What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? How could Walt Wallet have met Abraham Lincoln? February – April 2023

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.

Yeah, I wouldn’t have bought this as a kid either. It’s cute, but I understand the skepticism of the kids who hear the story. And when they hear it a second time, in the daily story. If I do my job well, this essay should catch you up to the end of April in the daily continuity. If you’re looking for something after about August 2023 there’s probably a more up-to-date plot recap here. Here we go.

Gasoline Alley.

6 February – 29 April 2023.

Boog Wallet, of the youngest generation of the strip, started February hanging around his friend Bear, the bear. Bear talked a bit about the problems of encroaching civilization, like how loud it is. Boog gives Bear some earplugs to help his hibernation and heads for home.

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 10th of February, 2023. Presenting Jack Frost in the first panel there, with a body literally reading ‘SNOW’, and obscured by trees, is a magnificent bit of staging. Does a lot to make the scene feel colder.

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.

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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.

Next Week!

And in my blog here next week or so? More bears! Bears that attack! Bears that befriend! Bears that are microscopic and lack the ability to attack or befriend! All that and architecturally-assisted flooding in Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail, if all goes well.

Reposting The Stages Of The Road Trip: Stage Five

And now I wrap up my reposting of this road-trip sequence, one of my favorites. The bit about where every small town in the North found the black crepe-paper to shroud their downtowns after Lincoln’s murder is something I genuinely wonder and don’t even know how to investigate. The bit about the promising-looking barcade that was just closed exactly when they’d be there is also drawn from real life, from a trip to the (excellent) Knoebels Amusemenet Park in Pennsylvania.

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OK, but is this the sheep district of the country or what because this is getting to be far too many sheep.

Dan tried to get away without calling it “Diet Pupsi” and couldn’t. But he did realize that over this trip everyone had tried, one time or other, just saying the name of it right. The implication is that everybody’s ready to let this in-joke go, but nobody wants to be the one to say it. Dan resolves to bring this up at a good moment, but hopes so very much that someone else brings it up first.

Sophie starts the practice of deliberately misreading the highway signs now. Taking “Williamsport” as the game of Williams promises some great fun, but all it really leads to is stories of times their satellite navigator had no idea how to pronounce a street name. “Malcolm the Tenth Street” is judged the best of those. There’s just not enough good towns in the area, though.

It seemed like this should be a good way to pass a few miles. But sharing the most important thing in their lives that they’ve given up correcting their parents about? Like, where it’s just too much effort to explain what’s really going on, and it’s easier to let them go about being wrong and correct people whom their parents in turn mislead? Yeah, so it turns out that for everybody it’s just “exactly what it is we do for work”. That’s weird itself. Like, you’d think for someone it would be a relationship or some important aspect of their personality or something. No, though. It’s just what everyone does in exchange for money. This seems like it says something important about modern society, but who knows?

All right, but that is definitely a two-story strip mall, putting to rest an earlier squabble.

Josh is irrationally offended by the name of the Creekside Inn Hotel, citing “redundancy”. His status is not helped when it turns out to be near the Riverfront Cemetery Memorial Park.

The historical marker turned out to be a surprisingly good stop. It’s just a note that this town was somehow too small for Lincoln’s Funeral Train to stop at, but they have this amazing picture of the train just going through town. It’s not a very good picture but for an action scene in 1865? That’s pretty amazing anyway. But the real question is how everything in town is covered in black crepe. Where did that all come from? The town isn’t anything today, and back then? It was so nothing it couldn’t even get the funeral train to stop. Why would they even have enough crepe to shroud all downtown? Or if they didn’t, where did they get it? Did they have enormous quantities of regular crepe and just dye it black all of a sudden? Amanda’s joke that maybe it was crepe of all colors and it just looks black is judged to be “too soon”. But that doesn’t answer the real question.

It’s become so tiring to read all the highway signs that the town or towns of Portage Munster are passed without comment.

Now it’s time for the search for a place to have dinner. This is a complex triangulation of where they are, how fast they’re going somewhere, and what towns of any size are going to be anywhere near dinnertime. The objective: find someplace genuinely local to go. And after fifteen minutes of searching, success! It’s a well-reviewed barcade and they even have a menu online with four vegetarian-friendly options, plus great heaping piles of fried things. And it’s been open since like 1938. It is closed today, and tomorrow, for the only two days it’s set to be closed between Easter and Thanksgiving this year.

By now the group has gotten past making up redundantly-named landmarks and is annoying Josh with oxymoronic names.

At least everyone can agree: after all this time driving, we’re all walking like badly-rigged video game models. This is what’s so good about taking a road trip. You get to enjoy everything in new and different ways.

