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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/29/24

No. Sorry. Call me a coastal flatlander elitist if you must, but I do not buy today’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith on any level. First of all, Hootin’ Holler’s access to mass media is limited to the radio and Parson Tuttle’s TV set; there would simply not be any local demand for the superhero franchise characters who make up the bulk of store-bought Halloween costumes, and Silas, the only local storekeeper, would certainly not bother to stock them. And you’re trying to tell me that Jughaid would actually enjoy the idea of a costume that by its very nature transforms mocking laughter into chuckles of approval? Utter nonsense. I’m sorry, but nobody in this blighted community is operating on that level of semiotic sophistication.

Gasoline Alley, 10/29/24

The history of humankind’s quest to create thinking machines has repeatedly produced surprises, where we discover that the capabilities that we bundle together as “intelligence” are separable, and some of the ones that we previously thought of as “advanced” are easier to implement via computers than ones we thought of as “basic.” In the 20th century, for instance, we wrote programs that could perform complex mathematics and achieve grandmaster level in chess, but the ability to operate robotic legs or process simple visual input proved impossible on the hardware at the time. Today, we have so-called “AIs” whose ability to produce fully fluent speech in human languages has outpaced its ability to tell us anything useful or real, with chatbots like ChatGPT cheerfully providing bullshit answers and made-up references that nevertheless sound exactly like a person wrote them. What I’m trying to say is that, since Google’s Gemini AI told people to eat glue and ChatGPT got lawyers fined by a judge, I find it fully believable that Arty would tell these little children that they don’t have to wear a seatbelt, right before he throws a switch and accelerates so fast that he smears them all over the inside of the saucer, but I don’t think he’d use the weird, clunky phrase “You’ve been watching too many TV and sci-fi movies!” in the process.

Family Circus, 10/29/24

Honestly can’t believe Big Daddy Keane is so happy to be on the receiving end of this kind of adoration from Jeffy, who is objectively his worst child by every measure. If he could see the look of withering disgust Billy is dishing out right now, he’d be brought back down to earth right quick.

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Dennis the Menace, 10/27/24

The Sunday Dennis the Menace strips always come with a title in the first panel, and usually it offers little pun or light wordplay, but today it’s just … “Dracula”? Dracula, the name of the vampire Dennis wants to be for Halloween. Or at least it is for the first few panels, after which he kind of loses interest. I guess he does pivot to wanting to be a boss … the vampire who sucks the blood out of the working class! Ha ha, just kidding, Dennis’s mother doesn’t even participate in the wage economy. He just wants to tell her what to do, because he’s kind of an asshole, but it’s not a class struggle thing, honestly more primal and Freudian. Hmm, maybe the vampire metaphor could work after all. I’m going to workshop this and get back to you.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/27/24

I like the idea that Hootin’ Holler is so impoverished that creating unique outfits that would only serve as a costume would be a profligate waste of resources, so on Halloween “Hallerween” the inhabitants simply wear each other’s clothes to celebrate the spooky season. Anyway, I’m not sure if Snuffy is using “borrowed” euphemistically here; if he isn’t, it probably means Granny Creeps is walking around right now in Snuffy’s comically tiny overalls, and if it is, her stripped body is lying face down in a creek somewhere nearby, which is slightly but measurably worse.

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Blondie, 10/26/24

Look, clearly I’m not as young as I was when I launched this blog back in 2004, and if I had a chance to tell that 29-year-old what what aging would be like, I would say that it really fucks with your sense of time: things that you think of as happening just the other day may, in fact, have happened literally years ago. But writing about the legacy comics definitely helps “keep you young,” not in the sense that comics are a medium for children or anything, but rather in the sense that the legacy strips are all churned out by old guys, so you get a lot of cautionary examples of how not to be a clueless old guy. For instance, no matter how novel something seems to me, I would do a little research about it before committing to print the declaration that it constitutes a “hot craze.” Did you know that Starbucks has been selling pumpkin spice lattes since 2003? That they are, in fact, even older than this blog? I’m just saying. Making wry commentary about Mary Worth may have once been a hot craze, but it is no longer, and neither, I regret to inform both Elmo and Dagwood, is pumpkin spice.

Beetle Bailey, 10/26/24

I actually really like how happy all the officers are in the first panel. It would’ve been easy, given the joke, to make them sullen or angry that their team is losing, and expressing their rage in a nonstop stream of obscenities. But they’re havng a great time! They’re exuberant swearers! That changes the whole dynamic.

Hi and Lois, 10/26/24

OK, so earlier this week I made my occasional reference to the occasional colorist mistakes that you see in the comics, but this is definitely the funniest one yet. Just imagine some unfortunate, underpaid soul, possibly working in a country where baseball is not a well known pastime, squinting at Ditto’s hat and thinking, “So … ‘Sox’? That’s short for Red Sox, right? Great, I have this one covered.”