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Gil Thorp, 10/24/09

So it turns out that all imprisoned-brother-haunted ticking time bomb Duncan Daley needed to do to find emotional support was to let his idiot friends in on his little secret! Hopefully I’m not offending any current or future high school jocks by questioning how willing and eager Shep and Robb (or perhaps two other interchangeable friends with stupid names) are to help, as this isn’t a social class known for its nurturing attitudes. Even Ted Peare’s teammates pretended that he was infected with a deadly disease when they found out he was homeless!

Anyway, with the Mudlark locker room softened by this outbreak of drama-killing, touchy-feeling emotional support, we have only one place left to turn for hard-hitting narrative action: prison! Let’s hope that we just gloss over the rest of Milford’s undoubtedly doomed football season and just focus on the shankings.

Barney Googe and Snuffy Smith, 10/24/09

Good lord, now we know why the malformed child known only as “Tater” has remained an infant throughout this strip’s multi-decade run: Loweezy has been forced by rural poverty to birth a whole series of little Taters and hand them over to the greedy Silas, who as the owner of the General Store is the only resident of Hootin’ Holler who participates at all in the national non-barter-based economy, and to whom the Smif clan is presumably heavily indebted. We can only hope that this sinister shopkeep is selling the babies to parents so desperate to adopt that they won’t question too closely the size of the gene pool that spawned them, as the other possibilities are even more terrifying.

(Side note: Showing the limits of the modern information age, the name of Snuffy Smith’s store owner character is one of the no doubt many bits of data that cannot be easily found with a quick Google search. I had to find it the old-fashioned way: looking through the archives until I found a strip where one of the other characters addressed him by name. My God, it was like living in 1997!)

(UPDATE: Uh, yeah, as several posters have pointed out, Silas’s name is in fact right there in the strip. Of more interest however is the person who mentioned that his name is also in the Snuffy Smith Wikipedia article. I had of course consulted Wikipedia on this important subject, but had looked up the feature under its official name, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, which does not include this vital data. Why on earth are there two articles on this subject? Oh, there’s an angry merge template going up on those articles tomorrow, believe you me.)

Family Circus, 10/24/09

I’m not sure what’s more unsettling: that Jeffy can’t determine the relative ages of the people he sees on the TV, or that he can’t differentiate between displays of maternal and romantic affection. For his sake, I’m hoping that his horrified parents will realize what he’s watching and ratchet the V-chip protection levels on this TV set up so high that the only thing it will get is the Weather Channel.

Ziggy, 10/25/09

Ziggy is using a slight variation on the ancient “they asked for a number to call in case of emergency, so I wrote ‘911’” joke to draw attention away from the fact that nobody on Earth would lose a moment’s sleep if he were hospitalized or dead.

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Family Circus, 10/8/09

If you’re like me (which is to say the sort of person who Thinks Too Much About Things, and is a little OCD), your first response upon seeing the numbers in today’s Family Circus was to whip out the old calculator, Billy-style, and see what kind of timeframe we’re talking about. 4,206 days is 11 years and 191 days! And one of the reasons I was curious about this figure is that I’m never entirely clear on how old any of the Keane Kids are supposed to be. It’s hard to tell, given their gnomish stature and obvious cognitive deficits, but, assuming that kids are still getting their license at 16 like they traditionally have, today’s numbers put Billy at four and a half years old, which struck me as wildly off, considering he’s supposed to be the oldest of four, and he and his little sister both go to school. Then I realized that there was a sure-fire way to determine Billy’s canonical age: the “drawn by Billy” panels, which, after a bit of searching through my archives, yielded up the crucial bit of data: Billy is 7, and so appears to be proclaiming that he won’t be getting his driver’s license until he’s 18 or maybe even 19! I feel bitter for him making me think about this as much as I have, but at least I get to point out that he either cheerfully expects to repeatedly fail his drivers test, or is incapable of doing math, even with a calculator.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/8/09

Speaking of things that irritate me all out of proportion to their actual transgressions, why does Barney Google and Snuffy Smith think we need a title card informing us that we’re going “shoppin’ wif th’ Tuttles”? Do they think that we’ll be dangerously disoriented by seeing the strip’s trademarked dialectical banter thrown about by a pair of risible hillbilly stereotypes who aren’t part of the strip’s core cast? Please, give us some credit. Most readers will see vaguely old-timey rustics crackin’ wise and droppin’ Gs from the ends of gerunds, smile wanly, and move on with their lives without troubling themselves to place the narrative in some larger context; Snuffy Smith devotees, meanwhile, will immediately recognize Hootin’ Holler’s sole pastor, and will be pleased to see that he remains a money-grubbing fraud.

Mary Worth, 10/8/09

Good lord, in the second panel, Dr. Jeff looks less like a father rushing to his daughter’s side to comfort her in her time of need and more like the leader of an angry vigilante mob, or perhaps like a majestic but enraged lowland gorilla. It’s almost as if he’s hoping that he’ll spot a heroin dealer or user on his drive to the hospital and have the opportunity run them down with his car. I was wondering why he was so worked up, but then remembered that Scott is, of course, the son of Dr. Jeff’s one true love. I can’t wait to see the bloody revenge he wreaks on Santa Royale’s comically dressed underworld!

Marvin, 10/8/09

Ah ha, I finally figured out what this week-long feces-plot is really getting at: it’s Marvin’s origin story! “And from that day on, the world knew him as … THE PANTS-SHITTER!”

Apartment 3-G, 10/8/09

Isn’t Margo’s dad supposed to be some rich businessman? Shouldn’t he be able to afford enough Just For Men to dye the hair on the sides of his head as well?

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Slylock Fox, 10/4/09

Congrats to Slylock for not simply arresting the first suspect that law enforcement’s attention settled upon and throwing him in prison without trial! I think this is a first for whatever thuggish law enforcement organization he works for. Of course, every female kangaroo in a twelve-mile radius will inevitably be rounded up and waterboarded into confessing the crime, but still, baby steps.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/4/09

I think it’s sad that the unrealistic beauty standards of the modern media are having an impact even in rural, isolated Hootin’ Holler, where local morality laws force women to cover their hair and, apparently, forbid them to wear bras.

Funky Winkerbean, 10/4/09

Every single inhabitant of the Funkyverse ought to have a broken heart tattooed on them at birth.