On Today's Alley Oop - 10 January 2022

January 7 marked the third anniversary of Lemon and Sayers takeover of this once great comic strip. Since nothing happened, we can only assume that they are good to go for another year. Ouch. Mark Thomas has been posting the links to the strips twenty years ago which is just finishing up the first story solely produced by the Benders. At that point, it was the worst "Alley Oop" story ever but the Benders would follow that with another 17 years of nonsensical garbage that continuously set new lows. And yet, somehow, the Lemsay team has surpassed even the Benders in banality. What has the new team brought to the strip in their short tenure? We've seen the unnecessary introduction of multiple  universes, each with a "theme" meant to amuse but ultimately that attempt fails because they just don't make sense. How could a a universe made up entirely of villains, or butlers, or puppies, or whatever, sustain itself? As a plot point, it's just a big yawn. Then there are the multiple Alley Oops, an even bigger yawn. Really, do we need another riff on Alley Oop telling his look alike that he is handsome? Not funny the first time and it's not getting any funnier. The Undynamic Duo gave us "Little Oop", which was supposedly about a young Oop growing up in the Bone Age but quickly moved him into the 21st Century, upsetting any attempt to make this jive with Oop's first encounter with the modern world. The revived Sunday strip gave us two new uninteresting characters, Garg and Penelope. The first supposedly Oop's forever best friends as if 80 years of Foozy never existed. In a desperate attempt at relevance, Garg is black as if a closed society of a few hundred could be anything other than monocultural. The second was 21st century super genius, Penelope,  who upped the relevance stakes by being gay. If you can't be funny or interesting, you might as well hit the high marks on social relevance. Penelope illustrates another change in the strip with her homemade time-machine as everybody and his brother seems to have built one - raccoons, turtles, and even other kids. Yet another yawner.

I came across a New York Times article written about the time of the Benders' retirement. In it, Lemon is quoted as saying “purists will be happy with the fact that the characters are not radically changed and also excited that the freshness of the heyday of the ‘Alley Oop’ universe is being revived.” Was he out-and-out lying or just totally in the dark about what Sayers was going to do? Alternative universes, talking dinosaurs, sentient animals, twelve year-olds building time-machines, and the total absence of dramatic conflict does not conjure up the heyday of this strip. There have been only two time-travel stories before the 20th Century, the true appeal of the strip since 1939, as Joey has focused on the totally unappealing other dimensions that have dominated the story lines. As far as not radically changing the characters, it looks like he must have gotten into the edible CBD products again. Alley Oop is a wise-cracking doofus who hasn't been involved in a fight or military conflict in the past three years. Dr. Wonmug is a meandering dumb-as-a-doorknob "genius" who is into Duran Duran and the Grateful Dead. Ooola has fared a bit better but is no longer the dynamic, tough-as-nails troubleshooter, not afraid to bop a few heads or pull a gun on a tough character in one of her travels. Rarely, if ever, did these three go together in a time-travel story but now they go everywhere together. And other once major characters - Guz, Umpa, Foozy, and Oscar Boom - have simply disappeared. All of this illustrated in Lemon's really loopy artwork framed in his even worse sense of color. No attention to detail, just a bunch of squiggly lines. Every bit as unappealing as the story lines.

In today' strip, Alley lectures his alter-ego after apparently beating him up. Or maybe he slapped him or pushed him down. Who knows and who cares?