conflict with Honest Ernest over the Sunny Soleil Garden Society. He’s planning to pave over the garden outside the clubhouse. Society president Violet Cheshire is all for this too. Ernest’s (ex?-)wife Caroline wants nothing to do with him, and poured his homemade lawn toxin sideline down the drain. So now he’s into paving. Violet Cheshire won’t hear any arguments against the parking lot, and all Cherry Trail can do is salvage some rose bushes ahead of the concrete pour.
Then comes the rain pour. A heavy but not exceptional storm rolls through and with the soft, absorbent ground gone, the water rolls into Violet Cheshire’s office. She’s not happy about that, either, but what are you going to do? Think about how we get rain sometimes?
Back to Water Bear Country. Mark Trail can’t get anyone to say they understand that “water bears”, tardigrades, are microorganisms remarkable for their hardiness and incapable of threatening a human. He does get a greeting from Water Bear Country Retreat organizer and AI writing/art scammer Simon Stump. And he gets to meet the current set of campers. Re-meet, most of them: there’s people like ‘Cricket Bro’ Rob Bettancourt that he’d like to punch. Or Professor Bee Sharp, whose punching is less necessary. There’s also a lifestyle influencer named Holly Folly he doesn’t know anything about.
This gang goes off on a nature hike. Mark Trail figures it’s a good chance to find out why there might be macroscopic bear problems in the village. Possible causes? Lots of food left in attended dumpsters. He can barely consider what this means for park management when Holly Folly runs in calling for help. The trail collapsed and Cricket Bro and Bee Sharp fell down the ravine. Mark Trail drives home and picks up Andy and a cart to wheel Bee Sharp back up.
Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 23rd of March, 2023. I love the little hearts floating around Holly Folly and Andy in the second panel there. This may also be a good spot for a discussion question. Does it work that we don’t have any knowledge of Holly Folly’s problems before Mark Trail announces they exist? In structure it’s a deus ex machina, a thing not set up in the story that gets Mark Trail to the next point. But it’s something she has reason not to bring up, and that Mark Trail has reason not to bother looking at until he’s gotten this clue about Bee Sharp. So is that fair?
The camp’s emergency plan is to point and say, “Look, a big, distracting thing!” before Stump explains journalists are smug and he’s going to destroy them. So Mark Trail gets his own first aid kit, and drives Sharp to the hospital himself.
Mark Trail doesn’t relish telling Rusty that his favorite science guy has a broken leg. Rusty doesn’t care, though; he’s declared Bee Sharp “cancelled”. This because of a video where Sharp claimed hippos were closely related to pigs. This is something you could find in any pop nature book a generation ago but which has turned out to be wrong. (Other things to catch the Old Pop Nature writer? Skunks aren’t mustelids, and red pandas aren’t in the raccoon family.) Rusty Trail embarrassed himself in class repeating Sharp’s mistake uncritically. And when Sharp wouldn’t even issue a retraction? It seems harsh, but we have to hold our science popularizers to standards.
This is the clue Mark Trail needed. Professor Bee Sharp’s in that credibility deathspiral where middle schoolers say mean stuff about him. The Bettancourts have been losing all their money from their NFT and crypto scams turning out to be scams. Holly Folly’s facing a workplace lawsuit. Almost everyone at the camp is broke. But what does that mean? Does it relate to Jebediah Jeter’s disappearance?
Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 28th of April, 2023. What could be wacky about a guy named ‘Jebediah Jones’, a name which doesn’t sound at all like a character Conan O’Brien had on to introduce the next show’s guests from 2004 to 2006? … And it has struck me that “Jebediah Jones” and “Holly Folly” are self-consciously silly names in a way that, like, “Rob Bettancourt” or even “Professor Bee Sharp” aren’t. Even “Chet Chedderson”, the shipping magnate who’s the only person at the camp with actual money has a slightly goofy name. This isn’t a novel thing for the strip, as see Kelly Welly. I wonder if it’s an attempt to consciously make the temporary and minor characters more preposterous and therefore easier to remember.
Luckily, Jebediah Jeter pops right up and shares his story. He was digging around Stump’s office and, he thinks, got too close to the truth. So “they” — Stump and I’m not sure who — marched him off into the night to fight with a bear. He fled, and so did the bear. And … they became friends, all right. But what’s the truth Jeter got too close to?
