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Archive: Barney Google & Snuffy Smith

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Is this an attempt to make Lute jealous that’s gone awry?

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Hagar the Horrible, 5/4/23

I know it’s a little hypocritical, because I always complain about legacy comics being static and hidebound, but I also am always a little unsettled when a legacy comic introduces a new character out of nowhere. Still, I have high hopes for this new fellow in Hagar the Horrible, Honi’s Friend Who Wears A Beret And Waits For Food With His Fork And Knife At The Ready And His Tongue Hanging Out Like A Dipshit, and I look forward to his future adventures, assuming he’s not about to be disemboweled by Hagar.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/4/23

OK, I take back what I said yesterday: Rene doesn’t need emotional validation to recognize his own inherent good qualities. No, he knows himself quite well as the ultimate soulless scamming machine. He will stop at nothing to hone the skills necessary to pull off his grifts. If he must look deeply into the souls of men and help them set their lives right in the process, so be it, but that cannot be anything more than a means to an end, and that end is to make a few bucks off of people on a cruise who might want to be similarly transformed. I will no longer question his purity of purpose in this space. Too bad he’s probably going to prison for attempted murder now!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/4/23

What kind of elaborate and pricey bachelor party would a resident of Hootin’ Holler envision? Would it involve strippers? Did you read that sentence and then suddenly and involuntarily imagine what the Snuffy Smith version of a strip club would look like? Did the very thought of it make you want to lie down, not in a sexy way, but more in a desperately try to achieve a state of ego death that will allow you to stop imagining it way?

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Rustic Sunday

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Gasoline Alley, 4/30/23

I thought perhaps we were going to get the beginning of a heartwarming arc where Joel learns to read late in life (hey, it worked for Crankshaft!) until Rufus actually reads the letter to him, which is so inane as to make someone actively avoid becoming literate if that’s all that’s on offer. Why not spend your day planting trees rather than reading books and letters written on the stuff they make the trees into, you know? It’s Arbor Day all year, my friends.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/30/23

Another data point for the “Where is Hootin’ Holler” question: probably the only part of the U.S. that has both a rich history of hillbilly culture and a fault line capable of producing earthquakes this powerful is the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which puts today’s action squarely in the Ozarks. Apologies to the millions of people from St. Louis to Memphis who don’t live in a region of mandatory seismic retrofits who are about to wake up under a pile of rubble!

Panel from Slylock Fox, 4/30/23

Ha ha, check out the facial expression on that doctor. That is a guy who’s trying to come up with a schedule for the nurses and his least favorite intern to keep 24/7 tabs on Cassandra’s litter box.

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The answer is “apples,” also

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/27/23

OK, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, I’m all for mixing things up once in a while, but I’m going to have to ask you to stop trying to make Barney Google and Snuffy Smith Present … Sparkplug’s Grandson Li’l Sparky happen as, like, a parallel continuity that implies that the animals of Hootin’ Holler are all sapient and can talk to one another but also coexist with the human characters. Like, don’t get me attached to Clara the chicken, beloved by her peers as a great cook, when we all know that sooner than later she’s going to end up in Snuffy’s burlap sack and then Loweezy’s fryer, begging for her life in words her captors cannot understand.

Dustin, 4/27/23

Great facial expression on Neka in the final panel here. That’s exactly what you’d look like if you visited a friend’s home for the first time and immediately learned that her family relationships are a twisted, passive-aggressive web of mutual loathing.

Hi and Lois, 4/27/23

The appearance of Chip as a sort of one-man Greek chorus here is very funny to me. On the one hand, it’s a little out of place because I’m pretty sure we almost never see Chip interacting with his younger siblings in any way, but on the other, do you know who’d be really, really impressed by innovation like this? Stoned teenagers, that’s who.