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Barney Google, 2/23/11

Longtime readers know that I’m fascinated by Parson Tuttle, Hootin’ Holler’s sole clergyman and a notorious mooch and fraud. Though we met his wife before when we went shoppin’ wif her, it never occurred to me to wonder why she didn’t accompany him on his foraging expeditions among his flock; I guess I assumed that this was not one of the things that parson’s wives do. Does she sit at home alone, waiting for whatever secondhand scraps the parson brings back from his surly parishioners? Anyway, today Loweezy has decided to use her backwards community’s iron-clad gender roles to shame Tuttle into eating at home. Unfortunately for her, as the parson’s insouciant grin in panel three demonstrates, he has no shame.

Herb and Jamaal, 2/23/11

“Ha ha, just kidding! There’s nothing I like better than smugly unleashing the little jokes I think up on hapless service personnel. But seriously, can I take out a life insurance policy on my best friend and business partner, whom I’m totally 100 percent not planning to kill?”

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/16/11

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve seen Jughaid’s haid without his omnipresent coonskin hat, and what a disturbing sight it is! Horror aside, though, this comic implies that perhaps I’ve been too hard on the residents of Hootin’ Holler over the years; after all, that shallow brainpan and those protruding brow ridges indicate that the town is populated by a lost tribe of Homo habilis, and frankly rather than criticizing their primitive lifestyle we ought to be impressed by how close their civilization comes to the one created by anatomically modern humans.

Shoe, 2/16/11

I’ve become something of a connoisseur of Shoe’s trademarked Goggle Eyes Of Horror, and today’s double-whammy is particularly intriguing to me. One expects to see them on whatever bird-man is the butt of the joke, as our stranger is here; however, the fact that the Perfesser is also sporting them seems significant. It’s as if he’s realized to his shock that Shoe is right, King is the name of his dog, but he was talking to the other man about a real king, and he forgets, sometimes, which is which. It’s the look of panic a man has in a moment of lucidity as he realizes he’s slipping into senility or going insane, and as such is a thousand times more harrowing than some mild consternation at almost ordering a sub-par meal.

Apartment 3-G, 2/16/11

Good gracious, why does Iris keep falling asleep in the car? Is she like a baby, and the sound of wheels on pavement just lulls her to sleep more or less immediately? I’ve been assuming that this is just a jaunt of a few hours or less, but perhaps I’m wrong; perhaps they’ve been driving aimlessly around Upstate New York for days, and Iris has been passing out from exhaustion whenever she has a few minutes. Trey and Margo have stayed awake the whole time, since they’re high on love and/or cocaine.

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Mary Worth, 2/4/11

OHHH BURN! Poor Wilbur’s main experience with social networking is Facebook, with its ethos of mutuality: if you’re Facebook friends with someone, they too will be Facebook friends with you. He’s not prepared for the harsh world of Twitter, where following someone doesn’t guarantee that they’ll follow you back, leaving you in a subservient position. Dawn’s refusal to follow her father is harsh, but ultimately makes sense; how many times can you see the #sandwich and #mayonnaise hashtags in your feed before you feel kind of ill?

But before Wilbur can follow his daughter, he has to figure out which Dawn Weston Twitter account is her! Is it:

• westonda, who announced in April of 2009 that she was watching Dancing With The Stars, and hasn’t been heard from since?
• dweston29, who 18 months ago was “NEW TO THIS TWITTER THING BUT THINK ITS NEAT,” then went with her sister to a cake testing, where, as far as we know, she still remains, tasting cakes?
• DawnWeston, who hides her tweets from the world and identifies herself as “Dr. Dawn Weston,” possibly in an attempt to one-up her erstwhile lover Dr. Drew?

I dunno, I have a strange feeling that another Dawn Weston Twitter account is going to appear in the next day or so. Just a hunch!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/4/11

Particularly unsettling in today’s Snuffy Smith: the disconnect between art (“Aw, it’s fun havin’ some banter with yer doctor! We kid because we love!”) and dialogue (“I’m being crushed financially by these high medical bills! The stress is seriously exacerbating my health problems!”).