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Archive: Barney Google & Snuffy Smith

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The frolicking dolphins are eager to welcome Wilbur to the watery grave he keeps dodging

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Six Chix, 5/11/23

So the thing about “sudden,” as a noun, is that it has completely fallen out of use in English outside the set phrase “all of a sudden,” and even when it was in use there wasn’t any particularly strong syntactical or grammatical reason why it took an indefinite article in that phrase rather than a definite one, so it’s pretty natural for modern-day speakers to start reanalyzing and rearranging the phrase, and as long as people know what you mean it’s hard to say you’re doing it “wrong.” Still, some people care a lot about being right in linguistic matters; I found this out the hard way when I got into a discussion on the comments of this very blog in which I pointed out that “none” is not a contraction for “not one” and has always been used in both the singular and plural, with recorded uses of “none are” going back to Chaucer, and this caused one commenter to melt down at me and then quit the site altogether. I have my own odd things I’m overly attached to, of course, but at least none of them have me visualizing myself as an angry pulsing green blob holding the line against a bunch of purple blobs that look pretty chill, honestly.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/11/23

Now I’m imagining the elaborate beehive coif Snuffy had to create to fit his new hair under his hat so that nobody could catch even a glimpse of it while he dashed from his home to this cave, presumably so he wasn’t immediately burned at the stake for engaging in witchcraft. Granny Creeps is powerful enough, or helps enough leading citizens of the Holler with her potions, to avoid that fate herself, but a local layabout and troublemaker like Snuffy is the sort of person who might be made an example of.

Mary Worth, 5/11/23

There’s not a lot about Dr. Jeff I find particularly worthy of praise or envy, but despite being a core Mary Worth character he seems to not put a ton of effort into keeping up with Wilbur’s sex life, and you have to respect that.

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Medical maladies

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Daddy Daze, 5/9/23

Daddy Daze is one of the more recent additions to my stable of commented upon comics, and yet I have been commenting on it for more than three years. As a non-child-haver, I am not an expert on child development, but I feel reasonably confident in asserting that the Daddy Daze baby is not, in fact, three years old, and I feel also confident (albeit slightly less so) that a parent would, if given a chance to to keep their child stuck at one particular stage of development for years, and possibly forever, choose this one. Anyway, I wouldn’t be thinking about any of this if the Daddy Daze daddy hadn’t brought up a specific if unnamed date printed on that granola bar wrapper, which I now desperately want to see, though I can’t decide if it would simply resolve into a new and plausible-in-the-moment date every time I looked at it, or if it would shimmer and shift just at the edge of legibility, somehow making it impossible for my eyes to ever focus on it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/9/23

Ha ha, it’s funny because Snuffy is desperately ill, and the only way to get medical attention is for his wife to carry him for miles along a rough dirt track in a wheelbarrow, which will only compound his misery and may kill him!

Mary Worth, 5/9/23

Wow! Looks like Dr. Jeff’s new Medicare fraud scheme is going great.

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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?