Was Gasoline Alley ever a gag-a-day strip? I thought it was always a soap opera strip, with the gimmick that its characters aged in real time (until they became zombies).
I don’t read Gasoline Alley, but whenever I see one, it seems like it is straddling a line between gag-a-day and soap opera continuity, only not doing either one particularly well — the gags are weak (as in the instant example — that’s all there is folks, a lame snappy answer to her stupid question), and the continuity not very satisfying (though, how would I know for sure, if I don’t read it regularly? I seem to recall a few months ago there was some big reveal about who some speaker was, and there were enough of that sequence posted here to see that it never amounted to anything — big build-up in one strip, no follow-through…)
Sarcasm? Or maybe there is a family named “Deal” down the road. Or maybe it made sense to the cartoonist but no one else.
I guess they’ll admit to being primitive enough to be a semi-realish “deal,” but not the *realist* real one. That’s “other folks” (as It always is).
I’m reminded of the bit that goes approximately “To the rest of the world, a Yankee is a citizen of the U.S.; to people in the U.S. South, a Yankee is somebody in the U.S. North; to people in the North a Yankee is somebody in New England; to people in New England a Yankee is somebody in Maine; and to people in Maine a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.”
I think the point is that the farmer has discovered a simple method to get the pesky tourists to leave (and go bother his neighbor instead).
P.S. @ larK – I read Gasoline Alley as a kid (when Dick Moores was writing it), so there must have been at least a few good gags in it back then (I loathed the “soap opera” strips). I quit following it some time before the next change of authors, and was never able to get back into the “new” incarnation, but maybe that was just because I was older.
P.P.S. This strip appears to be from 2018. Wasn’t Gasoline Alley on a thread to retire the strip some months ago? Will they never pull the plug?
Is the pie thing a real thing, or just something absurd to finish out the progression? Why do Yankees eat pie for breakfast, where does that come from?
@ Shrug – I recall a similar sequence that attributed abnormal thinking and/or behavior in the U.S. to: “California” / “L.A.” / Hollywood.
–And have you lived here all your life?
–Not yet.
BTW, some rural “snappy answers” are collected under the song title “The Arkansas Traveller”.
larK — pie for breakfast hasn’t been a thing in most of New England for a century; it’s really only in agricultural areas. But New England farmers in summer were known to have a full meal — including pie, both meat pies and dessert pies — around sunrise at four AM, then work eight hours and have a second meal around noon, then work until sunset and have a third lighter meal at sunset around 8 pm.
So “pie for breakfast” was a way of talking about those Yankee farmers who worked sixteen hour days in the summer, involving three full meals, including a breakfast that would count as a supper for anybody else. Because when you’re doing sixteen hours of physical labor, you legitimately use that many calories.
@Kilby: “I recall a similar sequence that attributed abnormal thinking and/or behavior in the U.S. to: “California” / “L.A.” / Hollywood.”
Heinlein used that sequence in the opening of his 1941 short story “And He Built a Crooked House.”
:
Americans are considered crazy anywhere in the world.
They will usually concede a basis for the accusation but point to California as the focus of the infection. Californians stoutly maintain that their bad reputation is derived solely from the acts of the inhabitants of Los Angeles County. Angelenos will, when pressed, admit the charge but explain hastily, “It’s Hollywood. It’s not our fault—we didn’t ask for it; Hollywood just grew.”
The people in Hollywood don’t care; they glory in it. If you are interested, they will drive you up Laurel Canyon ‘where we keep the violent cases.’
The deal is “go away, and bother somebody else”
@ Shrug – I’m impressed: that is definitely the original source of my vague recollection. The scary part is that it’s been at least 25 (and probably more than 30) years since I read that story for the last time. The incredible part is that you were able to associate the sequence and dig up the original.
I always figured Bostonians thought Yankees were those damn baseball players in New York.
Gasoline Alley dailies are often story arcs (lots of Rufus and Joel lately, which has some GoComics commenters unhappy*) but the Sunday like this are usually one-off jokes.
* Some are unhappy in particular with no mention of the 75th wedding anniversary of Skeezix and Nina. Someone has been posting links from the original strips of that period.
I thought it was sort of cute. A condescending city person asks rhetorically “Are you really quaint farmers” and so you answer “No, we’re fakes” exposing what a stupid question it was.
Kind of cute.
The expression of the woman in panel one is unnerving.
beckoningchasm, Clovia’s always been drawn like a Botox treatment gone terribly wrong.
The older strip must have been borderline-Arlo for its time: They’re getting those looks because everybody in the lobby knows that they’re going upstairs to do.
