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Hi and Lois and The Lockhorns, 7/15/23

Call me “out of touch” all you want — my family certainly does — but golf seems like a hugely expensive and boring waste of time to me, and I have other hugely expensive wastes of time that I actually enjoy, so I will never play golf and you cannot convince me to do it. By “you” here I specifically mean newspaper comic strip creators, for whom golf usually lands somewhere between “relatable pastime” and “holy sacrament,” though these two strips today seem to admit that golf is, in fact, not as enjoyable as they usually make it out to be, and can even add to the overwhelming sense of oppressive ennui that we as middle-class inhabitants of the 21st century West cannot escape. Golf is at least giving Hi and Thirsty the opportunity to avoid their spouses, but somehow Leroy and Loretta have turned the game into yet another opportunity to spend time antagonizing one another while also getting a sunburn. Truly grim stuff!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/15/23

Now, I’m sure the first panel of this strip has raised objections among the more pedantic among you who are well aware that Snuffy’s house and the local church are not situated close together like this in established Googleverse canon. But the composition is in fact symbolic — the two structures are shown next to one another, prefiguring Snuffy and Parson Tuttle’s proximity in the next panel. The art in this strip is not and has never been literally representational; if it were, why does everyone look like [shudders in disgust] that?