Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/27/11
“Yep, you sure won, Gran, what with your obvious terror of your imminent demise! Look at ’er weeping bitter, bitter tears!”
Panel from Dick Tracy, 2/27/11
“That’s right, citizen! The way to soothe anxiety is to blend in with the crowd! Conform! Conform! Dick Tracy and the thoughtcrimestoppers textbook demand it!”
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?”
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.