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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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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.

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Mary Worth, 4/26/23

OK, look, I was willing to accept it when we only got a day of Wilbur singing karaoke while sobbing openly, but now we find out that a cat tried to blind Dr. Ed and now he’s wearing an eye patch and we didn’t get to see that at all? Unacceptable! Still, I see two potentially funny ways forward: either Ed’s briefly rekindled love affair with the veterinary profession has now been snuffed out for good, and he’s brooding one-eyedly and thinking about burning the building down for the insurance and starting over again in a new town as a simple bricklayer, or the whole incident was relayed to Estelle over the phone as he explained that he needed to “take some time off” from their relationship to sit in a dark room and heal (i.e., spend more time with his wife and children so they don’t get suspicious).

Judge Parker, 4/26/23

This is part of a larger storyline about April finally getting released from her illegal CIA prison for implausible reasons, but right now let’s just acknowledge that it’s very funny to cruelly mutter “Yeah, let’s end this” as you get yet another spam call.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/26/23

I’m not afraid to admit that I was genuinely surprised by the punchline in today’s Snuffy Smith: I assumed that Snowball was the seeker, and that he thought he’d have an easy time finding Li’l Sparky because horses are quite large in general, larger than most available hiding spaces, and that Li’l Sparky in particular is wearing a bright yellow blanket to boot. But, no, it turns out that Li’l Sparky is the seeker, and playing Hide and Seek with him is easy because he’s not very smart.

Pluggers, 4/26/23

Sorry, I was going to try to figure out what this joke is supposed to mean, exactly, but then I got stuck on the idea that there’s a carton of milk just off panel to our left and it’s hurling at this plugger at high speed and about to hit him right in the nose, and while I’m reasonably sure that’s not what this joke is supposed to mean, I’m enjoying that image too much to part with it.