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Archive: Barney Google & Snuffy Smith

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No Apologies Needed For Being Basic As Hell: The Jeff and Mary Story

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Mary Worth, 5/16/23

Look, I’m a guy who likes to eat out, and LA has an great food scene with amazing high- and low-end restaurants, but definitely at the places I go to regularly, I have one or maybe two go-to dishes, because … I dunno, they’re good! I already know they’re good! Why would I get the thing that may not be good, when there’s something I already like? Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that you either die a hero or live long enough to find Mary Worth relatable. Also, are they stretching out the “Mary and Jeff go on a date” transition between storylines into a second week? Whatever, who cares, this is representation for me, as established.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/16/23

Do I want to keep making jokes about the obvious desperate poverty that the residents of Hootin’ Holler suffer in? I’m ambivalent about it, but when they keep doing strips about things like people stealing badly needed useful tools from their own children just for a few dollars, it’s pretty hard not to.

Daddy Daze, 5/16/23

OK, we’ve all just sort of accepted that the bit of Daddy Daze is that the Daddy Daze daddy pretends that the Daddy Daze baby can talk, but I think we should draw the line at the Daddy Daze daddy pretending that the Daddy Daze baby can write.

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The frolicking dolphins are eager to welcome Wilbur to the watery grave he keeps dodging

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Six Chix, 5/11/23

So the thing about “sudden,” as a noun, is that it has completely fallen out of use in English outside the set phrase “all of a sudden,” and even when it was in use there wasn’t any particularly strong syntactical or grammatical reason why it took an indefinite article in that phrase rather than a definite one, so it’s pretty natural for modern-day speakers to start reanalyzing and rearranging the phrase, and as long as people know what you mean it’s hard to say you’re doing it “wrong.” Still, some people care a lot about being right in linguistic matters; I found this out the hard way when I got into a discussion on the comments of this very blog in which I pointed out that “none” is not a contraction for “not one” and has always been used in both the singular and plural, with recorded uses of “none are” going back to Chaucer, and this caused one commenter to melt down at me and then quit the site altogether. I have my own odd things I’m overly attached to, of course, but at least none of them have me visualizing myself as an angry pulsing green blob holding the line against a bunch of purple blobs that look pretty chill, honestly.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/11/23

Now I’m imagining the elaborate beehive coif Snuffy had to create to fit his new hair under his hat so that nobody could catch even a glimpse of it while he dashed from his home to this cave, presumably so he wasn’t immediately burned at the stake for engaging in witchcraft. Granny Creeps is powerful enough, or helps enough leading citizens of the Holler with her potions, to avoid that fate herself, but a local layabout and troublemaker like Snuffy is the sort of person who might be made an example of.

Mary Worth, 5/11/23

There’s not a lot about Dr. Jeff I find particularly worthy of praise or envy, but despite being a core Mary Worth character he seems to not put a ton of effort into keeping up with Wilbur’s sex life, and you have to respect that.

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Medical maladies

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Daddy Daze, 5/9/23

Daddy Daze is one of the more recent additions to my stable of commented upon comics, and yet I have been commenting on it for more than three years. As a non-child-haver, I am not an expert on child development, but I feel reasonably confident in asserting that the Daddy Daze baby is not, in fact, three years old, and I feel also confident (albeit slightly less so) that a parent would, if given a chance to to keep their child stuck at one particular stage of development for years, and possibly forever, choose this one. Anyway, I wouldn’t be thinking about any of this if the Daddy Daze daddy hadn’t brought up a specific if unnamed date printed on that granola bar wrapper, which I now desperately want to see, though I can’t decide if it would simply resolve into a new and plausible-in-the-moment date every time I looked at it, or if it would shimmer and shift just at the edge of legibility, somehow making it impossible for my eyes to ever focus on it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/9/23

Ha ha, it’s funny because Snuffy is desperately ill, and the only way to get medical attention is for his wife to carry him for miles along a rough dirt track in a wheelbarrow, which will only compound his misery and may kill him!

Mary Worth, 5/9/23

Wow! Looks like Dr. Jeff’s new Medicare fraud scheme is going great.