Archive: Barney Google & Snuffy Smith

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Dustin, 11/5/24

The thing about Dustin is that it’s a perfect machine of hateability, in the sense that there isn’t a single recurring character that I have any real warm feelings for. Dustin’s sister Meg in some ways escapes my ire the most, because she has very little in terms of revealed personality and exists only to make rude comments about her brother and parents and occasionally be reprimanded for dressing too slutty. Today, however, we learn that her misanthropic attitude extends beyond her family to the human race at large, and frankly I would love to learn more about Doomer Goth Meg in future installments of this strip.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/5/24

A sobering discovery of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is that, in many places that embraced electoral democracy, it functions less as a way for wise or efficacious policies and ideas to be debated and endorsed by the citizen body, and more as a head-counting exercise: different interest groups within a society, many of them ethnic- or clan-based, use the vote as a means to assert their numbers and power rather than to win in the marketplace of ideas. While this might not be what the Enlightenment philosophers and America’s founding fathers had in mind, you have to admit that the Smifs and the Barlows taunting each other by means of “I Voted” buttons is preferable to their usual means of settling disputes (murdering one another with antique rifles and whatever other makeshift weapons they can lay their hands on).

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/29/24

No. Sorry. Call me a coastal flatlander elitist if you must, but I do not buy today’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith on any level. First of all, Hootin’ Holler’s access to mass media is limited to the radio and Parson Tuttle’s TV set; there would simply not be any local demand for the superhero franchise characters who make up the bulk of store-bought Halloween costumes, and Silas, the only local storekeeper, would certainly not bother to stock them. And you’re trying to tell me that Jughaid would actually enjoy the idea of a costume that by its very nature transforms mocking laughter into chuckles of approval? Utter nonsense. I’m sorry, but nobody in this blighted community is operating on that level of semiotic sophistication.

Gasoline Alley, 10/29/24

The history of humankind’s quest to create thinking machines has repeatedly produced surprises, where we discover that the capabilities that we bundle together as “intelligence” are separable, and some of the ones that we previously thought of as “advanced” are easier to implement via computers than ones we thought of as “basic.” In the 20th century, for instance, we wrote programs that could perform complex mathematics and achieve grandmaster level in chess, but the ability to operate robotic legs or process simple visual input proved impossible on the hardware at the time. Today, we have so-called “AIs” whose ability to produce fully fluent speech in human languages has outpaced its ability to tell us anything useful or real, with chatbots like ChatGPT cheerfully providing bullshit answers and made-up references that nevertheless sound exactly like a person wrote them. What I’m trying to say is that, since Google’s Gemini AI told people to eat glue and ChatGPT got lawyers fined by a judge, I find it fully believable that Arty would tell these little children that they don’t have to wear a seatbelt, right before he throws a switch and accelerates so fast that he smears them all over the inside of the saucer, but I don’t think he’d use the weird, clunky phrase “You’ve been watching too many TV and sci-fi movies!” in the process.

Family Circus, 10/29/24

Honestly can’t believe Big Daddy Keane is so happy to be on the receiving end of this kind of adoration from Jeffy, who is objectively his worst child by every measure. If he could see the look of withering disgust Billy is dishing out right now, he’d be brought back down to earth right quick.

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Dennis the Menace, 10/27/24

The Sunday Dennis the Menace strips always come with a title in the first panel, and usually it offers little pun or light wordplay, but today it’s just … “Dracula”? Dracula, the name of the vampire Dennis wants to be for Halloween. Or at least it is for the first few panels, after which he kind of loses interest. I guess he does pivot to wanting to be a boss … the vampire who sucks the blood out of the working class! Ha ha, just kidding, Dennis’s mother doesn’t even participate in the wage economy. He just wants to tell her what to do, because he’s kind of an asshole, but it’s not a class struggle thing, honestly more primal and Freudian. Hmm, maybe the vampire metaphor could work after all. I’m going to workshop this and get back to you.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/24

I like the idea that Hootin’ Holler is so impoverished that creating unique outfits that would only serve as a costume would be a profligate waste of resources, so on Halloween “Hallerween” the inhabitants simply wear each other’s clothes to celebrate the spooky season. Anyway, I’m not sure if Snuffy is using “borrowed” euphemistically here; if he isn’t, it probably means Granny Creeps is walking around right now in Snuffy’s comically tiny overalls, and if it is, her stripped body is lying face down in a creek somewhere nearby, which is slightly but measurably worse.