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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/15/04

Many times, I’m sure, you’ve read Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and said, “Jus’ whar in tarnation do these folks live, anyhow?” Well, today’s installment answers that question.

The various names of a long sandwich on Italian bread (sub, hero, grinder, hoagie, what have you) have long been the example used when discussing dialectical variations in American English, but I’d argue that the nationwide advent of Subway has killed off most of the variants. In my mind, the most prominent remaining geographical tip-off terms are those used for soft drinks: do you say “pop”, “soda”, or “coke”?

Now, I grew up in Buffalo, New York, which is pop country. I remember going to Los Angeles when I was a kid and asking for a pop at a restaurant, which utterly baffled our waiter. I went to college in soda-land, with a lot of kids from New York City, and had the pop beaten out of me by relentless verbal abuse, but I still get excited when I see it used in print. Even if, you know, it’s being used by toothless, semiliterate hillbillies.

Anyway, the first thing I did when I saw this comic was to go to the alarmingly well researched county-by-county map at popvssoda.com. As you can see, the only traditionally hillbilly-populated areas that fall into the pop zone lie in a relatively restricted corner at the north end of the Appalachians: West Virginia, western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and western Pennsylvania (affectionately known by its inhabitants as “Pennsyltucky”). So there you have it, America: we’ve used linguistic science to narrow down the true location of Hootin’ Holler, which we can now thankfully avoid.

I like the fact that printed matter in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, like the sign in the first panel, is written in the exact same wacky mangled spelling as the word balloons. I’d also like to note that just about every word balloon ends in two exclamation points. If anyone actually gets excited, look out!

Also, while we’re getting all linguistic, I’d like to revisit a comment I made in my last B.B. & S.S. entry, in which I remarked that Whar Th’ Boys Are would be a good beach movie for hillbillies or pirates. Upon further reflection, it seems clear to me that the pirate version would be Whar Th’ Boys Be.

In today’s alarming search engine query, we have a lonely Web-surfing pervert who likes mature, professional women, evidenced by his plugging “+’sally forth’ +nude” into AltaVista.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/8/04

Fellas, don’t let the ladies fool you when they talk about wanting men who are “sensitive”, “caring”, “literate”, or “not felons”. Since time immemorial, girls have always gone in for bad boys. No matter how nicely they dress, with their big fluffy pastel-colored bows and such, they’re inevitably hanging around places where bad boys go — bars, detention, prison — waiting to get their hands on some surly, untameable stallion.

It’s good to see that the teachers in Hootin’ Holler, untouched by the educational reforms that have swept over the U.S. since the end of the Hoover administration, are still publicly humiliating naughty children Cultural Revolution-style. Also, Whar Th’ Boys Are would be a great beach movie in which four hillbillies, or possibly four pirates, came to Ft. Lauderdale on spring break in search of a little action.

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Panels from Herb and Jamaal, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, Shoe, and Doonesbury, 9/10/04

One of the many things about Gary Trudeau that I like is that he’s admitted that, at least initially, he wasn’t very good at drawing. A lot of early Doonesburys consisted of one character sitting in front of the TV for four consecutive identical panels, and while there was a certain pop-art charm to this, I think most people would agree that his strip has improved leaps and bounds since then, especially after his extended early-1980s sabbatical.

Anyway, for me, one of the defining features of modern-era Doonesbury is the “shadow panel,” where the characters are rendered as white against a black background (or vice versa) for a single panel. This is a technique that has spread in one form or another to other comics as well (or maybe it was always there, though Doonesbury is where I noticed it first). It’s kind of arty, and like a lot of art, I don’t have a clue what it’s supposed to mean. I think it’s safe to say that it doesn’t represent a momentary shift in ambient light, or a massive nearby explosion. Sometimes, as in both Herb and Jamaal and Barney Google and Snuffy Smith today, it’s part of a shift in perspective, generally representing something too far away to render details. (Though I should point out that in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, the shadowy characters are not, in fact, too far away to render details; in fact, with their white hands, they look alarmingly like Aunt Jemima figurines.) With the other two, though, we’re looking at the same scene from essentially the same angle, so it’s representing … what, exactly? Time passing? A change in scene? A desire to not draw the same damn details on the same characters for a third time in one day? Anyone who knows more about drawing comics than I do (and Lord knows there must be enough of you out there) should please edify us all.