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Tina’s Groove, 1/24/25

A thing about being a monarch is that nobody can stop you from doing all sorts of awful sicko stuff, and usually this takes the form of wars or religious persecution or what have you, but sometimes it just means they get to play out their sadistic whims. A particularly sadistic one is “raising a baby that nobody ever speaks to in the hopes that it will talk and we’ll learn what God’s original language is,” and there really must be something to this because supposedly four different rulers — Pharaoh Psamtik I, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, King James IV of Scotland, and the Mughal Emperor Akbar — supposedly tried it. There’s some doubt that any of these experiments really took place, although the recorded end of Frederick’s — “But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments” — seems grimly plausible.

Anyway, it doesn’t sound like Greg’s upbringing was that extreme, but still, it does seem like he’s the subject of some kind of experiment? Maybe to see if, never having met another soul outside his family in his whole sad sack life, he’d fall in love with the anxious, depressive protagonist of Tina’s Groove? She had a boyfriend a a couple weeks ago, but she’s on the prowl for hot (?) friends’ cousins now, apparently!

Blondie, 1/24/25

Speaking of people isolated from outside stimulus, I will note that Blondie appears to be hearing “I am woman, hear me roar,” a line from a Helen Reddy song released in 1971, for the first time, and I would actually like to see an analysis of what parts of her brain are “modern suburban wife and caterer” and what parts are “flapper girl from the 1930s.” I think that’d be a real interesting experiment, honestly! Not sure if we could do it with an MRI machine or what, I leave the implementation details to the eggheads.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/24/25

I was going to suggest that Hootin’ Holler was so isolated from mainstream society that its inhabitants are ignorant of even basic cryptid information, which explains why Jughaid seems to confuse “snowman” in the sense of the folk art he’s creating in his yard with the mysterious shaggy man-like beast of the Himalayas. But clearly Snuffy is well steeped in the lore, so I guess we just have to admit that Jughaid is kind of dumb.

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Marvin, 1/21/25

I really have to respect Marvin for playing the long game and getting me to publicly praise it for turning away from shit and piss jokes and then unleash what may be one of the vilest strips in the all years I’ve read it, one in which Marvin suggests that, if he had his druthers, he would continue crawling around on the floor and soiling himself well into his tween years, simply because he feels making the effort not to and alleviating his parents of the burdens of catering to his basest needs would be an affront to his dignity.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/21/25

Lotta people see the revolving door of the Hootin’ Holler jail and think Snuffy never truly pays the price for his various crimes. But today we learn that in fact his constant brushes with the law have turned his own mind into a prison that’s ultimately of his own making, and I think that’s neat.

Pluggers, 1/21/25

“Pluggers are stuck in the bathtub and probably they’re going to die there” is frankly a little too grim for me this morning! Please go back to being smug about your exurban folkways, Pluggers, I much prefer that to seeing the chicken-lady’s last bubbly moments!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/10/25

Ha ha, can you imagine? The Smif and Barlow families would be lined up opposite each other, and Steve Harvey would shout out, “Things you carry home in a burlap sack!” And Barlow would buzz in first and smugly shout “Chickens!” but while he’s distracted, Snuffy jumps over the podium and charges at him with a rusty blade he had hidden in his overalls, eager to slit Barlow’s throat and finally declare victory in their long-running clan war, right there on national television. The little bastard doesn’t understand that TV shows aren’t broadcast live, but the footage will leak out anyway. It’s too sensational not to.

Bizarro, 1/10/25

Hey, did you know that the millions of toner cartridges and batteries we’ve produced over the past few decades all have souls? Or maybe they are the souls of the electronic equipment we stick them inside, I’m not 100% that I follow the cosmology here, but the point is we’re going to be encountering this stuff when we die and move on to the next world, and I think it’s going to have some questions for us that I for one am not sure I’ll be able to answer.

Dennis the Menace, 1/10/25

You know what’s real menacing behavior, Gina? Carrying around a 5 x 7 wedding picture of your parents outside in the middle of winter while you tell people about this. What if you drop it in the snow?