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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.

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Spider-Man, 6/22/12

I know trying to question the logic of funnybook superheroes is just asking for a trip down a rabbithole of crazy but: since Peter Parker is not in-universe famous, wouldn’t unmasking Spider-Man be incredibly anti-climactic? I mean, it’s not like he’s internationally famous playboy Tony Stark or billionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne or even well-known journalist Clark Kent. I’m guessing it would go something like “OH MY GOD SPIDER-MAN IS … uh … that guy? I guess?”

Actually, I guess that, since Newspaper Spider-Man MJ is supposed to be a famous actress, Newspaper Spider-Man Peter Parker might be mildly famous as “that guy who’s always lurking in the background, glaring sullenly at the camera in the paparazzi shots of Mary Jane Parker in People and In Touch.” Since this storyline was briefly about MJ’s co-star Jericho Brand attempting to sex her up before that was pushed aside for Clown-9’s marginally more interesting antics, one assumes that he, at least, knows who Peter is, since the master seducer always studies his prey before he makes his move. Though Jericho apparently hadn’t counted on MJ’s power of super-bumping-into-people, which she has on call to protect her feeble hubby.

Six Chix, 6/22/12

Haha, here is a strip I do not understand at all! I will eat pretty much any kind of fried meat and/or corn garbage America’s calorie merchants will churn out and put in a garishly colored package, so I am not really a “foodie” per se, but the one kind of food snob I am is a bread snob, in the sense that I much prefer buying whole loaves of good bread that you slice pieces off of with a knife, rather than mushy awful pre-sliced bread in a bag. And yes, these whole loaves can contain the occasional air bubble. Which may be what this lady is talking about! Except usually these holes are only visible once you slice into the bread? And she seems to be gesturing to some weird little loaflets that have dents (holes?) on the outside? And, yes, this is the point where I have officially spent too much time thinking about this Six Chix comic and/or bread-holes. The lady does kinda look like the one from this comic, who could never vote to convict an attractive man whose greatest crime was being so darn pretty, so maybe she’s just a deranged old woman, wandering around the Chixiverse, complaining about non-existent bread-holes and sexually harassing criminals.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/22/12

“Haw haw, that’s a good ’un, Snuffy! Now c’mon, let’s go burn down th’ newspaper for printin’ this Darwinist filth.”