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Mark Trail, 9/13/17

Now look, folks, I’m just a simple city boy. I’m used to God’s honest American landscape, where you never have to walk more than 10 minutes to get to a bus stop and you can get Thai delivery anywhere. So forgive me if I’m a little naive about how things work out in the countryside. But … when there’s a tornado coming, it doesn’t affect horses more strongly than other creatures or objects, right? It doesn’t pull them upright with mysterious force and leave humans standing around just feet away unaffected? Horses don’t stand on their hind legs in mysterious circles, whinnying up to their Wind God to take them up to the Sky Pasture before smiting the earth and the Saddling Ones upon it with His mighty hoof? That’s … not a thing that happens, right?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/13/17

Lukey claims Elviney’s going to give him the business about spending the day goofing off. I think he’s honestly more worried that, once again, she’s going to make him feel like a fool by gently reminding him that, in order to catch fish, you have to actually cast your line into the water, not out into the bushes in the complete opposite direction.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/2/17

Usually Snuffy’s brushes with the law are depicted with the same jocular gloss as the rest of Hootin’ Holler’s dysfunctional culture. The crimes are generally relatively low-impact stuff like bootlegging and chicken thievery, and Snuffy goes to jail for a few days and there’s tongue-lolling hilarity all around. Today … today is different. The Holler’s judge, the only real representative of outside authority in this lawless community, looks genuinely horrified by the case he’s just finished presiding over: has his previous indulgent attitude led to this? Even Snuffy and Loweezy look like they’re suffering true shame. My assumption is that the generations-old Smif-Barlow fued finally escalated to the point where Sheriff Tate stumbled upon a ramshackle cabin on the creek where Barlow corpses were stacked like cordwood.

Spider-Man, 9/2/17

Wait, Kala and Mole-Man were engaged? You know, for a gnomish, homely, nearly blind cave-dweller, he still gets his fair share of attention from the ladies! This makes Kala’s insistence that her husband not disrupt the Mole-Man/Aunt May wedding all the more poignant. Why can’t everyone in this strip be as emotionally advanced as her?

Pluggers, 9/2/17

It’s no “Rhino-Man hocks his TV,” but “pluggers feel overpowering shame over something that’s entirely harmless and increasingly socially normalized” is pretty high up there in the pantheon of Extremely Grim Pluggers Punchlines, in my opinion.

Judge Parker, 9/2/17

“To the CIA! Once we turn in your wife, we can stop worrying about this — and, here’s the best part, probably get a big reward!”

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Spider-Man, 8/20/17

One of the great running gags of superhero comics is that it should be much, much easier for in-universe characters to figure out a superhero’s secret identity than it ever turns out to be. There are a host of reasons why the “secret” is always obvious — they’re never in the same place at the same time, their voices are identical, people look more or less the same whether they’re wearing glasses or not, etc. — but in our current case, it’s because Spider-Man and Peter Parker are pretty much the exact same kind of dick. Like, if my wizened aunt was about to finally wed her longtime beau and a giant tentacle erupted form the earth to attack the wedding party, I might be more inclined to shout “run!” or “oh no!” rather than “whoa, déjà vu much???” But that’s just how Peter Parker and Spider-Man play it.

Meanwhile, speaking of dicks, I had assumed last week that Tyrannus was shushing his army of fetish-gimps as they prepared to board some form of burrowing transport and head for the earth’s surface for wedding-ruining and subsequent conquest. But nope, it turns out this is all being down remotely, and he just wanted an audience as he gloated and pulled the big lever marked “TENTACLE.”

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/20/17

This throwaway-panel scene from Hootin’ Holler reminds all of us flatlanders that we should appreciate our infrastructure privilege.