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Mary Worth, 7/17/23

Congratulations, Greta! You may be depressed due to trauma, but you’re at least seeing a vet who recently started seeing a therapist himself due to his own trauma-based depression. Does that mean that Dr. Ed is as good as a licensed therapist? Ha ha, no, absolutely not, but he’s a lot more forgiving about his patients pooping in the middle of a session than an actual therapist would be.

Hi and Lois, 7/17/23

Congratulations, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and the Horse! Not only were you “shortlisted for the 2020 British Book Awards Non-Fiction Lifestyle Book of the Year,” but you also got a barely legible appearance in a Hi and Lois strip where Hi and Lois are mad at each other for reasons neither will really articulate and the vibes are real bad!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/17/23

Congratulations, pickleball! You’ve reached the stage where the creative team for Barney Google and Snuffy Smith thinks its readership will know what you are, so you must be an integral part of American life at this point! (Bitcoin hit this stage back in 2015.)

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Hi and Lois and The Lockhorns, 7/15/23

Call me “out of touch” all you want — my family certainly does — but golf seems like a hugely expensive and boring waste of time to me, and I have other hugely expensive wastes of time that I actually enjoy, so I will never play golf and you cannot convince me to do it. By “you” here I specifically mean newspaper comic strip creators, for whom golf usually lands somewhere between “relatable pastime” and “holy sacrament,” though these two strips today seem to admit that golf is, in fact, not as enjoyable as they usually make it out to be, and can even add to the overwhelming sense of oppressive ennui that we as middle-class inhabitants of the 21st century West cannot escape. Golf is at least giving Hi and Thirsty the opportunity to avoid their spouses, but somehow Leroy and Loretta have turned the game into yet another opportunity to spend time antagonizing one another while also getting a sunburn. Truly grim stuff!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/15/23

Now, I’m sure the first panel of this strip has raised objections among the more pedantic among you who are well aware that Snuffy’s house and the local church are not situated close together like this in established Googleverse canon. But the composition is in fact symbolic — the two structures are shown next to one another, prefiguring Snuffy and Parson Tuttle’s proximity in the next panel. The art in this strip is not and has never been literally representational; if it were, why does everyone look like [shudders in disgust] that?

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Rhymes With Orange, 7/12/23

One of my biggest beefs with several of the more popular religious cosmologies is the concept of hell: the idea that anything you could do in a finite lifetime could be worthy of infinite punishment just seems wildly unbalanced to me. (Honestly nothing we do could possibly be good enough to merit infinite reward either, but I have a lot less problem with that because I’m a big softie.) Theological sophisticates will tell you that the real punishment you get in hell is separation from God’s grace, but I’m willing to bet that most people who believe in hell think it consists of very real and very agonizing endless physical torture, which makes the whole thing even more abhorrent to me.

Now, I’m not such a scold that I’m can’t appreciate cartoonish depictions of hell — like, I don’t think you should drop pianos on people from a great height either, but I still enjoy classic Warner Brothers cartoons. Even in those cases, though, I’m always struck by the extent to which gruesome torment is at the core of the joke. Sometimes it’s in iconography that everyone kind of ignores — does anyone really think about why the devil is always depicted holding a pitchfork? it’s not a fun reason! — but sometimes it’s pretty deliberate. In this strip, I love that the slot machines themselves are fiery hot, leaving the poor damned players in agony as they pull the lever over and over again (and, presumably, never win). Do you think they’re kept in place by some mental block that makes them unable to leave the machine, perhaps mirroring a vice they were guilty of in life? Or are there just some chains or something at their feet that we can’t see, due to all the flames that are eternally burning their flesh?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/12/23

The bad news is that Sheriff Tait, the only law enforcement officer in the community of Hootin’ Holler, died from massive blood loss and organ damage after being mauled by a vicious bear. The good news is that this saved him from an even worse fate: dying slowly and terribly from the rabies that he contracted from a bat who bit him just moments before the bear caught up with him.