Archive: Barney Google & Snuffy Smith

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They’ll Do It Every Time, 10/28/06

TDIET exists to give whiny, petulant voice to the sort-of-but-not-really voiceless, and thus I always assume that whatever character is best expressing that classic look of quizzical put-upon-ness is meant to stand in for whoever sent the idea in to Mr. Scaduto in the first place. Today’s episode is an elaborate fantasy in which helpful teenagers are constantly thwarted in their attempts to pull their weight in the household; thus, we can only assume that “A. White” is the helpful baseball-cap flipping, vest-wearing cool cat. The idea that a teenager might be a regular TDIET reader is truly horrifying, however. Please, please tell me that, like David Tarafa, A. White is a plucky young Curmudgeon reader. PLease?

Another possibility is that A. White is actually the silent but clearly horror-stricken mother in this scenario. She’s too terrified to stand up to her obviously rage-filled hubby on her kid’s behalf in person, so she’s hoping that his favorite cartoon feature in the Boston Herald will show him the error of his control-freakish ways.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and Mark Trail, 10/28/06

“Yeah, Andy, we’ve got to find Molly! And by ‘we,’ I mean ‘you.’ Go find our friend! I’ll be here with the gun … you know, if you need me … or whatever.” This strip just further illustrates that there isn’t a single featherless biped in Mark Trail who’s worth a damn. I hope that after Andy and Molly take care of the brothers -ake, they turn on Mark and his friends, and then rule over Lost Forest like the King and Queen of the Beasts that they are.

I offer this Snuffy Smith for comparison, to illustrate how Mark Trail is hopefully going to play out in a few days. That “Grr!!” coming out of the bear is meant to be menacing, but comes out just sort of cute and Molly-like.

The Phantom, 10/28/06

The Ghost Who Walks Very Uncomfortably In His Tight, Tight Pants is offering a lovely ass shot in the first panel (this one’s for you, bootsybrooks!), but I’m more looking forward to next week’s thrilling factory tour! “And in here is the break room … you can see we just got a new refrigerator … now down here is the factor floor, and here’s the conveyor belt … an interesting thing about this model is that it was first designed to accommodate a five-foot-wide belt, but they’ve been able to expand it to accommodate our shipping containers, which have had to get bigger because of changing packaging regulations…”

Judge Parker, 10/28/06

God damn it, is this strip going to be about not making assumptions about people based on first appearances, and about how people who seem very different might have a lot in common, and could even become good friends? Because that’s going to blow.

For Better Or For Worse, 10/28/06

Oh, 4Evah and Eva’s public humiliation is going to be delicious.

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Mary Worth, 6/19/06

Yeah! It’s Charterstone pool party time! We all know what that means: the gears of the Mary Worth plot machine are grinding noisily as we transition to a new storyline. I sure hope that we get back to the glory days of meth fiends and drunks and moronic yoga instructors, and leave behind the recent insipid territory of lame divorce and lamer marital spats that we’ve been forced to slog our way through.

Of course, no Charterstone pool party would be complete without Professor Ian “Chinbeard” Cameron being an asinine sourpuss. With any luck, the next plotline will focus on Ian because something terrible happens to him — like, he has a heart attack and dies. The end. That’d be great. And it would probably only take, like, six or seven days.

The fellow in the orange shirt in the background looks to be desperately trying to have a good time at this squarefest by climbing on something. “Whee, I’m six feet higher than everybody else! It’s wacky!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/19/06

Can we have one day in the comics that doesn’t have some kind of “man on dog” theme? Please?

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From Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/24/05

Only the throwaway front-matter gag is worth commenting on in Sunday’s BB & SS, and it’s only worth commenting on to the extent that it enrages me. But boy, does it enrage me. Here’s a tip: when you make jokes that emphasize the weird, Depression-era limbo in which these hill folks seem to live most of the time, sometimes the strip is amusing. When you take transient catchphrases from the late ’90s and try to play them off as “cool,” it just feeds my rage … rage … RAGE!

Anyway, since I have nothing to say about these panels except that I hate them, I thought I’d turn to more pleasant matters and point out that I am slowly but surely falling in love with the “next” teasers that come at the end of Sunday editions of Spider-Man. They’re ludicrously overblown, no doubt on purpose. There’s this:

And this:

And, my personal favorite, this:

Yes, who does have the rhino? I’m sure there are versions of these that you can come up with for other comic strips, which exercise I leave to you, my eager commenting minions of humorous evil.