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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/11/26

OK, there’s two things that could be going on here. The first is that we’re meant to understand that Hootin’ Holler is one of the proposed wackiest places to live in America, which, no! No!! It’s poor and depressing and violent! That’s not wacky at all! The other possibility is that the gag writer just thought of the idea of a “wackiest places to live in America” list to serve as a counterpoint to the well-trod territory of the best places to live list, and decided that Snuffy hearing about this idea that certainly isn’t a joke and can barely be called a premise was good enough for a Saturday strip and then moved on with their life. Honestly, I respect the second one more.

Mary Worth, 4/11/26

“Mary has immediately begun to use her new pet to serve as a sounding board for her to workshop what she thinks is the best possible spin on her meddling,” is, I guess, not a huge surprise. Anyway, I just want to say now and for the record that it’s possible for an older man to have a perfectly good relationship with his children and to fall in love with a fake internet babe and send her lots of money! I feel like sending lots of money to a hot girl you met online is not necessarily something you check in with your kids about, even if you love them and speak to them regularly! The correlation here is not causation!

Family Circus, 4/11/26

The movies? Why would Billy want to do that when he could keep reading about The City of Brotherly Love, America’s silliest town! Eagles fans pelting Santa Claus with batteries … the MOVE bombing … that innocent robot they murdered … it’s all very silly and Billy simply can’t get enough!

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Family Circus, 4/1/26

Happy April Fool’s day, everybody! As I’ve noted over the last few years, the “trick” the passage of time has played on me is my growing appreciation of the Family Circus’s whole deal, which is that the kids are annoying on purpose, like that’s the whole joke. Look at Ma Keane’s face here! She wants to die, and maybe also to kill!

Crankshaft, 4/1/26

If I’m remembering right, for a long time Lena was a never-seen off-panel character that the other characters at the bus depot would constantly complain about, and then we started seeing her in person and she was always depicted as a perfectly nice woman that everyone is unfathomably cruel to for no reason. Look, in this one she briefly believes they’re being nice to her! That’s the “prank”!

Pluggers, 4/1/26

At least that’s intelligible as a prank, though. Is the prank here … on us? Like we’re supposed to believe that Mr. Whipple sent a letter to Pluggers HQ from beyond the grave encouraging them to do a panel where his successor as Charmin spokesbeing comes into a plugger’s home and takes a huge dump? “Look, pal, you’re in the wrong house,” says the bear-man, in what is becoming less and less what anyone would consider a “prank.” “I don’t get all that excited about toilet paper. I appreciate its utility in keeping my butthole and buttcrack clean of feces, but I’m not really invested in it emotionally.”

Intelligent Life, 4/1/26

Not even going to engage with the prank content on this one. These guys know what movie tickets cost! They see movies in the theater all the time, and talk about box office numbers while they’re there! Instead, I just want to point out that in panel one Skip has responded to “Wow … it’s April Fool’s Day,” with “Woot!”, which is absurd. Nobody’s excited about April Fool’s Day. This is just another example of these losers responding to any cultural reference they recognize with a sort of Pavlovian noise of general approval. It says a lot about society, and it sickens me.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/20/26

One of the special interest rabbit holes I’ve gone down in the past few years is the history of the composition of the Bible, and I’ve become particularly fascinated by the so-called Documentary Hypothesis, which is one theory (though by no means the only accepted one) about how the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) were put together. Joel Baden’s The Composition of the Pentateuch has what’s probably the most recently formulated version of it, which goes something like this: at some point after the Judean elite returned from the Babylonian exile, some scholar or scholars took four different source documents that told different versions of the stories of the creation of the universe and the early history of the Hebrews, and edited them together into a single narrative. This editing consisted of meticulously figuring out how the different episodes could be strung together chronologically without creating discrepancies like characters dying and then coming back to life, though as you would expect, it still creates a lot of puzzling results. (For instance, Baden demonstrates that the story of Joseph being sold into slavery is really difficult to follow because it’s actually three somewhat contradictory stories mashed together.)

Anyway, here’s what’s to me the funniest aspect of this. The first four books of the Torah, covering the creation of the world, the legendary arrival of Abraham’s family in Canaan, their descendants’ enslavement in Egypt, and their descendants’ escape and wandering in the desert, were created by interweaving three different sources, called J, E, and P by scholars, together. There’s a fourth source, D, that covers much of the same narrative territory. But D, as originally written, had a literary framing device: on the last day of the Exodus, just before the Hebrews cross into the Promised Land, Moses stands before the multitude and recaps for them the history of the Hebrews and the laws that they received. And because the editors are so single-minded on keeping things chronological, this recap (the book of Deuteronomy) is placed at the very end of the story, so the effect of reading the edited version is that you read the whole thing and then you get a retelling at the end, which differs in quite a few details from the earlier versions of it you’ve already read!

So, sorry for the long digression, but what I’m wondering here is: are we going to get a full-on retelling of the fake self-help Mirakle Method story, from Mud’s point of view? Will it differ in subtle but meaningful ways from the 2023-2024 strips that laid it out in the first place? Is Rex Morgan, M.D., being pieced together from ancient texts, and will this act of scholarship cause a worldwide religious transformation over the next few centuries? Stay tuned!

Family Circus, 3/20/26

That went, uh, very off the rails and I apologize to those who were bewildered by it. Hey, you know what I hope doesn’t serve as the beginning of a new religion any time soon? This Family Circus panel where Jeffy is ranting about how “shadows don’t have faces.” It’s creepy and I don’t like it! Stop talking about the faceless shadows, Jeffy!

Alice, 3/20/26

You know, I’ve never been really clear on what Alice’s job is, but this strip forces me to confront a harrowing question on that subject: whatever it is, is it possible that she’s good at it? I will be taking most of the weekend to dwell on this with increasing unease.