As a New Englander I tend to associate the term “yankee” with a particular sort of person; not easily defined, exactly, but the sort of person that this time of the year thinks it’s a swell idea to get drunk and let off fireworks in the street.
Uh, no . . . that would be rednecks . . . still going on, despite the Fourth being over four days ago.
I seem to recall a few months ago there was some big reveal about who some speaker was, and there were enough of that sequence posted here to see that it never amounted to anything — big build-up in one strip, no follow-through…)
Maybe the “Peggy Lee” portion of “Walt is feted by the Old Cartoon Characters Home”. Many were sure Walt was going to stay, but no. And Peggy Lee turned out to be no one in particular and certainly not “famous in her own right”.
The older strip must have been borderline-Arlo for its time: They’re getting those looks because everybody in the lobby knows that they’re going upstairs to do.
Yeah, the casual act weren’t a-foolin’ nobody.
Today’s the get rousted by a cop while out on the beach. Not sure if he’s convinced in the last panel of their bona fides by the uniform or something else.
Brian, where are these being reprinted?
And the British called the American soldiers Yanks – the short form of yankee.
My grandfather emigrated to this country at around 17 or 18 from either Poland/Russia (as I was originally told) or Austria/Russia (as my mother now says). Either way – when he, as a greenhorn, arrived here the thing he wanted to be most was a Yankee – an American.
Brian, where are these being reprinted?
One of the commenters (StuDolgon) on GoComics posts them.
Hmmm. I didn’t realize that posting a Twitter link on WordPress would result in that. A new bit of information.
Remarkable!
@Meryl – As a youngster, my main source for rich misinformation about the revolutionary period was a copy of Johnny Tremain I checked out often from our library. I don’t know if was special to that edition or an actual part of the novel originally, but there was something like an appendix discussing the history of the phrase and especially the song “Yankee Doodle” and a very long printing of the lyrics in many many verses.
Mitch4- I remember little beyond the main plot of JT so I don’t know if it was the edition I read – which turned out to be a year before I was suppose to read it in school. But it is not the worst of the modern fictional books about the period.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Was Gasoline Alley ever a gag-a-day strip? I thought it was always a soap opera strip, with the gimmick that its characters aged in real time (until they became zombies).
I don’t read Gasoline Alley, but whenever I see one, it seems like it is straddling a line between gag-a-day and soap opera continuity, only not doing either one particularly well — the gags are weak (as in the instant example — that’s all there is folks, a lame snappy answer to her stupid question), and the continuity not very satisfying (though, how would I know for sure, if I don’t read it regularly? I seem to recall a few months ago there was some big reveal about who some speaker was, and there were enough of that sequence posted here to see that it never amounted to anything — big build-up in one strip, no follow-through…)
Sarcasm? Or maybe there is a family named “Deal” down the road. Or maybe it made sense to the cartoonist but no one else.
I guess they’ll admit to being primitive enough to be a semi-realish “deal,” but not the *realist* real one. That’s “other folks” (as It always is).
I’m reminded of the bit that goes approximately “To the rest of the world, a Yankee is a citizen of the U.S.; to people in the U.S. South, a Yankee is somebody in the U.S. North; to people in the North a Yankee is somebody in New England; to people in New England a Yankee is somebody in Maine; and to people in Maine a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.”
I think the point is that the farmer has discovered a simple method to get the pesky tourists to leave (and go bother his neighbor instead).
P.S. @ larK – I read Gasoline Alley as a kid (when Dick Moores was writing it), so there must have been at least a few good gags in it back then (I loathed the “soap opera” strips). I quit following it some time before the next change of authors, and was never able to get back into the “new” incarnation, but maybe that was just because I was older.
P.P.S. This strip appears to be from 2018. Wasn’t Gasoline Alley on a thread to retire the strip some months ago? Will they never pull the plug?
Is the pie thing a real thing, or just something absurd to finish out the progression? Why do Yankees eat pie for breakfast, where does that come from?
@ Shrug – I recall a similar sequence that attributed abnormal thinking and/or behavior in the U.S. to: “California” / “L.A.” / Hollywood.
–And have you lived here all your life?
–Not yet.
BTW, some rural “snappy answers” are collected under the song title “The Arkansas Traveller”.
larK — pie for breakfast hasn’t been a thing in most of New England for a century; it’s really only in agricultural areas. But New England farmers in summer were known to have a full meal — including pie, both meat pies and dessert pies — around sunrise at four AM, then work eight hours and have a second meal around noon, then work until sunset and have a third lighter meal at sunset around 8 pm.
