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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/13/23

You know, at first I thought this was about the eternal struggle between the modern scientific method, as represented by Doc Pritchart and his flatlander medical degree, and the ancient, chthonic folk wisdom of the Holler, as represented by Granny Creeps and her cave full of potions. But then I realized that Doc is probably just trying to stop Snuffy from getting poisoned. He’s right to worry! Who the hell knows what’s in that stuff she’s going to give him!

Pluggers, 11/13/23

Look, Pluggers, I get that you’re a comic whose whole thing is that you take submissions from your readers who are, by definition, pluggers, and pluggers absolutely love to forward emails consisting of jokes that they themselves did not write to their friends and loved ones, but I feel like maybe you should Google those submitted jokes to make sure they aren’t from, say, Cool Funny Quotes Dot Com’s collection of quotes by Anonymous or a weirdly padded blog post on Grumpy Fuckers Dot Com written by “Royston Butterscotch” or a magnet you can buy from Fem Power Gifts by Getbullish or X, the website formerly known as Twitter before you go to the trouble of illustrating them with anthropomorphic chickens.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/13/23

It doesn’t count as “dramatic tension” per se, but for weeks now I’ve been really unable to tell whether or not Mud is supposed to be sincere about the Mirakle Method or not. I guess he believes both that the Method can improve your life and that people are rational economic actors who always have access to the full information they need to make spending decisions that will never regret. Buzzy, though? Buzzy seems shady. Feel like Buzzy’s gonna get forcibly Mirakl’d in the not so distant future, i.e., he’ll be weeping openly as he contemplates his own personal swingset on the moon.

Gasoline Alley, 11/13/23

I often have fun on this blog trying to figure out where exactly various syndicated newspaper strips take place. But, Gasoline Alley? Never really cared to put the energy into it, to be honest with you all. Good thing, too, because all I had to do is wait it out for a while until today, when the strip tells us the characters all live near Charlotte, North Carolina. Who would’ve guessed? Not me, I admit, but as noted I wouldn’t have tried very hard.

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Barney Google and Snuffy, 11/9/23

OK, whew, good news everybody, Sparkplug’s Grandson Li’l Sparky doesn’t need to participate in market economics in order to survive, he can still just happily munch on grass wherever! Now I’m moving onto my next Snuffy Smith world-building gripe, which is that I refuse to believe that Jughaid knows what “salad dressing” is.

Dennis the Menace, 11/9/23

Dennis, meanwhile, is still too naive to understand that money, or its increasingly abstract representations, can be exchanged for goods and services, much to his (oddly proportioned today, am I right? what’s going on here) grandfather’s discomfort. I guess refusing to acknowledge that a chain of labor relations go into the production and delivery of your toys and instead just expecting and indeed insisting that they manifest themselves for you is in fact fairly menacing.

Beetle Bailey, 11/9/23

The fact that someone over at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC looked up the official La-Z-Boy logo and did a passable job of rendering it on Beetle’s helmet ironically makes this one of the least lazy Beetle Bailey strips of the last decade.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/9/23

Not much to say about the content of today’s strip, but, with all apologies to “cellar door,” I don’t think there’s a more beautiful phrase in the English language than “Meanwhile, the Harwoods have also watched the infomercial.”

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Dustin, 11/8/23

There’s a lot of reasons to dislike Dustin, and one of the biggest is that it was cooked up with the premise of “Ha ha, these lazy millennials are moving back in with their parents because they’re slackers who refuse to get a job” and then was launched in newspapers in January of 2010, when the Great Recession was at its peak and unemployment stood at more than 10%. Anyway, the family dynamic has remained constant over the subsequent decade plus of economic change, and so today, with some the strongest employment numbers in living memory, we can maybe start hating Dustin for his own personal shortcomings rather than as a symbol of his generation; but I think we also might need to consider that in the world of Dustin, it has never stopped being 2010. Certainly it would explain why someone in their early 20s might talk about “the Brad Pitt look” as if that were a novel and contemporary cultural reference, although I guess it would make even more sense if the strip were actually taking place in 1997.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/8/23

At least in the context of the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith Present … Sparkplug’s Grandson Li’l Sparky strips, horses in the Snuffyverse are capable of human speech. But still, it makes me very sad that they apparently need to exchange money for goods and services. They’re domesticated animals! Shouldn’t they just get a nice feed bag in their paddock to meet their needs?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/8/23

“It doesn’t have anything to do with health, so it’s not my problem! Some people say that there’s a ‘mental’ kind of health, but I’m not buying it.”