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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/18/14

Having been so long isolated from the mainstream of the U.S. and global economies, Hootin’ Holler has de facto become its own alternate currency zone.

Pluggers, 1/18/14

The crushing sameness of their dull, long, disappointing lives has numbed pluggers to the point that they rarely change facial expressions anymore. But they still need to occasionally groom the hair that continues to thrive even while their souls shrivel.

Mark Trail, 1/18/14

“Hey, wait, why are you shutting the door? Why are you locking the door? Why doesn’t my key work in the door anymore?”

Lockhorns, 1/18/14

Welp, looks like I’m pretty much the same age as Leroy Lockhorn, time to go weep endlessly somewhere!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/11/14

Usually when Snuffy Smith makes a joke about “th’ economy” they at least take a stab at putting “haw haw our community is very far outside the economic mainstream” at the center of the joke. This one mostly seems like an “old hillbillies say the darndest things when they misconstrue extremely common English-language idioms” gag which is pretty weak. It’s not helping that Lukey is shouting the punchline at us at the top of his lungs for no reason in panel two. “I said, I never heard it leave!! Get it? Get it? Eh? I’m being deliberately obtuse, for laughs?”

Zits, 1/11/14

Sorry, Connie: Jeremy and Sara’s cyber-child is all too real. Everything you’ve feared about the future is true: your son and his fellow teens are abandoning the messy process of biological reproduction, along with its ancillary behavior patters like sex, love, and pair-bonding, and are instead building a gleaming android race that will replace us. While the transition will be painful — literally, in the case of outmoded biological lifeforms that resist the Great Cleansing — our heirs will live in a better world than this one, assuming you expand your definition of “living.”

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Marvin, 1/3/14

So when I returned from my Christmastime Journey and caught up on the comics I hadn’t been reading, I didn’t review all the comics. Marvin, for instance. I didn’t catch up on Marvin. Who cared exactly about which poo-stained antics I had missed? I was thus dropped into this midweek running gag without context, and assumed, since there were no other clues, that “Kiddie Coiffe,” a stand of some sort, was meant to be a Starbucks-style operation, with “coiffe” a whimsical misspelling for coffee. And even if I had known that this was coiffe as in coiffure, I would have supposed it was a li’l play hair salon or barber shop? But nope, they’re selling hair. Human hair, dog hair, you name it. Not enough to make a wig out of, mind you, just weird little patches, if the chunk taken out of Bitsy’s pelt is any indication. Haha, baby hair sales! Ha! So, congrats, Marvin: you’ve brought me to a place of profound discomfort that has me actively wishing for a return to poop jokes.

Dennis the Menace, 1/3/14

“Look dad, I know you don’t love me, and I don’t particularly want you to try, but I am going to make you tacitly admit it so that I can get what I want.” Oh man, Dennis’s menacing game is on point for 2014.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/3/14

“Haw haw, just kiddin’, Mama Smif! When I say ‘risky,’ I meant that givin’ birf in Hootin’ Holler is takin’ yer life in yer own hands, what with our hamlet’s poor sanitation and substandard med’cal care!”