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Mary Worth, 8/22/24

Oh, he’s listening, Estelle — he’s just horrified that you would think that, as a vet, he’d be OK with a zoo themed wedding. He has to deal with animals all day at work — do you think he wants to see all his human friends and family pretending to be animals, too? Plus he has issues with zoos on ethical grounds — putting wild creatures in cages is cruel! Maybe you two aren’t as simpatico as he thought!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/22/24

I tease about Glenwood’s entertainment offerings but you know who really must be starved for fun? The poor citizens of Hootin’ Holler. There’s exactly one television in town and you have to bribe the parson to get a look at it, the only radio station anyone can get mostly broadcasts NASCAR races, and it even seems like the traditional arts of folk music have passed this community buy. That’s why Silas, the town’s only real capitalist, is trying out giving the people what they want: wacky vaudeville-style act-out bits, with props. Sure, it’s free now, but once he gets the customers hooked, they’ll be more than willing to pay a little extra for their daily chuckle!

Crock, 8/22/24

Hey guys, remember the Wise Sage, the beloved (?) Crock character who lives in a cave (??) in the desert? Well, turns out he’s very old and lives out his every moment in agony, yet still forever hopes to stave off death, for at least one more moment, because he fears what might come after. Fun!

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Dennis the Menace, 8/15/24

Spent a long time … no, that’s a lie. I spent like 30 seconds trying to figure if there was a “joke” here per se. Like, is it about … ice cream or something? Maybe? Eventually decided that there wasn’t. Mr. Wilson is just feeling better! Maybe he finally got on the right cocktail of psychopharmaceuticals, or maybe he just realized he has it pretty good and decided to rearrange his outlook on life. Either way, good for him!

Hi and Lois, 8/15/24

There’s no joke here either, but that’s par for the course in this strip now, and frankly I’m not complaining, because this is great. The little league team isn’t doing well, and Hi, who probably already feels like it’s kind of a thankless job, just got publicly insulted by one of the kids, while his son looks on in horror. It’s perfect! Keep it up, Hi and Lois!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/15/24

I’ve ruffled a few feathers by speaking some tough truths about comic characters — namely, the truth that the Lockhorns are Millennials. So here’s some more shocking real talk: probably most of you, based on their old-timey attire plus the fact that they look like wizened, ancient gnome-creatures, assume that Snuffy and Loweezy Smif are old people. But that doesn’t add up! As you can see here, they don’t see themselves that way; moreover, they have an infant child, and live in the sort of community where younger parenthood is the norm! We must therefore assume that they are at most 27 years old, and you know what that means: THE SMIFS ARE ZOOMERS

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Mary Worth, 7/30/24

A recurring question that arises in the increasingly Wilbur-focused era of Mary Worth we find ourselves in is: are we getting so much Wilbur because we’re expected to like and support him, or are we being repeatedly shown his worst humiliations, in order to create a strip that is nothing more than his personal hell? I’ve had my doubts, but today’s strip, in which Wilbur tells an incredulous fish that he communicated with another dead fish in a dream, and then we smash cut to Wilbur’s ex, whom Wilbur named the dead fish after, in the midst of an extremely erotic canoodle with her handsome boyfriend, certainly seems to point in one direction fairly strongly.

Blondie, 7/30/24

Blondie absolutely loves a “what’s a universal, non-controversial cultural touchstone of the moment we can do extremely lazy jokes about,” and obviously the Olympics are the pinnacle of that sort of thing, with the added advantage that they last for weeks. Yesterday we had a mildly funny joke about Dagwood getting in trouble for streaming the Olympics on his phone during a work meeting, but I’m actually kind of appalled by today’s strip, which seems to imply that Olympic runners have their performance scored by judges rather than simply being timed to see who finishes the event the fastest.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/30/24

I love it when a work of art sparks a conversation, raising not one but multiple questions about its characters and its world. For instance, today’s Snuffy Smith has me asking “Doesn’t ‘busking’ usually happen on a sidewalk in a big city? Why is Jughaid doing it out in the middle of an open field somewhere” but also “Doesn’t Jughaid wear that stupid hat all the time? Does Ol’ Bullet repeatedly attack him when he does, and if so why don’t we get to see it more often?”

Shoe, 7/30/24

Ha ha! A laugh track, get it? Because his political promises are laughable! Good one! Say, does anyone involved in the creation of Shoe know what a “website” is and how one works? Like have they ever used the internet, at all?