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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/27/23

OK, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, I’m all for mixing things up once in a while, but I’m going to have to ask you to stop trying to make Barney Google and Snuffy Smith Present … Sparkplug’s Grandson Li’l Sparky happen as, like, a parallel continuity that implies that the animals of Hootin’ Holler are all sapient and can talk to one another but also coexist with the human characters. Like, don’t get me attached to Clara the chicken, beloved by her peers as a great cook, when we all know that sooner than later she’s going to end up in Snuffy’s burlap sack and then Loweezy’s fryer, begging for her life in words her captors cannot understand.

Dustin, 4/27/23

Great facial expression on Neka in the final panel here. That’s exactly what you’d look like if you visited a friend’s home for the first time and immediately learned that her family relationships are a twisted, passive-aggressive web of mutual loathing.

Hi and Lois, 4/27/23

The appearance of Chip as a sort of one-man Greek chorus here is very funny to me. On the one hand, it’s a little out of place because I’m pretty sure we almost never see Chip interacting with his younger siblings in any way, but on the other, do you know who’d be really, really impressed by innovation like this? Stoned teenagers, that’s who.

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The Lockhorns, 4/24/23

Happy Monday, everyone, and it’s a truly happy Monday indeed when the day’s Lockhorns panel features Leroy openly weeping, or at so least so overwrought with emotion that he’s hiding his face in his hand. Like, this deadpan zinger from Loretta would be funny in any circumstance where he takes his fantasy league a little too seriously, but it’s very funny if he’s actually crying about it. Is he so upset because his emotional life is very empty and he’s way, way overinvested in fantasy baseball, the only fun part of his day? Or has he made some ill-advised side bets and lost a lot of money?

Hi and Lois, 4/24/23

Look, I’m not going out of my way to rain on anybody’s date night fun, but I’ve been reading this strip for years and I’m pretty sure I never knew that Lois’s mother (also Beetle Bailey’s mother, for the record) lived in the same town as the Flagstons, or at least close enough that she could be called upon for last-minute baby-sitting duty, so honestly that means it’s been quite a while since they hung out and maybe they should invite her to dinner.

Pluggers, 4/24/23

ME ON THURSDAY, APRIL 20, 2023: Being a little forgetful about names is a normal thing for a person to experience. I’m not opening myself up to shame or ridicule by talking about it on my blog for everyone to read.

ME ON MONDAY, APRIL 24, 2023: Oh no. Oh NO.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/20/23

One of my little life problems is that I have an absolutely terrible memory for names, which as you can imagine is often embarrassing, because I can usually remember a lot of other stuff about a person I’ve met a few times, to the extent that we’re talking and hitting it off and it’s no longer socially acceptable for me to not know their name, frankly. I experience this same problem with characters in newspaper comic strips, and take it from me, it’s quite hard to Google the names of people in newspaper comic strips, especially when (a) you don’t know their name and have to work from descriptions like “guy in Rex Morgan, M.D., whose dad is a horror comics artist” and (b) the deepest archive of textual material online about newspaper comic strips is on a blog that you yourself write, and you often find several entries where you wrote about the character whose name you’re trying to find in a way that makes it very clear that you couldn’t remember the name back then either and ended up writing around it.

This is a long way of saying that I do appreciate that Hank and Yvonne keep introducing themselves to Fergus, but: I’ve got it, now! They can stop! It’s just getting weird, honestly! I guarantee you that even though Mud appears to have retained their last name, he only thinks of Yvonne as “the woman who will not shut up about ‘Muddy Boots.’”

Hi and Lois, 4/20/23

Guys, the CSI franchise is very much on CBS. Were there no HBO shows you could think of for this gag? Sopranos Street? Sesame Succession? Does Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC not pay its jokesmiths enough to afford premium cable?

Dennis the Menace, 4/20/23

Ha ha, just a little light demonic possession! I judge this: pretty menacing.