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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/10/12

I’m putting both yesterday and today’s Snuffy Smith up there to demonstrate that they’re both basically the same joke, which … I’m OK with? There’s something charmingly vaudevillian about having Parson Tuttle continuously lob the same opening to Lureen and seeing her bat “I’m so lonely and desp’rate!” punchlines back to him. Maybe they’ll keep it up all week! Or maybe tomorrow the Parson will stop hinting and just come out and say that he wants her to recruit men for the choir by going out and having sex with them.

Apartment 3-G, 7/10/12

Haha, will I ever get tired of Nina suffering and turning her physical pain and rage on anyone who gets too close? No, the answer is no. “You’d better be telling the truth! I know medical professionals lie to patients constantly. I know you’re a dirty liar! If you make me get into this awkward position and it doesn’t help, I will destroy you, Tommie, do you hear? I have connections! I’ll get your apartment building condemned and your nursing license taken away and have everyone in your family killed! Then I’ll strangle you, but I wanted to do that other stuff first to show that I’m in earnest here. And I’ll do it all using the rage-strength I gain during a single contraction!”

Funky Winkerbean, 7/10/12

Is Funky Winkerbean really going to make us worry about whether this kitten dies on the way up, or possibly down, Kilimanjaro? All signs point to yes! To be fair, the readership is wholly indifferent about the death of any the human characters, so dramatic tension has to be maintained somehow.

Crock, 7/10/12

So wait, Crock‘s done now, right? These are repeats? Enh, whatever, it keeps showing up in my online comics page, so I guess if I can rag on Archie reruns from the 1990s I can make fun of this. Anyway, today’s strip is about Trooper Benson, who was hit by artillery shells during combat and died screaming in agony.

Ziggy, 7/10/12

Despite all of the foregoing, nothing in today’s comics has discombobulated me more than discovering that Ziggy’s cat is a lady.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/7/12

Trust me, old people: Young people think they don’t want to hear about you having sex, but what they really don’t want to hear about is how you actually lost interest in sex years ago, and someday they will too.

Crankshaft, 7/7/12

Ha ha, Crankshaft thinks he can hide his plans from the all-knowing Deity! Look, Crankshaft, it’s not like God wants to know about your innermost thoughts and feelings, as they’re no doubt extremely distasteful. But unfettered access to your soul is just one of the burdens of omnipotence.

Marmaduke, 7/7/12

Aww, this scene is so sweet and romantical that I’m not even going to do my usual “Marmaduke is a Lovecraftian demon from below hell” shtick with it. But I do want to point out that Marmaduke’s neighbors are dogsex-lovin’ perverts.

Mary Worth, 7/7/12

Oh my goodness, if Wilbur and Dawn’s Italian cruise ends like this, this Mary Worth storyline will truly be the most amazing in recent memory.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/1/12

Here is a True Story from Josh’s Real Life Events: Many years ago, when I in the midst of my failed attempt to acquire a PhD in ancient history, I discovered that getting a humanities grad degree doesn’t pay particularly well, so I used to do office temp work between semesters. So in this one temp gig, I was doing doing filing at a professional association for optometrists with a guy who was getting an MFA in poetry (AND THAT SENTENCE IS A SELF-CONTAINED CAUTIONARY TALE FOR ANYONE THINKING ABOUT GRAD SCHOOL, BY THE WAY). As people do when bored with mindless work, we started shooting the pop-culture breeze, and somehow it came up that I had alway found it amusing that Steve Miller appeared, based on the evidence of the lyrics in his smash hit song “Take The Money And Run,” to believe that “Texas,” “taxes,” “facts is,” and “justice” all rhymed with one another. And the poet-temp, whether to pull my leg or be contrary or because of genuine poetic conviction, made the case that there is a such thing as a “soft rhyme,” which has a long and honorable history in poetry, and thus Miller’s rhyme scheme was perfectly acceptable in that context.

I was already planning on bringing this anecdote up as a lens through which to discuss Mary Beth’s rhyming of “holler,” “dollar,” and “feller.” In my own speech, the first two rhyme with each other but neither with the third, and I wondered if this were an example of soft rhyme or if we were getting a glimpse of the phonology of Hootin’ Holler’s unique, isolated dialect. But then I took one last look at the throwaway panels and finally noticed that Mary Beth begins the strip by reading Emily Dickinson — the very poet my co-temp used as an example of someone who employed soft rhymes frequently. Thus I’m assuming that our young poetess, while still clinging to traditional structural forms like the limerick, is beginning to explore more advanced techniques. This is, in other words, the most cultured Barney Google and Snuffy Smith ever written, not that there’s really much competition for that title.

Blondie, 7/1/12

Speaking of academia, if you’re writing a thesis about the connection between masculinity and earning power in pop-cultural depictions of contemporary society, you could find worse examples than the next-to-last panel here, in which Dagwood, finally realizing that he’s been duped again, crouches a bit and gently protects his crotch with his briefcase.

Mary Worth, 7/1/12

I was going to write the long riff about how Mary’s response is just as vague and bloviating and self-important as the letter that prompted it, but then I got to the final panel, where we learn that Dawn can’t go anywhere without being reminded of her ex-boyfriend’s cock, and literally all other thoughts were sandblasted out of my mind.