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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.”

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B.C., 6/18/12

OK, while we have yet another example of B.C. predator vs. prey antics, with implied family dynamics among eusocial insects to boot, and I’m on the record as enjoying this sort of thing in the past, I’m afraid I cannot fully approve of today’s B.C. Mostly I feel puzzled by the role in the narrative of the tree-dwelling … bear … thing. Did the bear-thing put up the fake foreclosure signs in an attempt to con the bees out of their hive and acquire the delicious honey within? Are the foreclosure signs actually meant to not be fake, and the bear-thing is an agent of the bank that holds the mortgage note on the beehive? Is this some kind of opaque political allegory about the ongoing housing crisis? Does the bear-thing have a primitive axe? When did bears start learning how to use tools? Should we be scared of an army of tool-weilding bears, come to take what’s rightfully theirs, like beehives and our foreclosed homes and who knows what else?

Funky Winkerbean, 6/18/12

“Silence, running-slave! The whole point of bringing you to this state of exhaustion was to leave you too tired to make unfunny puns or forced jokes! Looks like we’ll just have to keep going until you lose your power of speech entirely!”

Apartment 3-G, 6/18/12

“I never read What To Expect When You’re Expecting, so I literally have no idea what happens next! I know at some point I’m going to have to pay for this tiny human to go to college, but everything between now and then is a mystery. Does something come out my hoo-hoo at some point?”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/18/12

Snuffy can’t clean any of the clocks today, because he was savagely beaten over some gambling debts and is in too much pain to move.