Exceptional People

I was reading The Year We Had No President, Richard Hansen’s early-1960s study of the United States’s inadequate constitutional provision for a disabled or incapable President because … uh … I don’t know. I guess I interrupted a fairy circle and they enchanted me to be like this? Well, whatever. The point I got to this choice quote about President Garfield’s administration:

Except for Secretary of State [ James G ] Blaine and the young Secretary of War, Robert T Lincoln … the names of the Cabinet members are forgotten by all save historians.

Now. I will concede that Robert Todd Lincoln is a little bit remembered. He was at his father’s deathbed when President Lincoln died. He witnessed Charles Guiteau’s shooting President Garfield. And he was right outside the building at the Pan-American Exposition when Leon Czolgosz shot President McKinley. So everyone who got way too into Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as a kid remembers him.

But James G Blaine? Yes, of course I remember Blaine, Blaine, James G Blaine, Continental liar from the State of Maine (PS Burn this letter). But that’s because I’m a freak who merged with this college-level US history text I somehow got hold of as an eight-year-old. Even granting that Richard Hansen was writing sixty years closer to the events? I’m going to say he was way overestimating the non-historian recognition of James G Blaine.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe in 1962 James G Blaine leapt to the average person’s tongue the way Cordell Hull’s or Henry Stimson’s do today. I want to see Hansen’s citation is all.

The Stages Of The Road Trip: Stage Five

Stage one. Before the trip.
Stage two. Getting started.
Stage three. Seeing malls and sheep.
Stage four. Trying to remember things.

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OK, but is this the sheep district of the country or what because this is getting to be far too many sheep.

Dan tried to get away without calling it “Diet Pupsi” and couldn’t. But he did realize that over this trip everyone had tried, one time or other, just saying the name of it right. The implication is that everybody’s ready to let this in-joke go, but nobody wants to be the one to say it. Dan resolves to bring this up at a good moment, but hopes so very much that someone else brings it up first.

Sophie starts the practice of deliberately misreading the highway signs now. Taking “Williamsport” as the game of Williams promises some great fun, but all it really leads to is stories of times their satellite navigator had no idea how to pronounce a street name. “Malcolm the Tenth Street” is judged the best of those. There’s just not enough good towns in the area, though.

It seemed like this should be a good way to pass a few miles. But sharing the most important thing in their lives that they’ve given up correcting their parents about? Like, where it’s just too much effort to explain what’s really going on, and it’s easier to let them go about being wrong and correct people whom their parents in turn mislead? Yeah, so it turns out that for everybody it’s just “exactly what it is we do for work”. That’s weird itself. Like, you’d think for someone it would be a relationship or some important aspect of their personality or something. No, though. It’s just what everyone does in exchange for money. This seems like it says something important about modern society, but who knows?

All right, but that is definitely a two-story strip mall, putting to rest an earlier squabble.

Josh is irrationally offended by the name of the Creekside Inn Hotel, citing “redundancy”. His status is not helped when it turns out to be near the Riverfront Cemetery Memorial Park.

The historical marker turned out to be a surprisingly good stop. It’s just a note that this town was somehow too small for Lincoln’s Funeral Train to stop at, but they have this amazing picture of the train just going through town. It’s not a very good picture but for an action scene in 1865? That’s pretty amazing anyway. But the real question is how everything in town is covered in black crepe. Where did that all come from? The town isn’t anything today, and back then? It was so nothing it couldn’t even get the funeral train to stop. Why would they even have enough crepe to shroud all downtown? Or if they didn’t, where did they get it? Did they have enormous quantities of regular crepe and just dye it black all of a sudden? Amanda’s joke that maybe it was crepe of all colors and it just looks black is judged to be “too soon”. But that doesn’t answer the real question.

It’s become so tiring to read all the highway signs that the town or towns of Portage Munster are passed without comment.

Now it’s time for the search for a place to have dinner. This is a complex triangulation of where they are, how fast they’re going somewhere, and what towns of any size are going to be anywhere near dinnertime. The objective: find someplace genuinely local to go. And after fifteen minutes of searching, success! It’s a well-reviewed barcade and they even have a menu online with four vegetarian-friendly options, plus great heaping piles of fried things. And it’s been open since like 1938. It is closed today, and tomorrow, for the only two days it’s set to be closed between Easter and Thanksgiving this year.

By now the group has gotten past making up redundantly-named landmarks and is annoying Josh with oxymoronic names.

At least everyone can agree: after all this time driving, we’re all walking like badly-rigged video game models. This is what’s so good about taking a road trip. You get to enjoy everything in new and different ways.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? June – August 2017

Are you trying to work out what’s going on in Joe Staton and Mike Curtis’s Dick Tracy? Welcome, fellow confused reader. I’m doing my best to explain the current storyline myself. I’m writing this in the middle of August 2017. If it’s much past that date for you, the story might have changed radically or even concluded. If I’ve written another summary of plot developments they should be at or near the top of this page. Thanks for trusting in me to spot pop culture references in the venerable story comic about a scientific detective.

