Animals strike curious poses (derogatory)
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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/15/26
The characters in newspaper comic strips generally keep their vocabulary squeaky clean, and the Hootin’ Holler crew doesn’t even resort to grawlices as far as I can remember. That’s why I’m pretty horrified to learn today that, while we’re not seeing him in action, Snuffy is just letting loose with a nonstop stream of obscenities, blasphemies, and slurs around the house, presumably where Jughaid and li’l Tater can hear. Grim stuff! (It’s less surprising to learn, as we do in the throwaway panels, that even the Holler’s lone semi-legitimate businessman doesn’t know the difference between deflation and disinflation, as flatlanders generally struggle with that as well.)
Pluggers, 3/15/26
BlueSky, one of several social media sites where I post daily links to my blog, has an auto-moderation feature that deemed yesterday’s Pardon My Planet demonic sideboob “adult content.” Well, sorry, I’m doubling down on the smut. Check out today’s Pluggers! Depraved furry pornography! Unspeakable filth! This is the sort of thing America wants to see in the newspaper now and we all need to come to terms with that fact!
Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/15/26
Oh, man, were you excited at the prospect of Mud Mountain Murphy and Lorna Starr/Mae Mae Clodfelter getting to know each other over several days of cafe breakfasts, and maybe feeling a spark of attraction that could eventually blossom into romance? Well, too bad. They already knew each other, it turns out. We’re skipping all of that! Better luck next time!
30 replies to “Animals strike curious poses (derogatory)”
RMMD:
“I think I’ll have the… huh…”
“Sorry. We’re all out of ‘huh’ this morning.”
Two nearsighted kids in high school: “Hey! We’re nerds not Pluggers. Huff!“
BG&SS:
Can’t we get Rex Harrison’s Professor Henry Higgins to make a guest appearance here and teach these people to utter just one word of standard English?
Pluggers:
“And the clods made love.”
— James Marshall Hendrix, “Electric Ladyland”
Hagar the Horrible-“Do you have a magic memory loss potion?” “Yeah. It’s called gin.”
RMMD-Hiding away from the world.
MW-“I was just watching Hollywood Squares with that delightful Paul Lynde and I thought of you.”
RMMD: Don’t worry, Josh, they have a lot of catching up to do. After all, they know one another, but they apparently don’t know one another’s stage names. We might even get some awkward moments, when Fergus says “I suppose you’ve heard of Mud Mountain Murphy” and is met with crickets.
RMMD: Mae Mae needn’t worry about Fergus blowing her cover. He’s never seen a “talkie.”
RMMD: In yesterday’s strip, Mae Mae was wearing a name tag. I guess it fell into the stack of pancakes. Also, Mud took a long loving gander at her back porch as he walked into the cafe, but that wasn’t enough to jog his memory.
Slylock: Weber had the same question and solution on his applied math qualifying exam in grad school.
Even Mae Mae’s earring momentarily changed colour at the realisation that it would have to be in the prolonged future company of someone who is literally a mountain of mud.
“What in the world are you doing here?”
“I’m playing the part of a tertiary character in a really boring comic strip.”
“What a coincidence! So am I!”
RMMD: I was looking forward to Rustic Romance. But, depending on how desperate Lorna is to keep incognito, I could settle for Homespun Homicide.
RMMD – Why are they talking on the telephone when they’re just a couple of feet from each other?
Wary Morth:
“A sudden emergency has come up…I can’t just visit you, I have to move in with you!”
Who in the world, even in a world that contains and tolerates such a place as Hootin’ Holler, would buy the eggs Loweezy lays?
BGSS: Funny to think how much of Hootin Hollar’s economy is tied to the obscenities market. Pray that they never figure out short-selling or we might see a 2008-style crash when Rev Tuttle comes down hard on “cursin’ ”
Pluggers are so disgusted by the sight of each other that they need to blur their vision before engaging in physical intimacy.
BGSS – I love that she actually boxes up the butter with printed packaging.
RMMD — There are two kinds of diners: ones with picture menus, and ones without.
@Everything Is Better With Monkeys: Well, obviously, the butter and eggs are packaged. You think they came from the Smif farm? No, she’s simply reselling groceries Snuffy stole from the neighbors.
Um, when one Plugger has a beak and the other Plugger has a muzzle, there really isn’t any need to take glasses off to smooch. Trying to think which anthropomorphic Pluggers WOULD need to do so. The cat-man, maybe — he’s got a pretty flat face. But my choices for lady Pluggers are a chicken or a kangaroo, and neither of them is married to, or even dating, the cat. So I mark this gag FAILED!
BG&SS: Nice to see King Features Syndicate straight up pushing Trump administration propaganda. No, inflation isn’t down. Hasn’t been for a while now. Surely, over the months leading up to the midterms, we’ll get more of these strips pushing outright lies that would be convenient for the Republicans as simple facts.
RMMD: Sure, drugs like Ozempic are helping people manage their diets and maintain a healthy diet, but no-one thinks of the downside: if you’re eating healthy balanced breakfasts with plenty of fibre, who’ll believe you when you pretend to shit yourself violently on stage?
If you’ve got glasses, you should take them off before you kiss. Is 57% of the world’s population pluggers? Or are pluggers a specific subset of glasses-havers who “need” to take them off? Is it not merely uncomfortable to smush the glasses into their face?, do they suffer from some unholy curse that merges their flesh with steel and glass if they press into it too hard?
JP I just want to saw that the ‘establishing shot’ drawing in the throwaways is quite lovely, and the details are nicely done – birds, flowers and buds with different tints as you’d expect, the shading giving shadows on the house front proper for sunlight filtered through the trees… if only they spent a quarter as much care on the plot.
I cringed at today’s Pluggers.
And I have seen some pretty freaky furry porn stuff out there.
That says something.
*say (sigh)
Pluggers: Wasn’t expecting any mouth-on-pecker action today.
Luann: Frank and Puddles are gonna spit roast Nancy.
Mae Mae Clodfelter must be Lorna Starr’s real name and not a made-up one, since Mud already know it.
JP: In typical Ces fashion, the whole story resolves itself with Alan taking Bog Dan to the dentist for an implant for his missing tooth.
H&L: Guest author Neil deGrasse Tyson