What’s Going On In Alley Oop? What happened to King Guz? December 2023 – March 2024

The current story in Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop sees Alley Oop named King of Moo. Longtime readers of the comic strip may wonder, doesn’t Moo already have a king and wasn’t it Guz? Even longer-time readers may remember, wasn’t Alley Oop fleeing King Guz after trying unsuccessfully to become King when Doc Wonmug first brought him into the future year of 1939?

So first, yes, Guz used to be king of Moo. But we learned in June 2022 that Guz had retired and Moo had elected President Krash. And, third, uh … I thought that was what Alley Oop was doing when Doc Wonmug plucked him out of the past. But the GoComics archives miss the days right before Wonmug’s introduction so I’m not positive. Sorry.

So this should catch you up to early March 2024. If you’re reading after about June 2024 please check this link for a more up-to-date plot recap. All going well. All not going well, well, that’s normal enough.

Alley Oop.

11 December 2023 – 2 March 2024.

Last time you’ll recall Lord Odom, a giant dragonfly with the ability to change history, had turned Alley Oop, Ooola, and Doc Wonmug into trees. So they spend several decades turning sunlight and carbon dioxide into food and water, until insects that should have been limited by the cold winters that global warming has stopped overwhelm them and destroy the forests. So, uh … that’s it then, comic strip’s over.

Next Week!

If I can make my way through the Comics Kingdom Redesign Morass of Suckiness and Poor Decisions I get to see Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom, weekday continuity, look back over old stories without snickering.

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Oh, uh … wait. Yeah. So, Tree Alley Oop remembers from a previous adventure that plants can communicate with each other. So why can’t Tree Oop, Tree Ooola, and Tree Wonmug command the local vines to envelop Odom. You wouldn’t think it that easy for vines to get a grip on a giant bug. But Odom’s a bit touch-starved and likes the hugging. At least until the hugging threatens to cut off his breathing and then he relents, turning Our Heroes back to human.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 22nd of December, 2023. I quite liked this twist, by the way. It seemed a nice bit of chaos tossed into the situation and yet was explained logically by the end of the story.

Odom reveals how he manages to do reality-changes greater than theory says he should: he doesn’t know. He was just an ordinary dragonfly, going about his business, thinking about George Orr, and then suddenly he woke up giant, superpowered, and ready to take over the world. Wonmug can’t buy this, not until he accidentally ejects Arval, a talking Larva, from Odom’s mouth. Arval’s a parasitic wasp larva, the kind that burrows into a being’s brain and controls them. Arval wasn’t out to do anything, he just crawled into this dragonfly and what the heck but together they were a nigh-omnipotent being and at that point why wouldn’t you try taking over the universe? Wonmug gives Arval a home in a little jar for safekeeping. And as Odom’s neither a menace nor really at fault for anything, Our Heroes let him go. And it’s back home to start a new adventure. (With a stop to reveal Wonmug keeps hitting the timeline-reset button after adventures, which feels like a very 90s Web Comic beat, given how it smashes any story’s suspense into just ‘can they get away’?)

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That adventure began the 9th of January, our time, with Alley Oop and Ooola returning home to Moo. And Alley Oop gets to thinking about how he’s had all kinds of great adventures. He starts telling them to his Moo friends who love the stories even if they don’t know what he’s talking about. One of his friends suggests Alley Oop write a book. It’s a lot of work. There’s the book-writing. Also the paper-making and the ink-making and the binder-making and the book-publisher-making, and bookstore-making, and you see where this is a lot of work that could fail at any step.

None of them fail. He’s an overnight sensation with the most popular and only book in Moo. Before long he’s doing one-man shows to sold-out audiences. That’s barely started when he’s having other people pretending to be him for one-man shows to sold-out audiences. With huge sacks of money coming in, what else is there to do but let it go to his head?

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 2nd of March, 2024. I’m sorry not to have seen more of Krash. The goofball politics of Moo have been fun when we’ve visited them.

So he buys a McMansion Cave. And you know what follows enormous wealth: undeserved power. Krash, President of Moo, has had enough of the corruption surrounding her office and wants to retire, taking Moo’s treasury with her. So she reinstates the monarchy, naming Alley Oop the King, and leaves. So that’s where we are.

Next Week!

But yeah, it’ll be Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) up for plot recapping unless I decide I don’t want to deal with that until Comics Kingdom gets their web site functional again. If they can’t manage that it’ll be Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, Charles Ettinger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy.

Local Architecture Critic Derides Seasons, Nature

I’m sorry to get to this late, but other stuff kept coming up. Remember the architecture critic for the local alt-weekly? The one who took his mandate to ridicule shabby and run-down buildings around town as a chance to explain how ugh but the vertically oriented windows do not work with the lines of the house? He’s still at it.

In a recent issue he named the Eyesore of the Week — “our look at some of the seedier properties in Lansing” — to be Power Lines and Trees, found “everywhere”. He says:

With autumn in full flush, one’s eyes are naturally drawn upward to enjoy the resplendent colors of the season. Unfortunately, that view is diminished when the bright colors are pruned away to allow for the unrestricted distribution of utility lines.

So my headline here is a bit unfair since he isn’t actually decrying the natural progression of seasons. He’s more protesting that we have power lines. To be fair, the city was hit badly by an ice storm two winters ago that knocked out power for a lot of the area. Some homes were without electricity for up to 23 months and reverted, Flintstones style, to having their cell phones charged by trained pterodactyls on bicycles hooked up to generators. And underground power lines would have a harder time being knocked out by ice storms and falling branches. And then we wouldn’t have to trim branches so as to better knock out power lines during ice storms.

Anyway, the cover story of last week’s issue was Art Infusion: Public Art Is Popping Up Around Lansing, But Where Is It Coming From? The question suggests that city officials just patrol the streets each day, and occasionally run across some bright-orange pile of twisted metal girders, and phone the main office to report, “Yeah, looks like we got some new public art on Eight Street. No, don’t think it’s actively threatening. I did hear a rumor of a Dali-esque melted-clock installation at Cedar and Kalamazoo, going to check that next.”