Sid Stump plans to unleash AI automatic content generation on the world. He’s running the camp as a way to get investor money. But the camp is shoddily run — the cliffs were ruled unstable years ago, and haven’t got any better — and everyone coming to the camp is themselves looking for money. But even if they succeed … AI automatic content generation sucks. It writes plausible-sounding nonsense, because STEM idiots don’t know what epistemology is or how to get one. Mark Trail offers Jeter what he’s most needed — a ride to safety — but it may be too late. He’s led Sid Stump to Jeter.
And that’s our cliffhanger, at least until the cliff collapses out from under us.
Sunday Animals Watch!
The past several months have leaned into the interpretation of Sunday strips as slices of Mark Trail’s articles. He even mentions needing to write about tardigrades a few days before they turned up in the Sunday strip. So I guess here’s a listicle of Mark Trail writing for you:
Iguanas, 12 February 2023.
Wolves and why there aren’t “Alpha Wolves”, 19 February 2023.
Tardigrades, 26 February 2023.
Great Horned Owls, 5 March 2023.
Wind Storm Safety, 19 March 2023. (Mark Trail recommends it.)
Bears and trash safety, 26 March 2023. (Mark Trail recommends both.)
He couldn’t. Walt Wallet was born over two weeks after Abraham Lincoln’s murder. However, the current story, wrapping up, in Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley builds on a claim he’s made about having shaken Lincoln’s hand. His reasoning, first explained in February, is that his great-grandfather shook Lincoln’s hand, and his great-grandfather shook his grandfather’s hand, and his grandfather shook his father’s hand, and his father shook his hand, and therefore …
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 19th of February, 2023. So some trivia about Walt Wallet’s family tree here, to be entered into the Gasoline Alley wiki at your earliest convenience. Also I’m amused by the notes in the center panel bottom row, when we see the hands of Uncle Walt and Walt’s Father tagged as such, and the tags admitting not knowing if it’s the other way around. Good little detail.
Unfortunately snow’s rolling in. It’s wonderfully illustrated stuff — Jim Scancarelli let himself play here, with happy results — but it also threatens Boog’s life. After a quick prayer he stumbles across the stairs of his mother’s forest-ranger station. So he survives, which is good for him. And he even had a backup miracle. Bear woke up, saw the snow, saw Boog’s prints, and knew he wasn’t dressed warm enough for this. Bear is a good and loyal friend who happens to be bad at hibernation.
Boog’s mother drives him home, though, and around the 4th of March we pass on to Boog’s little sister Aubee and her friends Sophie and Ava Luna. Also Ava Luna’s magic doll Ida Noe. They’re off, first, to see Unca Walt Wallet in case he wakes up.
Some great news: he does wake up! He shakes the kids’ hands and tells them they now can claim to have shaken hands with Lincoln. While anyone can claim that, he baffles the kids by explaining his logic. Also baffling them is the sense they did this before, in the Sunday strips, what’s the deal? (They’re reintroducing it for people who only get the dailies.)
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 7th of April, 2023. So I’m going to nerd out here rather than annoy you in the main text. Aubee starts to take out her phone, but is talked into not messing up history, which, good goal there. But it is a shame she couldn’t have taken a discreet movie of the Gettysburg Address, for many reasons, among them that we don’t actually know precisely what Lincoln said. We have several drafts of the speech, with minor variations, and of course Lincoln wouldn’t be bound to deliver the text in front of him exactly. Newspaper reports manage to make matters worse, with “transcriptions” of the speech running from vastly shorter to vastly longer versions. In every real sense it doesn’t matter. Nothing of substance would change if in one spot he said ‘in’ where we think he said ‘with’. But wouldn’t it be sweet to know?
Never mind the odd claim. They wonder could it be true that Walt’s great-grandfather shook hands with Lincoln? Since he passed away in March of 2016 it seems there’s no way to know. Unless …
Ida Noe, the magic doll, observes that since they could wish themselves to visit Santa Claus, why couldn’t they wish themselves back in time? And so they’re off to 1863. Their belated desire not to mess up the course of history lasts until they meet Constable Matthew Waffles and want to know if he knows Officer Barbara Waffles. The Constable is amused by notions like women being cops or having the vote or getting credit cards in their own name. But he takes a liking to the strange kids and brings them to front-row center-stage seats for The Gettysburg Address.
They’re excited, sure, but a gust of wind kicks up and blows President Lincoln’s notes away! This is the job for a couple kids who are young and energetic and don’t know whether that back-of-envelopes story is true. They gather up the notes and, fortunately, a large white guy is there to take over once the work is done.
Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 24th of April, 2023. Another nice artistic flourish in a season that’s been full of them: the design of Waldo Wallet is more closely fashioned on the style the comic strip had when it started, a century-plus ago, so that Waldo Wallet looks of a different time from the kids. I knew Jim Scancarelli knew we would notice that.
They realize the fellow bringing Lincoln’s notes back to him and shaking the President’s hand looks a lot like a young Uncle Walt. And indeed, turns out his name is Waldo Wallet. As they head home they reflect that yes, the core of Walt’s story was right. Also they can’t think why they didn’t shake Lincoln’s hand while they had the chance. No sense waiting to return home, though. The code of magic doll time travel forbids it.
And so we end, I think, a cute trifle of a story that gave Jim Scancarelli even more chances to play with the visual style. If you didn’t enjoy, well, there’s probably another story coming in the next week or two.
![Sophie, to Marie: 'It's late and Abbey hasn't called like the promised. And no one's answering at the cabin.' Marie: 'Sophie, they're having a romantic weekend. I'm sure their minds are elsewhere.' [ Elsewhere ] Sam, Abbey, and the child run through the dark woods. Abbey cries out: 'IS THE BEAR CHASING US?' and Sam answers 'KEEP RUNNING!!!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/judge-parker_francesco-marciuliani-mike-manley_2023-07july-28.php_.jpg)
![[ At Pavel's mansion, Sam receives a 'gift' ... ] Sam: 'You want me to capture April Parker's mom?' Pavel: 'What that assassin --- that murderer! --- has done to my people, my organization ... she should not be ANYONE'S mother!' Sam: 'Why can't one of your men do it?' Pavel: 'The CIA is watching April's family around the clock ... but we know it is only a matter of time before her mom shows up to April's house ... and that's when you, a close friend of their family, can get inside. And bring her to use.' Sam: 'I'm sorry, Pavel. I can't do this.' Pavel: 'No, what you *can't* do is turn down my gift to you. You saved my daughter. Don't put your own children in danger by being rude.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/judge-parker_francesco-marciuliani-mike-manley_2023-08august-20.php_.jpg)
![Throwaway panel, a flashback to the 2005 strip where The Phantom stole diaries from Mina Braun's library, thinking: 'Mina learned of Eden here in the family library. I can't have her or anyone else learning that lesson here again.' In the present, The Phantom, Mina, and Diana Walker dine in a restaurant in The Domain. Diana: 'You're firm, then, in your decision, Mina? You mean to stay here among the Almost Humans?' Mina: 'I am! Thanks to you both, I'm ehre now as the scientist I've always been. Not a woman hiding from a world that thinks her mad. My findings can never be published, of course. It would be a crime to lead the outside world to the gates of the Domain.' Phantom: 'The Champion of Old would be happy to hear you say that.' [ MEANWHILE, at what looks like a ruling council meeting ] Chair: 'You believe this Phantom ... is the same formidable human known to our ancestors?' Teydra: 'If he isn't, I find him no less extraordinary for it! I wish to forge an understanding with this man before he leaves the Domain of the Almost Humans ... a pledge that, whatever he is, we are forever allied with him! --- and he with us.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/08/the-phantom_tony-depaul-jeff-weigel_2023-06june-11.jpg)
![Mark Trail: 'Senator Smalls, isn't it true that the train explosion was intentional? A hazard-chemical train exploded and our train system isn't safe at all?' Smalls: 'How dare you! Police, get him out of here! He's inciting a riot!' [ Looks like Mark must defend his journalistic integrity ,.. with two fists o' justice! ] (Mark Trail and Happy Trail raise their fists, ready to fight security.)](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/08/mark-trail_jules-rivera_2023-07july-22.jpg)
![[ Narrator: Peter dreams of good times ... ] Spider-Man swings around the neighborhood, reflecting on, 'All in all, not a bad night's work! Killgrave revealed as the criminal he always truly was --- your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man as public hero #1 again --- and MJ riding high on her success! The heck with it! The way I feel right now, nothing can bring me down!' He swings into his home. 'Hi honey! I'm ho --- ' Mary Jane: 'Oh, Peter --- ' [ Narrator: ... and not-so-good times ] Mary Jane: 'My Broadway show --- it's closing!' Peter: '!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/07/spider-man_roy-thomas-larry-lieber_2023-07july_30.jpg)
