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!
46 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
@Banana Jr. 6000: Yeah, looks like the twist is not “Mud knows Lorna from the celebrity circuit” but “Mud knows Lorna from childhood.”
Judge Parker and Rex Morgan really diverged in the post-Woody Wilson days. One went in the direction of murder and mayhem, the other toward a man deciding to go a little crazy and eat French toast.
@8 Gil Bates: Her back porch was much smaller back then. Hm. Maybe she was big, then lost weight, became a big star, became a recluse, then returned to bigness? That timeline could work.
@15 Ukranazi Stepan: Ewww.
@27 Pozzo: Expect to receive a Scratchy Scrote on Friday.
Since today’s comics are either stupider than usual (RMMD), spinning their wheels (Show us the damn video already, Ces!!) or unspeakable filth (you know), I’m going to do something different.
Last week, I attended my model railroad club’s annual festival. As we were cleaning up at the end of the day, I spotted that a vendor had tossed a perfectly good Lionel rolling stock box in the trash can. I fetched it out, then spotted an old newspaper that had been stuffed inside. It was the Houston Chronicle comics page from Sunday, September 7, 1975! Let’s see what was happening back then, shall we?
Leading off, we have RMMD. Rex and June are not married, and we appear to have at least three storylines in play. June’s roommate Valerie is having trouble with some guy named Keith who has ‘plans’ that involve her, and apparently the cops want to talk to her about another guy named Bill who met with some accident. Meanwhile, another friend of June, Melissa, is being imposed upon by a Mrs. Bond who Rex and June sent to live with her for a few days.
All very interesting, and not a single roots country artist, sub-vaudeville team, Street Sweeper, or spit curl to be seen.
Tumbleweeds: A gag that would have been lucky to make it on F Troop…
The Better Half: If the Lockhorns were drawn by Walker-Browne Comics Industries LLC, with a gag about a repressed but still lecherous priest thrown in.
Hi & Lois: Ditto brought over a friend who did wanton vandalism to Hi’s car.
Hagar: A preview of the current administration’s war policy in 2027…
Broom-Hilda: Apparently Broom has no house and just has her bed and nightstand on a barren salt flat.
MW: Mary doesn’t even appear! Instead, some blonde floozy named Connie Monroe is seen leaving the house of some red-headed bestubbled stud named Dana after his ‘female iceberg’ of a wife thwarted Connie’s entry to their home. Meanwhile Dana and said wife (‘Elaine’) discuss just how their marriage went so wrong and can they learn to love again? (And no, Wilbur isn’t skulking about in their bushes.)
[The Girls In] Apartment 3-G: Some thrilling drama in a ‘favorite after-theater spot’ deli where a big-time agent tries to entice the beau of Janice Brooks to ‘give up the doctor bit’ and return to the stage where he could be a star in three years!
Steve Roper and Mike Nomad: The notorious ‘Squint’ Stuart is holed up in a hotel after trying to kill Steve and sending him to a hospital with nonexistent security that ‘Squint’ knows ‘like the palm of my hand’! Meanwhile, Mike is arguing with the police about how they haven’t put a guard on Steve’s room (how could they? there were ELEVEN shootings that day!) and decides that he’s going to become a ‘one-man posse’ to find the creep!
And last but not least…
Mark Trail: Sid Sr. must have been laying down on the job that week, because it’s nothing but Background Fauna as Mark waxes rhapsodic about the plant Wood Betony, better known as ‘Lousewort’ for the mistaken belief that it causes lice on sheep.
Plus, a full-page ad (!) for some publication called ‘Moneyworth’ which features such important articles as ‘Fake meat can be a real value’ and ‘Is Cancer Contagious? New Findings’ (and that’s just a small sample!), and a Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum ad sharing Fun Facts (did you know the hottest place on earth is Dallol Ethiopia with an average temperature of 94 degrees from 1960-66? Good thing it’s never gotten hotter than that!)
RMMD – On the surface, this looks like the smouldering embers of a former romance about to be reignited, which is a predictable and tired soap strip storyline. What would be a lot more interesting is that Lorna has realized Mud has blown her cover, so now he has to die.
Pluggers are bleeding from the mouth after kissing the sharp beaks of their henwives.
RMMD: Let’s see, how are we going to make the inevitable romance between Maena and Mudgus as boring and stakes free as possible? They knew each other from back in the day before they each got (for certain values of the term) famous? Yeah, that works.
Snuffy, throwaway panels – Loweezy should cut costs by not providing such professional packaging for her “butter an’ eggs.” Just sell them out of a barrel, like a proper old-timey General Store!
Pluggers – Henrietta Beak doesn’t always have to take off her glasses to kiss. Sometimes it’s just a little peck.
Don Abundio, translated:
“That’s a great costume, Don Abundio”
“Thanks, babe! In a way, the Admiral gave me the idea”
“How so?”
“He refused to be the rear end of a horse”
When you kiss a Plugger, you don’t want to see details.
BGSS: You can tell inflation hit Hootin’ Holler, lots of dollar signs but no cents signs.
JP-“Randy was my bitch.”
C’shaft: Of course the guests at the Montoni’s-hosted wedding reception are dancing to “Proud Mary” and not “Happy” or “One More Time” or even the freakin’ Macarena. Of course.
Dustin: Most depressing Dustin ever.
MT: That’s not how you celebrate the Ides of March online, Jules.
MW: Figures that Mary Worth would be firmly against “romance.”
Snuffy Films: Today, Silas and Loweezy illustrate the conundrum facing many American businesses.
They want the Federal Reserve to tackle inflation but know it causes regret for commodities dealers getting less for their products and pensioners dependent on higher interest rates.
Tomorrow: Revenooer Donny hauls Banker Jerome before the Hootin’ Holler High Court.
Done!
GA: And we wait for at least another day on Walt’s fate (unless St. Peter has decided that Walt will eternally be a parody of an Irish entertainer).
PV: The artistry always astonishes me.
Doonesbury: An accurate assessment of athletic department rivalries.
$nuffy $mith: Truly confounding stuff here. Is $nuffy taking Lukey on a museum tour of a secret money room in his one-room shack?