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Gil Thorp, 5/15/17

OK, finally, after much dramatic wheel-spinning, we have this spring’s Gil Thorp storyline coming into shape: everyone loves muckraking investigative journalist Dafne when her reporting is bringing down fat-cat school board members, but when she starts nosing around the past of transfer student/rage maniac Ryan van Auken, she’s going to find out that her fellow teens aren’t that jazzed about a free and independent press after all! The last couple weeks have mostly been about a couple of boys’ track team members engaging in some extremely mild flirting with Dafne and one of her softball friends, so that will presumably work its way into the drama somehow, though honestly I’d rather it didn’t because it was frankly pretty boring.

Also, Dafne jokes about phone conversations being totally ’90s, but note that she’s apparently switched to her cell phone in mid-conversation, because landlines, ew, gross.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/15/17

I stand by my assertion from last week that Snuffy Smith’s depiction of the rural poor is fundamentally inauthentic, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t reveal interesting things about the mainstream society that creates and consumes it! For instance, in today’s strip an inhabitant of this isolated, impoverished hamlet discovers that his environment has been strewn with mass-manufactured garbage, and we’re expected to believe that he’d be ecstatic about it because he can extract a few pennies of marginal value from picking through the scrap.