![Lizz, describing the action: 'Gameboy was at the toy convention. Someone in his mask stole a common 'Hi Ho Cherry-O' game. That expensive Simmons Corners map was also taken. Gameboy left this in its place.' She shows a photograph of a note, 'Who's a little chatterbox? It's me! Little Orphan Gameboy!' Tracy: 'I see. Hold on, Lizz.' [ To his wrist-radio ] 'Tracy here. What is it?' Sam, over the wrist: 'Heads up, Tracy! B.O.Plenty is downstairs looking for you.' Tracy: 'Thanks, Sam. Lizz, please contact Steve at Batcave Toys and ask him to come in.' Lizz: 'What about Plenty?' Tracy: 'Not today. I'm out to lunch.' Lizz: 'Too late.' We see the silhouette of B.O.Plenty, calling out, 'Hi, Mr Macy!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/07/dick-tracy_mike-curtis-shelley-pleger_2023-04april-23.jpeg)
![[ Narrator: Confirmed! John X! ] The Jungle Patrol staff in the radio room celebrates. The Phantom, on the telephone, smiles.](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/07/the-phantom_tony-depaul-mike-manley_2023-05may-29.jpg)
![[ As Yelich and Sam have dinner ... ] Sam Driver: 'We can really use your help with a new client, Yelich ... ' [ Neddy and Ronnie talk ... ] As the wedding ceremony is about to start, bridesmaid Neddy: 'I can't believe they cancelled our show! Our second season was already in pre-production!' Ronnie: 'Really not the moment right now, Neddy.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/judge-parker_francesco-marciuliano-mike-manley_2023-04april-03.jpg)
![Dorothy; 'I wanted to *thank* you.' Keri: 'I hope you'd do the same for me ... but I doubt you've ever been in a fight.' Dorothy, hugging her: 'I still hate you for beating me up [*] that one time! I'll follow you on Instagram tonight, bye!' Keri, thinking: 'She even smells pretty.' [ * Editor's note: read the strip from 11/16/2022! ] Later, Mimi Thorp, picking her up: 'Keri Harper Thorp. How was your first time serving detention?' Keri: 'Honestly? Rad.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/gil-thorp_henry-barajas-rod-whigham_2023-06june-01.jpg)
![Horrible Hank Sr: 'Hey, kids --- welcome back. Hope you enjoyed the cruise.' Hank Jr: 'We did. But you're not going to *believe* who was there and what happened!' [ Hank Jr and Yvonne recount their cruise adventure. ] Hank Sr: 'Rene Belluso!?!' Hank Jr: 'Yeah --- can you believe it?' Senior: 'I can't believe you jumped into the ocean to save him. He hardly deserves it.' Junior: 'Couldn't help it, Pop. You taught me to care about everybody.' Senior: 'That was *me*? More likely your *mom*. I hardly like *anybody*.' Junior: 'You're a nicer man than you pretend to be, Pop.' Senior: 'Shush. Don't ruin the illusion. 'Horrible Hank' has a reputation to maintain.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/rex-morgan_terry-beatty_2023-05may-28.jpg)
![[ As Mary consoles Wilbur .. ] Mary Worth: 'Let me take you to karaoke. You'll feel better if you express your emotions ... I'll go with you, Wilbur. You don't need to do this alone!' Wilbur, teary: 'Okay ... sniff!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/mary-worth_karen-moy-june-brigman_2023-04april-21.jpg)
![[ mark helps with a rescue after two campers got hurt badly in a trail collapse ... and Andy's making new friends too. ] Andy's harnessed to a wagon, and Bee Sharp's resting in it. Holly Folly, petting the dog: 'What a good boy!' Andy: 'Arf!' Mark Trail: 'Glad we all made it out safely. How's everyone feeling?' Rob Bettancourt, holding up a branch: 'I'm bored. Can you turn a tree branch into a selfie stick?' [ No good deed goes unpunished, Mark. ]](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/mark-trail_jules_rivera_2023-03march-25.jpg)
![Mark Trail: 'Jebediah, everyone has been looking for you! What happened? I hope nothing too wacky.' Jones: 'Well, I was digging around Sid Stump's office and I got too close to the truth! They marched me out in the middle of the night ... to fight with a bear! But then I ran into the woods, with the bear giving chase. We became friends!' [ Making friends with bears isn't wacky, right? ]](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/mark-trail_jules_rivera_2023-04april-28.jpg)
Another Blog, Meanwhile 