For other comic strip talk, my mathematics blog just reviewed some strips with the theme of “Pets Doing Mathematics”. Please consider that, too.

Dick Tracy.

4 June – 12 August 2017.

My last update, in early June, coincided with the conclusion of a storyline. So I have a nearly clean field for this one. The story for June and July focused on the B O Plenty family, hillbillies with one Devo hat and a powerful aroma to them who married into the comic strip decades ago. The Plentys worry about strange sounds suggesting their house is haunted. What they should worry about is Paragon Bank noticing there haven’t been any payments on their mortgage, like, ever. In foreclosure, Plenty points out that he paid for the house in full, and turns over the receipt. The judge goes against precedent and rules the bank may not seize their home and destroy their lives.

Not to worry for justice. The bank skips out on paying court costs. Tracy, at the behest of Gravel Gerty, goes to the bank to keep B O from shooting anyone wealthy. And while he’s there Blackjack and his gang pop in and hold up the bank. Tracy doesn’t get involved, on the grounds that he didn’t want to start a gunfight. Blackjack, a hardcore Dick Tracy fanboy, realizes the detective has been replaced by a pod person, but makes off with the cash. Tracy points out that Blackjack’s taken to robbing banks with notorious reputations for cheating people, so, you know. I’m sure the bank is working its way through to paying court costs like the manager says they were totally planning to do.

Joe Staton and Mike Curtis’s Dick Tracy for the 25th of June, 2017. So, better or worse: Blackjack going on a series of bank robberies, or Blackjack sliding in to Sparkle Plenty’s Twitter direct messages? Because I gotta say, he has got to have the creepiest come-ons.

Sparkle Plenty goes to the bank. There she hears the haunting strains of Blackjack’s leitmotif, Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” (“I get knocked down/But I get up again”), which I am going to go ahead and assume he adopted after falling out of love with Smashmouth’s “All Star”. She appeals to his fanboyishness, offering to sign all his Sparkle Plenty collectible toys if he’ll call off the bank heist. He agrees, dependent on his getting a selfie with her. So that works out great for everybody.

Finance rumbles on. With Fleischer Savings and Loan defaulting on pension obligations Tracy figures he knows Blackjack’s next target. Manager Frank Hickman appreciates Tracy’s warning, but he’s counting on Blackjack robbing the bank to cover a $250,000 shortfall the auditor is days away from discovering. But Blackjack takes his time, as he’s busy building plastic scale models of Dick Tracy. Here the last molecule of plausibility is destroyed. I’ve been a plastic scale model builder since I was like seven and I will not accept the idea of a plastic scale model builder actually putting together a plastic scale model. We just buy kits and paints and glues and gather reference materials and let them sit until a loved one yells at us, then we sell two of the most-duplicated kits at the next yard sale. Building the blasted things goes against the Code.

Anyway, Blackjack wastes so much time that he gets to the bank just after Hickman’s set the place on fire. Tracy and his stakeout team, and Blackjack and his bank-robbery team, turn to rescue operations, hauling people out. Hickman fights Blackjack hard enough everyone knows something’s up. Tracy gets a major clue when all the bank workers say how Hickman set the fire. Blackjack’s arrested too, but he gets to see Tracy’s Wall of Action-Scarred Hats, which is a thing and really thrilling to him. And that, on the 25th of July, wraps up that story.

Joe Staton and Mike Curtis’s Dick Tracy for the 23rd of July, 2017. What I’ve never been able to work out is whether the name of the Fleischer Savings and Loan is a shout-out to the Fleischer Studios, the animation team that brought us all those great Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons, but also went and made Hunky And Spunky For Some Reason so maybe that’s why they get a rotten bank named for them?

The current story: Silver and Sprocket Nitrate escape from prison. Their liberator: an animate Moai named Public Domain. Domain wants the bogus-film experts to create a phony audio recording. There’s the legend that Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had recorded Abraham Lincoln’s voice on his phonautograph in 1863. The Nitrates like this idea, figuring they can make it their one last caper before retiring to a farm upstate. While the Nitrates call everybody they know to ask if they can impersonate Abraham Lincoln, Domain primes his mark. And that’s where we stand now.

Joe Staton and Mike Curtis’s Dick Tracy for the 6th of August, 2017. I am embarrassed to say how much I’m geeking out about this forged-audio-recording storyline. I mean, creating a plausible phony antique media document like this, which I assume has to come complete with a plausible provenance, presses so many nerd buttons on me.

