Moovians

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Normally I've started my reviews by focusing on Joey's writing but with today's strip, it is fair to start with Lemon's artwork. And good golly is that first panel awful. Long-time posters on the old "Alley Oop" strip used to point out obvious drawing errors by 80+ year-old Jack Bender by saying "perspective", a wink to the constant harangue of frequent troll "Grande Lobo". But that panel is so messed up that you can't even say that because it doesn't even seem to have any perspective. Jonny tries to show the town as being in the distance but it takes more than the wavy cliff line to accomplish that. The large, smiley (!) "chrab" on the right negates that attempt as it appears to be on the save level as Garnet. And Garnet looks like he's shrunk down to a midget. Then you have the chrab on the left that is nothing more than a blue blob. Last, the remnants of the destroyed town have no detail at all. This was supposed ...

 

 

T he characters show off their new-found stupidity today as Alley Oop, no longer the rough-and-tumble do-gooder of yesteryear, feels sorry for a rake rather than the people who lost everything they owned. Wow, how anybody thinks that is funny is beyond the understanding of any rationale person, which obviously excludes the suits that run a comics syndicate. (note: this was also posted on GoComics at:  https://www.gocomics.com/blog/4790/mixtapes-and-reagan-alley-oop-revisits-the-80s. We'll see how long it stays before Joey cries and has it removed.) Today's nonsense:  https://www.gocomics.com/alley-oop/2021/04/26

 

 

 

 

Sorry for the lack of reviews the past week-and-a-half. Wootie has gone AWOL and I just haven't had a chance to write anything. Rather than go through the tedium of critiquing each day's episode, today's review will be a look back at nine days of "Alley Oop" from April 15 through today, April 24, minus the goofball Sunday "Little Oop" which deserves, and receives, no comment. In an action / adventure strip, the reader expects that in nine days there would be a lot of action, something to keep them interested. Not so here where talking and silly jokes has replaced meaningful action of any kind. Doc explains on 4/18 that they are here to do "some good old-fashioned exploring" but still has never explained why of all the millions of universes, they picked this one, other than it is "mysterious". All of the other infinite universes are well understood and documented but this one is mysterious? If you say so, Joey. But this universe looks ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A sad news for email subscribers of Moovians. Unfortunately, the bright idea wiseguys at Google decide to shut down the email subscription feature of Feedburner (which is what powers the email subscription feature for all blogs on Blogger, including this one). This means that if you were subscribed by email to receive updates on new posts, that is going to stop from July this year. I dunno of any free alternatives to this service, so unless we finds one that works (and I really don't like relying on more third parties because they come at the expense of  making new accounts headaches and maybe privacy concerns for some readers as this would mean subscribing your email i.d. through yet another third party service) this means that we has to say bye bye to the email subscription feature on Moovians here. Anyway, you'd still be receiving emails from Moovians till July, until Feedburner shuts down this feature. We recently received this notification from Blogger : Follow...

 

 

And so the Three Stooges embark on a new adventure, using the time-machine to travel to Universe 881 as if there is some logic to how these universes are numbered. No explanation of how or why the time-machine allows our heroes to transport themselves to different universes. No explanation of why they went to this particular universe other than it is "mysterious", Joey's latest overworked word. With millions upon millions of universes, isn't it a good bet that it is going to be "mysterious. Or is it? It looks pretty much like a deserted mining town for which Oop immediately makes the snap judgement that "this place is pretty run-down". I mean, if you didn't know anything about Earth, and you suddenly plopped down in Chloride, New Mexico, you'd think Earth was pretty run down., too. And while we are thinking about other universes in this strip, why are they so much like ours? Why does it have planets that are just like ours with atmospheres just ...

 

 

 

 

One of the new tropes under the new management is that there are a gazillon universes just waiting to be discovered by the intrepid trio. Up until recently, they seemed to have no idea about what was in any of them as witnessed by their trial for time-crimes when Wongmug randomly popped in and out of them. No need for Joey to try and create some background for these universes, maybe even a story. Instead they were mere props for a daily guffaw because they were full of puppies or crystals or some other nonsense. Today our genius physicist finds out about a mysterious (there's that word again) universe. Maybe he subscribes to Unlimited Universes or some other web service to find out about these hidden universes. But, like so many Sayers' plot themes, once you think about them, they don't make sense. If there is an infinite number of universes, there is no way that all the people on earth, let alone these three goofballs. And rather than just go off to explore it, why wouldn...

 

 

I'm always irritated with comic strips where the characters talk in ways that no real people do. You know what I mean if you read strips like "Funky Winkerbean" or "9 Chickweed Lane". The former gets bogged down in rambling sentences and tries to create new slang words like "vendo" or "car date" or "bio-dad". The latter is weighted down with overbearing pomposity and likes to use words that haven't been used in decades if not centuries. Today's Oop has a great example when Doc Wonmug says he is reading a "longform piece" rather than a story. When's the last time you heard someone say "longform peice"? I'm guessing never. Ironically, this leads to today's punchline about whether the cartoon they are looking at is supposed to be funny. Ironic because that is exactly how most of us feel when we read this strip every day. Today's laugh-filled episode: https://www.gocomics.com/alley-oop/2021/04...

 

 

  1939: 118 of 312 (+0) – 2 complete months 1946: 199 of 313 (+0) – 3 complete months 1947: 127 of 313 (+0) – 1 complete months 1948: 30 of 314 (+0) – 1 complete month 1949: 287 of 313 (+0) – 8 complete months 1954: 247 of 313 (+0) – 7 complete months 1956: 313 of 313 (+0) – 12 complete months 1963: 54 of 313 (+0) – 1 complete month 1968: 138 of 314 (+0) – 2 complete months 1969: 227 of 312 (+0) – 4 complete months 1970: 299 of 313 (+1) – 9 complete months 1971: 218 of 313: (+0) – 5 complete months 1972: 289 of 313 (+0) – 6 complete months One more 1970 strip added this week. There are now 2,546 strips in the archive, spread over 13 years from Hamlin’s 40-year tenure on the strip. That pushes the Archive to 62.56% of the strips produced during those 13 years.

 

 

 For maybe the first time since the Lemsay takeover, Doc Wonmug finally says something that we can all agree on, "I'm glad that's over." There's the usual nonsensical events in today's strip but finally this rather drab story is kaput. Apparently running out of bus jokes, the Terrific Trio uses the time-cube to travel back to the lab. I guess Wonmug has upgraded the cube and added a new teleportation feature but why they didn't use it to travel in the first place is, um, mysterious. Then Wonmug doesn't even bother to look at the "mysterious" - it is mysterious because it is, well, mysterious - letter and tosses it into the fire. The letter underneath the mail slot is somehow mysterious but the fire burning in the fireplace when nobody was home isn't mysterious. Maybe Joey doesn't quite have a grasp of what mysterious means. Had Doc bothered to look at the letter, though, he would have noticed that it was from the Nobel Prize Committee...