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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.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/16/04

Do you ever read a comic and get the feeling that you’re just missing something? Like, is there a connection between a stovepipe hat and cleaning a chimney that I’m missing? Is the fact that she’s cleaning the chimney part of the joke, or is it just an arbitrary chore that the artist picked out, and it the strip would be just as “funny” if Maw were sloppin’ the hogs or darnin’ socks or whatever the hell it is she does with her time? Would I get this if I lived in the heartland and actually did an honest day’s work around the house myself, instead of hiring a migrant chimney sweep like the Chardonnay-swilling member of the liberal elite that I am?

Like most Americans — heck, I’ll go out on a limb and say most people — the first thing I think when seeing a hat like that is “Abraham Lincoln.” Maybe it would be funnier if Maw were saving the union or something, though you’d think that being a proponent of the Union cause would get you tarred an’ feathered in place like Hootin’ Holler.