On Today's Alley Oop, 25 January 2022

 Where are we exactly in this tangled mess of a story? To recap briefly, the atmosphere was destroyed or the oxygen in the atmosphere was removed, or something bad happened so that 95% of the earth's population died. But fortunately Doc had a backup time-lab (can you say "deus machina") that apparently was safe because, you know, if the atmosphere is destroyed it won't affect you if you're in a secured building. Sort of like if the elevator car snaps on the 32nd floor and falls, you can save yourself by jumping right before the car smashes into the ground. Once again, Joey's grasp of science makes 1950s DC Comics look like they were articles written for Scientific American. Wonmug magically determines that whatever the problem is with the air started in 1980 with an air purifying machine that was built in 1800 started to fail which led to the problem in 2022. (I got a headache just writing that sentence). So the not-so-intrepid-trio head off to the Rocky Mountains and Doc quickly finds the cave where the machine is guarded by a presumably 200 year-old robot. It turns out that the machine has been sabotaged by yet another Alley Oop look alike from yet another dimension just because he wants to be a villain. Oop travels to the other dimension to apprehend the other Oop and hands him to still another Oop to be taken to time-court. Oop returns to the 1980 Rocky Mountains and finds that Doc is unable to fix the machine because Oop, the villain, has removed a part. Ooola then flashes back to 1800 to find the inventor, Janet Higgins. She somehow knows what city Janet lives in. But how? Doc didn't tell her. And what city is it? The first white settlement in Colorado wasn't established until 1833 and that was a fort so she can't be in Colorado. Are we supposed to believe that somehow this person created a machine that cleans the entire world's atmosphere not to mention a robot to maintain it and somehow transported both into the Rocky Mountains. In 1800. Before Lewis and Clark. Sure, this is a comic strip about a time-travelling caveman but this is just too far beyond the suspension of disbelief.. And at this point, it feels like all of the air has been sucked out of this story.

In today's strip, Ooola is wandering around the unnamed big city asking random people where Janet Higgins lives. She finds a random kid selling fake "maps to the inventors' hovels" for a mere dime., which Ooola gives him. Except where would Ooola get a dime? from that timeframe The first dime had been minted in 1796 but she has just arrived from 1980. She had just gone on the spur of the moment and wouldn't have taken any money. Heck, she doesn't even have pockets! Man, this is just dumb.