There’s two major plot threads that have been left unresolved but got refreshes recently. Nothing’s been said about the weird noises that made the Plentys think their house was haunted. Other Detective Lee Ebony continues in deep undercover as Mister Bribery’s bodyguard.

Not given a refresh the past couple months: crime boss Posie Ermine wants his daughter, who’s been brainwashed and surgically altered into the Duplicate Mysta Chimera (“Moon Maid”), back. There was some (apparent) Lunarian in an Antarctic Valley pledging to investigate the mysterious Duplicate Mysta.

Next Week: Since my car has finally passed 100,000 miles I should take it down to Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for a check-up. Will there be old-time radio references? You make the call!

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose eight points today despite fears among traders that there might be multiple open-air jazz festivals going on in the Eastside that we’re going to have to deal with? The heck is that even possible?

359

Statistics Saturday: Episodes Where Captain Kirk Gets His Shirt Torn Or Taken Off, By Season

You can positively see the budget getting tighter!
First season totals include the pilot episode when they could throw some more money around.

There is a third-season episode where Kirk’s pants get torn. It’s the one where rock monster aliens pretend to be Abraham Lincoln so they can learn a little something about humanity. The pants-tearing probably wasn’t on purpose.

Really, Though, Comic Strip _Momma_ Going Quite Mad

I don’t mean to harp on this too much, but, did you see Mell Lazarus’s Momma for today? No, because there’s only fourteen people under the age of 50 who read the comics and most of them have better sense than to read Momma. But, well, just look at the strip for the 17th.

Mell Lazarus’s baffling Momma for the 17th of February, 2015. Also, I question whether it was actually Heritage Day in Canada.

While I criticized a couple strips last week for not making sense, I have to admit that at least the comic from the 13th is a joke-like construct: Francis talks about how his boss yelled at him for seven hours, Momma asked a question about this, and we get back a non sequitur response. Momma’s question doesn’t make contextual sense, but it at least has the grammar; the structure is right even if the humor is lacking.

Mell Lazarus’s crazy Momma for the 13th of February, with a setup that just … I don’t know. I just don’t know.

The Lincoln’s Birthday one hasn’t got the structure of a joke, but it does have the pop-cultural-reference form of things, by showing off a thing (Abraham Lincoln) and then some things that remind you of that original thing (“four score and seven years”, “civil”, “mint julep” — well, he was born in Kentucky). This “here’s a thing that reminds you of another thing!” form in brilliant hands gives you Mystery Science Theater 3000, the movie Airplane!, and those Bugs Bunny cartoons stealing jokes from then-current radio comedians. In clumsy hands, it gives you the Scary Movie franchise and Animaniacs and the like. These might be the humor equivalent of junk food — a quick laugh that, on reflection, you really can’t justify having found funny — but it is at least a form that inspires a giggle.

Mell Lazarus’s crazy Momma for the 12th of February — Lincoln’s birthday — 2015.

But this, well, I don’t know what there is even to giggle at. Maybe some vague nervousness at elderly people acting kind of daft? That seems cruel in an abnormal form for Momma, though.

So as not to be too negative on an otherwise decent day, let me close with this picture of our pet rabbit doing that thing where he’s nodding off but keeps waking himself up when his head droops too fast. Also he might be melting through the bars of his play area.

Our pet rabbit doing that thing where he’s nodding off, but keeps waking himself up because his head droops too fast.

Comic Strip Momma Extends Descent Into Madness

I’m neither the first person to notice this, nor is this the first time I’ve noticed this, but Mell Lazarus’s comic strip Momma is going full-on crazy. Consider the entry from the 12th of February, which observes Lincoln’s Birthday with a comic strip that makes you really wonder: why did he sign his name to it in two separate places not counting the copyright notice? Also, what the heck is any of it supposed to mean?

Mell Lazarus’s crazy Momma for the 12th of February — Lincoln’s birthday — 2015.

The strip for the 13th is no less baffling, because once again Mell Lazarus signs his name twice plus puts it in the copyright notice, and I’m not sure that the drawings of Momma in the first and last panel are even on the same model. I admit that Lazarus’s style has always been so loose that it’s hard to say when someone is quite off-model, but … I honestly wonder if the strip isn’t being assembled from reprints of past scenes that more or less fit the script. It would explain the setting jump from Francis on the front porch to Francis lounging on the sofa holding a beer between panels.

Also, why does his dating in the lower right corner smudged, like he changed his mind about the date?

Mell Lazarus’s crazy Momma for the 13th of February, with a setup that just … I don’t know. I just don’t know.

While that’s all busy sitting on your head, I have a bunch of comics whose jokes I understand, since they’re trying to talk about mathematical topics, and pretty much succeed. I’d be glad if you gave reading them a try.