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Gil Thorp, 3/8/12

Having finished with his winter job duties (i.e., losing the boy’s basketball championship), Gil finally has time to follow up on some of his personal projects (i.e., shutting down a wholly legal tattoo parlor with a minor sideline in selling bootleg DVDs). Ransom Hale may actually be named Rupert and may not be from New Zealand, but the good look at his tonsure that we get in panel three shows us the real scandal here: he’s a monk who’s forsaken his vows poverty, obedience, and possibly chastity! Boy, wait until the abbot hears about this!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/8/12

Snuffy, Uriah can’t hear your recounting of your corrupt relationship with the town’s only law enforcement authority; as his ghostly, colorless face in panel two indicates, he actually dropped dead from shock upon hearing about the Post Office’s troubled finances, and has now crossed over into the spirit realm. Since ghosts no longer think in ordinary language the way we do on this plane of existence, “?” is the closest we can get to transcribing the sense of wonder and amazement Uriah is experiencing as he begins to understand his newly transcendent state.

Judge Parker, 3/8/12

I’m not even going to try to explain what’s going on here; I’m just going to point out that today’s first panel, in which a chesty blonde cradles a shotgun while having a boring, confusing conversation with someone on the phone, is Judge Parker distilled down to its very essence.

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Crankshaft, 3/4/12

I’m always intrigued by the precise relationship between Crankshaft and its mother strip, Funky Winkerbean — not so much in terms of characters in common or mismatched chronology, but in tone. What thematic elements do they share, and what distinguishes them? Take this Sunday installment. All the old people are sitting around, talking in terms of mounting panic about the death of everyone they know, a fate that will find them soon enough. That’s basic Funkyverse fare. Then you get a dumb and tactless pun about the situation — also Funky-standard. But Crankshaft being a sullen, humorless jerk when he gets his pun taken away from him? That’s the Crankshaft value-add!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/4/12

Sorry, boys, nobody’s allowed to leave Hootin’ Holler! Loweezy’s doing you a favor: if you had managed to pilot your makeshift aircraft over the barbed wire fence, you just would have been shot by the guards.

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Ziggy, 2/28/12

That’s true, Ziggy! It’s also true that sometimes that door is an inky black portal radiating evil so powerful that it somehow, incomprehensibly, casts a shadow, and that it doesn’t lead to opportunity so much as to an awful hell-dimension full of soul-devouring demons. KNOCK. KNOCK.

Pluggers, 2/28/12

Pluggers know that if things really get bad, well, old Jed down at the pawn shop has a pair of pliers, and a few hours of pain should pay the rent for another month or two.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/28/12

Did you know that “druthers,” as in “If I had my druthers, the characters in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith would keep their tongues in their mouths instead of letting them flap about obscenely,” is actually a contraction of “I’d rather”? It’s true! Today’s Snuffy Smith sent me on an etymological voyage of discovery, which is a sentence that I’m pretty sure has never been written before and will never be written again.

Six Chix, 2/28/12

Aw, that bluebird looks awfully sad! Probably because the squirrel has just told it, in so many words, that it’s going to starve to death.