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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/28/25

Imagine: You’ve just finished putting together the script for a perfectly serviceable Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip, which hinges on wordplay around the phrase “Mr. Right.” But then you remember: in Hootin’ Holler patois, they never say “mister”; they say “mistopher.” Does this make the joke clunkier and weirder, and leave the reader wondering if “mistopher” itself is part of the punchline? Well, yes. But it doesn’t matter. You are the keeper of the sacred trust that is Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. You must scrupulously adhere to the lore, or else what’s the point? Would you jettison decades of tradition for a single day’s laugh? You wouldn’t dare.

Pluggers, 8/28/25

The joke here is whatever, but I’m very unsettled by the look on this plugger’s face as he approaches the bathroom. He looks like he knows he has a journey of awful discovery in store for him in there, and it is not reading-media-related. It’s something much darker and more visceral; he knows something awful is about to begin, but he can’t guess when or how it will end.

Heathcliff, 8/28/25

The robot’s smooth, featureless crotch is a reminder that cybernetic organisms are ghastly parodies of humanity, lacking the natural urges and drives that, troublesome as they may be, make us people. Grandma Nutmeg’s right to demand it be hidden from sight!

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Beetle Bailey, 7/29/25

There’s a lot of Beetle Baileys where the joke is that Sarge has beaten Beetle into an undifferentiated mass of broken limbs and shattered organs for some minor infraction, but for my money this one is much, much funnier. Just imagine Sarge going red-faced with rage over this extremely sub-par bit of wordplay, grabbing Beetle by the shoulders and huffing and puffing a bit as the two of them grapple, and then stalking off, leaving Beetle with his uniform hiked partway over his head as we see here, unhurt but also humiliated. All the while Killer stood absolutely still, watching the whole thing go down and hoping he isn’t next.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/29/25

I took Snuffy’s whispering in the first panel as a sign that he wanted to go easy on Horace, either because he genuinely didn’t want to hurt the man’s feelings or because he knew that any perceived slight could lead to violence in Hootin’ Holler’s clan-based culture. But it turns out he’s willing to take some risks! Congrats to Snuffy Smith for producing a strip that actually subverted my expectations, for the first time [checks notes] ever???

Curtis, 7/29/25

Curtis has gotten a summer job helping take care of a semi-comatose old woman who turns out to have telekinetic powers, which I think is a pretty normal sentence to write, and the plot hasn’t risen to the interest level necessary for me to blog about it, until today. Static snow is, of course, an artifact of the age before the transition to digital TV in 2009, which now gives it a sort of old-timey spookiness, and it has always been foreign to smartphones and similar devices. A video taken on your phone that’s just been deleted is a mild mystery; a video taken on your phone that’s been replaced with static snow is deeply unsettling, and Curtis, as an aficionado of the horror genre, should hopefully recognize the truly terrifying situation in which he’s found himself now.

Heathcliff, 7/29/25

One thing I love about Heathcliff doing elaborate bits in Heathcliff is how everyone else seems to view them mostly with gentle bemusement, even the very elaborate ones. I’m not sure if Heathcliff built this stadium, a project that would’ve cost tens of millions of dollars and taken years, or if he merely somehow managed to gain control of an existing facility by agreement or force, but either way there would’ve been a lot of steps leading up to this moment, which presumably Grandpa and Iggy watched with their hands in their pockets, mostly in silence, before finally remarking, “Ah, yeah, this looks like an opening ceremony of some sort.”

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Beetle Bailey, 7/2/25

Longtime readers know that one of my minor Beetle Bailey fixations is that Miss Buxley’s classic little black dress is actually a little red dress; it’s just that the daily strips depict black and white versions of underlying platonic forms that are in color, and red is depicted as black in that context, but then the strips are colored in by other hands later in the manufacturing chain, which screws up the whole system because the black apparently can’t be made red at that point. Or it least it couldn’t be made red, until today! Finally, Adobe Photoshop fill tool technology has advanced to the point where it can make the black area of a .tiff file red. Unfortunately it seems to screw up a bunch of other stuff, like make the text too small for the word bubbles and also kind of fuck up Miss Buxley’s face. It looks off, right? Is this AI? Will Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC be the first comics conglomerate to replace its human artists with AI? Anyway, I was going to do a riff here about the fact that “going pillow shopping” clearly seems like it should be a sex thing, but I got distracted by all this other stuff.

Bizarro, 7/2/25

Look, man, I love dogs. Huge fan of dogs. But the truth is, no dog, not even a highly trained one, would give even a moment’s thought to a beautiful sunset vista. This guy should be getting a phone call describing the incredible smells coming off a huge pile of turds that the dog found.

Hi and Lois, 7/2/25

Hey, Trixie, the Sun is an enormous ball of exploding hydrogen and helium more than 800,000 miles in diameter, and its motion is mostly determined by the gravitational forces of our galaxy, which contains millions of stars like it. You, on the other hand, are a baby with no job or anything else that imposes any kind of schedule on your days, so maybe you should be willing to accommodate your supposed “best friend.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/2/25

Aww, isn’t that nice? But seriously, insulin deliveries to Hootin’ Holler are intermittent at best, which is a big problem considering the community’s higher-than-average incidence of diabetes.