Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/1/24

Obviously Snuffy Smith’s whole deal is that he doesn’t care about the greater good of the polity and routinely engages in lawbreaking and antisocial behavior, but I gotta say that this is a new low. Many Hootin’ Holler residents who enjoy a lazy day on the lake fishing from their little canoes — including Snuffy himself! — will now have their leisure disrupted by flatlanders zooming around in their big powerboats. And for what? Was this little joke so irresistible that he had to have the sign in his bedroom, and are his literacy and scrapwood-scavenging skills so lacking that he had to take the extremely nonprofessional looking sign down from the lake?

Dick Tracy, 7/1/24

Mr. Borden is being blackmailed by Mr. Gabriel in some way related to those those salacious pictures in a manila folder that were hinted at a couple of weeks ago. I’m impressed that today’s strip includes a shoutout to the famous album cover of Big Black’s “Songs About Being Blackmailed Over Salacious Pictures In A Manila Folder.”

Hi and Lois, 7/1/24

No you absolutely can not, kids! Something you did is what’s made her so upset in the first place!

Mary Worth, 7/1/24

Oh, silly Wilbur! Fish are innocents, incapable of sin, and you will not be meeting Stellan again in hell.

Post Content

Blondie, 6/18/24

Originally read that first panel as referring to “verse” as in poetry, then was briefly disappointed when it turned out I was incorrect, then thought, you know what? I don’t need to hear what Blondie’s take on poetry is. Stay in your lane, Blondie! Blondie’s lane is doing funny onomatopoeias for snoring, and it’s thriving there.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/18/24

Honestly loving Loweezy’s exclamation point in the second panel here. Why, she had an entirely different idea about what Jughaid’s summer reading list was! Comics? Good heavens!

Dustin, 6/18/24

I also love Dustin’s dad expression of crushing despair in the final panel of this strip. Ha ha, it’s funny because he wants to die! And if he keeps drinking all that sugar, he just might!

Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/15/24

Today’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith punchline isn’t bad exactly. It’s a perfectly serviceable newspaper comic strip gag. There’s no shame in writing it, or in publishing it. But it’s not good, either, and it definitely doesn’t merit the insanely smug expression Jughaid is aiming at us through the fourth wall in the final panel. Settle down kid, it’s just a grape joke. Nobody’s gonna remember it tomorrow, but they are going to remember how off-putting you’re being.

Dennis the Menace, 6/15/24

Honestly, a little kid not just agreeing to look at old pictures with an old person but actually asking to do it seems like it would be an absolute dream scenario for said old person. The fact that Mr. Wilson is so firmly rejecting this offer really tells you a lot about the hell on Earth that is his Dennis-adjacent lifestyle.

Hi and Lois, 6/15/24

The project of reclaiming Thirsty’s original characterization as the neighborhood drunk has been getting grimmer for some time, and has entered a truly dark phase now, as his wife begs him to seek counseling, for her sake if not for his own, and he refuses in an incredibly dickish bait-and-switch designed to briefly give her hope that her awful home life might someday improve. What really makes this strip to me is the first panel, where you can see that Thirsty initially planned to just do a shot, but then changed his mind and decided to fill up a tumbler instead, so that he could really linger over that XXX-brand brown liquor flavor.