So “pie for breakfast” was a way of talking about those Yankee farmers who worked sixteen hour days in the summer, involving three full meals, including a breakfast that would count as a supper for anybody else. Because when you’re doing sixteen hours of physical labor, you legitimately use that many calories.
@Kilby: “I recall a similar sequence that attributed abnormal thinking and/or behavior in the U.S. to: “California” / “L.A.” / Hollywood.”
Heinlein used that sequence in the opening of his 1941 short story “And He Built a Crooked House.”
:
Americans are considered crazy anywhere in the world.
They will usually concede a basis for the accusation but point to California as the focus of the infection. Californians stoutly maintain that their bad reputation is derived solely from the acts of the inhabitants of Los Angeles County. Angelenos will, when pressed, admit the charge but explain hastily, “It’s Hollywood. It’s not our fault—we didn’t ask for it; Hollywood just grew.”
The people in Hollywood don’t care; they glory in it. If you are interested, they will drive you up Laurel Canyon ‘where we keep the violent cases.’
The deal is “go away, and bother somebody else”
@ Shrug – I’m impressed: that is definitely the original source of my vague recollection. The scary part is that it’s been at least 25 (and probably more than 30) years since I read that story for the last time. The incredible part is that you were able to associate the sequence and dig up the original.
I always figured Bostonians thought Yankees were those damn baseball players in New York.
Gasoline Alley dailies are often story arcs (lots of Rufus and Joel lately, which has some GoComics commenters unhappy*) but the Sunday like this are usually one-off jokes.
* Some are unhappy in particular with no mention of the 75th wedding anniversary of Skeezix and Nina. Someone has been posting links from the original strips of that period.
I thought it was sort of cute. A condescending city person asks rhetorically “Are you really quaint farmers” and so you answer “No, we’re fakes” exposing what a stupid question it was.
Kind of cute.
The expression of the woman in panel one is unnerving.
beckoningchasm, Clovia’s always been drawn like a Botox treatment gone terribly wrong.
The older strip must have been borderline-Arlo for its time: They’re getting those looks because everybody in the lobby knows that they’re going upstairs to do.
As a New Englander I tend to associate the term “yankee” with a particular sort of person; not easily defined, exactly, but the sort of person that this time of the year thinks it’s a swell idea to get drunk and let off fireworks in the street.
Uh, no . . . that would be rednecks . . . still going on, despite the Fourth being over four days ago.
I seem to recall a few months ago there was some big reveal about who some speaker was, and there were enough of that sequence posted here to see that it never amounted to anything — big build-up in one strip, no follow-through…)
Maybe the “Peggy Lee” portion of “Walt is feted by the Old Cartoon Characters Home”. Many were sure Walt was going to stay, but no. And Peggy Lee turned out to be no one in particular and certainly not “famous in her own right”.
https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/2018/04/12/6-50/#comment-12583
The older strip must have been borderline-Arlo for its time: They’re getting those looks because everybody in the lobby knows that they’re going upstairs to do.
Yeah, the casual act weren’t a-foolin’ nobody.
Today’s the get rousted by a cop while out on the beach. Not sure if he’s convinced in the last panel of their bona fides by the uniform or something else.
Brian, where are these being reprinted?
And the British called the American soldiers Yanks – the short form of yankee.
My grandfather emigrated to this country at around 17 or 18 from either Poland/Russia (as I was originally told) or Austria/Russia (as my mother now says). Either way – when he, as a greenhorn, arrived here the thing he wanted to be most was a Yankee – an American.
Brian, where are these being reprinted?
One of the commenters (StuDolgon) on GoComics posts them.
The one above came from 7/8:
https://www.gocomics.com/gasolinealley/2019/07/08?ct=v&cti=67255&comments=visible#comments
Stu has started posting links to the images in his Twitter account. Now you can see all of the ones he’s done, intermixed with some other stuff.
Hope this helps.
Hmmm. I didn’t realize that posting a Twitter link on WordPress would result in that. A new bit of information.
Remarkable!
@Meryl – As a youngster, my main source for rich misinformation about the revolutionary period was a copy of Johnny Tremain I checked out often from our library. I don’t know if was special to that edition or an actual part of the novel originally, but there was something like an appendix discussing the history of the phrase and especially the song “Yankee Doodle” and a very long printing of the lyrics in many many verses.
Mitch4- I remember little beyond the main plot of JT so I don’t know if it was the edition I read – which turned out to be a year before I was suppose to read it in school. But it is not the worst of the modern fictional books about the period.