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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/7/10

In all my years of reading the strip, I have encountered few scenes in Snuffy Smith more harrowing than panel two here. Lureen looks rightly terrified at the slavering mob of women who have assembled at the Gossip Fence, the traditional gathering place for female-oriented rituals in Hootin’ Holler. Little does she know that any woman who manages to successfully bed the hamlet’s most eligible bachelor is by iron custom torn to bits and devoured by all the other women in the town. This is how the community maintains its uniform hideousness: by weeding all the even vaguely attractive people out of the gene pool.

Archie, 9/7/10

Mr. Weatherbee, with his black shirt and white jacket, always seems to be waiting for an ’80s fashion revival that never arrives; today, he’s really attempting to force the issue by donning a piano tie. GIVE IT UP, MR. WEATHERBEE. IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

Spider-Man, 9/7/10

I love the fact that Spider-Man, true to his intense laziness, just automatically associates computers with video games and nothing else. “Wait, you can use the keyboard-television for things that aren’t Farmville?”

Pluggers, 9/7/10

Seriously, pluggers are shockingly lazy and just straight up don’t give a rat’s ass about what you think.

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Shoe, 8/13/10

This diner patron has suddenly realized that the ambiguities of the verb “serve” could be deadly in a world of talking animals. We already know that the birds in the strip eat other birds, so why wouldn’t Roz just kill her bird-man customer and feed him to a fish-man? No reason. No reason at all why she wouldn’t. Better tip big, bird-man!

Family Circus, 8/13/10

The whole “Keanes go to the beach” storyline we’ve been enjoying (for certain limited definitions of “enjoying”) over the past couple of weeks is, as several readers have pointed out, a repeat from the ’70s or ’80s. Certainly that was a more innocent time, when Jeffy’s brazen nudity was merely implied and not rubbed in our faces.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/13/10

“No, yore paw is passed out, from th’ likker.”

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Judge Parker, 8/9/10

Well, it turns out that Sophie’s cheerleading-driven powers of all-knowingness only give her universal access to cold, hard facts about whose ex-boyfriends are back in town, and whom those ex-boyfriends have divorced. The underlying motivations behind those circumstances are as opaque to Sophie as ever, and it’s kind of heartening to see that the youngest Spencer-Driver foundling is still an unsettling android-child, despite her makeover into a tween fashion plate. “NEDDY-UNIT: THE SOPHIE-UNIT DEMANDS INFORMATION ABOUT LOVE AND THE EXPERIENCE THEREOF! WILL LOVE OVERLOAD THE SOPHIE-UNIT’S CIRCUITRY IF SHE ATTEMPTS TO INCORPORATE IT INTO HER TOP-LEVEL ALGORITHM? THE SOPHIE-UNIT WILL INITIATE THE SENSATION KNOWN AS ‘IRRITATION’ (SUCCESS OF IRRITATION-INSTIGATION SUBROUTINE ESTIMATED AT > 95%) IN THE NEDDY-UNIT UNTIL THE DESIRED INFORMATION IS GIVEN!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/9/10

Ha ha, the chicken has fallen in love with Snuffy, whose main source of food is the chickens that he steals and eats! This has the potential for being one of the funny pages’ great tragic love stories. Let’s hope the artists don’t shy away from the heartbreaking beheading scene!

Dick Tracy, 8/9/10

Wow, usually we don’t get to see the badly decomposed corpses until the end of the Dick Tracy storyline. What exactly is that lump floating atop the body in panel one — is there an alligator lazily feeding on the poor sap, with Officer Hugepelvis gingerly sneaking up on it with plans to taser it? This could be the greatest Dick Tracy plot ever, if by “greatest” you mean “with the highest body count,” which is really the only metric I can think of that fans of this strip would respect.