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Mary Worth, 7/8/14

Say, what’s been going on with Mary Worth? Oh, you know, Olive demonstrated the ability to predict the future, or at least predict when branches are about to fall off trees onto Mary a few seconds in advance. And also, she’s got a cyst on her torso? Probably it’s cancer, giving her the second sight that comes just before death, or the egg of a terrible hell-demon that’s possessing her, or something. The important thing is that Olive’s parents are continuing to give in to their physical lusts for each other, just lounging around touching each other’s exposed flesh and having a little light torso-cyst talk, when they should be daughter-centering their lives and tearing that cyst out with their bare hands, immediately.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/8/14

Oh, well, I guess Bizzy Buzz Buzz is a character whose gimmick is that she … likes to clean things? I guess that explains what the deal was with yesterday’s strip, except in the sense that the deal apparently is that Loweezy brought a child over to clean up the Smiths’ filthy house, and that seems like it can’t be right. The question is also open as to whether Snuffy Smith readers were willing to wait a day for this payoff. Meanwhile, I’m really loving Jughaid’s furious expression in panel three. “No, that … that’s not what the expression means at all! God damn it, I’m getting displaced from my slot as the cute little kid in this strip by this?”

Archie, 7/8/14

Ha ha, it’s funny because Archie and his girlfriend are of different economic classes, and the imbalance fills him with anxiety!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/7/14

The arrival of Loweezy and li’l Bizzy Buzz Buzz at Snuffy’s Den of Bachelor Squalor is such a proudly announced non-sequitur that I immediately assumed Bizzy Buzz Buzz is a beloved recurring character in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, if by “recurring” you mean “hasn’t appeared once in the 10 years I’ve been reading this strip but they’ve been publishing the damn thing since 1919, so who knows.” Some cursory Googling (ha) didn’t bring up any evidence of this, though it did reveal that Bizzy Buzz Buzz was some kind of motorized pen that looked like a bird that was a popular toy in the ’60s and ’70s. By the way, if you’re looking for some super-depressing anecdotes, you could do worse than looking at classic toy discussion forums, apparently:

Funky Winkerbean, 7/7/14

Funky Winkerbean is sadly cutting away from Les’s artistic despair to focus on its suuuuper boring comics collecting plot, but I do like the fact that Holly is giving a shout-out to Crankshaft in the final panel here. “Hey, remember that monstrous old hatebag who used to drive the bus, who made all the stupid puns? Whatever happened to him?” (Spoiler: he’s a vegetative husk in a nursing home, dying unloved and alone).

Judge Parker, 7/7/14

This is all the same stuff from yesterday, which I’m glad about because yesterday I forgot to make a joke about the fact that Neddy is wearing a sleeveless t-shirt that just says “FRANCE” across the front. Do you think she got it in France? Do you think the French make them specifically to sell to Americans, and then laugh and laugh whenever anyone buys one?

Pluggers, 7/7/14

Not sure how many of you have ever clicked on the “MORE” link next to the archive drop-downs at the top of the site. It takes you to the advanced archives page, where you can search the site for posts with specific comics, on specific dates, and with specific keywords. It’s a nice system, built by my fantastic web developer Adam Norwood, and you should use it to your heart’s content, but really I had it set up for my own use. Sometimes I get a little nagging feeling in the back of my mind to the effect of “did I do this joke before?” and the answer is just a search away:

Anyway, feel free to enjoy the joke I wrote on this subject in October of 2012!

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Beetle Bailey, 6/27/14

I love the way Mrs. Halftrack’s expression of forced gaiety collapses the moment Miss Buxley asks her question. I’m not sure if she was genuinely if briefly happy that something pertaining to her husband could be spun as a positive and that good feeling was genuinely deflated when she had to provide details, or if she’s just slipped into her usual sour mode of marital misanthropy but is secretly pleased to be undermining her husband in public. My guess is the latter, and since she probably views Miss Buxley as a romantic rival based on the General’s delusional reports, she’s all the more excited to relay stories of his terrible incontinence.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/27/14

How quickly Kelly’s facial expression changes from “[DOLLAR SIGNS IN EYEBALLS]” to a wistful “Oh, so … it was that easy, then?” Sorry, Kelly: like Sarah, you’re discovering that life in the Morgans’ orbit means unearned riches, which sounds great until you realize that no pile of cash can fill the space inside where personal pride is supposed to go. She might be reflecting on the irony involved here: this whole journey to becoming Sarah’s blackmail victim/personal assistant/project manager began with her getting a ride on Niki’s motorcycle, and now she doesn’t need Niki or any human affection anymore, because she has Mrs. Pierpont’s limousine and “Bugsy”.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/27/14

Man, women, always going for literary bad boys, am I right?