On Today's Alley Oop - July 13, 2021

This will cover the events from July 5 through July 13 since the three goofballs landed in Florida. as mentioned in my response to Wootie's post, it is really tough to say how dumb this strip is in a way that is different than what has already said before. But the past eight days that even Joseph Nebush would have trouble saying something good about the story line.

Back in comics from the '40s and 50s, it was not uncommon to see stories where a character builds their own spacecraft and heads off on a journey to the moon and sometimes beyond. Heck, Hamlin had Oop and Boom blast off for the moon way back in 1948 with Boom's homemade rocket. But that kind of story just doesn't work in the 21st century because we know how complicated - and expensive - it is to for outer space travel. Way back in 2004, Richard Branson predicted he would reach outer space - and we're no talking the moon here - in three years. Even with his resources, it took 17 years. 

If you were alive during the whole Apollo program, you know how difficult and dangerous every single mission was. Recent movies have given a glimpse about how many people were involved behind the scenes in each launch. All that Joey needed to do was a little bit of research - the hard work that true professional writers do - to see what was involved with Apollo 11 as there are tons of stuff on the web. You find out that the mission control group was in Building 30 at the NASA complex  rather than the single building that Lemsay showed Oop readers. Mission control was room with 30 controllers in it but those controllers had support teams of 12 folk. We're already at nearly 400 people and we haven't even gotten to the thousands of other support people involved in a single launch.

Sure, I get that this is now a humor strip with the emphasize on the daily gag. But the gags aren't nearly funny enough to overcome the lack of authenticity. In fact, the gags are silly rather than zany that was Joey's objective when they took over the strip. We have Alley Oop showing up in a Star Trek uniform that was not a thing available in 1969. Then they find a display replica of Apollo 11, which if it existed in 1969, would be just sitting around with nobody near it. Then we are expected to believe that Wonmug would be able to figure out how to operate it just because he's a scientist! It took the astronauts years of training to lift off and there was a checklist of milestone events that started in October 1968. But Wonmug figures it out in a few minutes. But how did they lift off? Apollo 11 carried nearly a million galleons of fuel. Even if there was a replica rocket capable of lifting off just sitting around, there is no way that a spare million gallons of fuel is just lying around. This is just an insult to the intelligence of the average  reader and the 30 some people that upvote this everyday should be ashamed of themselves.

Not much to say about Lemon's artwork because it every bit as bad as Joey's writing. And after his awful rendering of Phil Collins a few weeks back, you'd think that the syndicate would tell him to lay off drawing real people because he is particularly awful at it. His rendering of the three astronauts look nothing like the real people - heck, they don't even look like people. Geeze, is a drawing lesson or two beyond your means?

(sorry I'm posting this without proofing it)

Today's spaceball: https://www.gocomics.com/alley-oop/2021/07/13