Archive: Barney Google & Snuffy Smith

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Spider-Man, 11/10/09

“I dunno, I guess I thought … he put people to sleep? You know, like the mythical figure you tell your kids about? ‘Mr. Sandman, Bring Me A Dream,’ and all that? But this is just a man … who turns into sand … and who calls himself ‘the Sandman.’ I mean … huh. It’s kind of a little too on the nose, isn’t it?”

Judge Parker, 11/10/09

So, wait, Frank D’Vito’s widow is a leggy, amoral blonde who lounges about her mansion wearing a dress so short and tight that she would find it literally impossible to sit down? I for one am totally shocked to see such a development in Judge Parker.

Mary Worth, 11/10/09

“Oh my God, he has … rightlegitis! And Scott’s father’s right leg was so shapely, too! Damn you, you smack-dealing bastards! Damn you straight to hell!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/10/09

BUT I FIGGER YORE EYESIGHT MUST BE PRETTY KEEN, T’ COMPENSATE FOR YOUR BAD HEARING! YOU CAN HEAR ME IF’N I SHOUT LIKE THIS, RIGHT?

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Spider-Man, 10/28/09

I’ll admit that I’ve been disappointed with Bigshot as a sinister adversary, as his name seems to indicate only his somewhat larger than average girth and his sole apparent superpower is the ability to wear that suit without self-consciousness. But now we’re beginning to see that below the surface of cheerful good-natured criminality lurks almost unspeakable depravity. In order to force the reformed Sandman to return to his life of crime, Bigshot has kidnapped the mutant’s daughter — an obvious and time-tested tactic. Presumably Sandman will rob a bank or two, little Sandy will be released unharmed, and everyone’s comes out a winner, right?

But wait, what’s this? Is Bigshot having is awful minions pollute li’l Sandy’s mind … with literacy? Imagine the scene: Poppa Sandman’s all like, “Hey, Sandy, let’s tune in to NBC to watch the hilarious and insightful Jay Leno, just like we do every weekday at 10 pm!” but then Sandy’s all “No way, dad! I’m still working my way through this week’s New York Review of Books!” And just like that, a once-solid father-daughter relationship begins to founder. Bigshot, you are a monster.

Momma, 10/28/09

Upon reading this strip, my first thought was, “Hey, Danny is supposed to be one of Francis’s no-good friends, right?” This implies some kind of intriguing family drama here, with Marylou going after (and by “going after” I mean “attempting to strangle”) a member of her little (?) brother’s coterie of losers. I was just about to start plumbing the depths of my archives or the Chronicle’s pages to confirm Danny’s identity, but then I had an epiphany: I had spent the maximum reasonable amount of time thinking about Momma today. Sure, this whole comics thing is fun now, but when you’re trying to cross-reference the identities of Momma’s mushy scribbles — and then, once you do, maybe update the strip’s Wikipedia page with your findings, just in case you or the Internet community at large has need of this data in the future — well, that’s when people start staging interventions.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/28/09

I’m sorry, residents of Hootin’ Holler would have to trudge three or four miles down rocky hillsides to the flatlands in order to get any kind of advanced schoolin’, so I refuse to believe that any resident of this impoverished hamlet would be able to deal with advanced math like “fractions” — or, for that matter, to form coherent thoughts without verbalizing them.

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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.