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Archive: Barney Google & Snuffy Smith

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Deadly Sunday

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Mary Worth, 3/19/23

It’s true and tragic that the veterinarians have higher than typical rates of death by suicide, and it’s also great that there’s a support group specifically targeted to them. But you have to admit that it’s very funny that Estelle has been blown off by a Ed after exactly two dates that were a year apart, and the conclusion she’s come to is “He’s probably avoiding me because he wants to kill himself.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/19/23

Am I little sad that we didn’t get several strips of Hank Jr. watching rambling hour-long YouTube videos of “cruise tips from an expert”? Am I disappointed that we weren’t treated to the several wrong turns he and Yvonne took on their journey to this cute little out-of-the-way eatery? Yes, of course. But just as it was designed to do, the carefully crafted narrative of this strip BLEW THOSE THOUGHTS OUT OF MY MIND in the final panel by teasing me with the prospects of who the last-minute musical guests are. Will one of them be “Mud Mountain Murphy?” Will his signature musical power move — pretending that he has to take a huge shit in order to move up in the order from opener to headliner — backfire spectacularly, during this cruise’s inevitable norovirus outbreak?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/19/23

This is actually a cunning move on Snuffy’s part. The pastor is about to wander onto the landholdnings of the Barlows, who don’t take kindly to being hit up for money, and Snuffy’s made sure that his clan rivals’ alibi isn’t going to hold up in court.

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Does Hootin’ Holler actually have a golf course, or are they just in an open field somewhere

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Family Circus, 3/15/23

I don’t have kids, but I am given to understand that your child handing you a crumb-covered piece of garbage and explaining how its actually a thoughtful, beautiful gift that you’ll be a bad person for throwing away is definitely in the realm of thing that your kids will do for/to you. This one’s going up on lots of refrigerators everywhere, is what I’m saying! “You’ve got to laugh,” they’ll say, hanging it up with a magnet. “You’ve got to. The alternatives are all pretty bad.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/15/23

I dunno, those quote marks around “exploring America” makes it sounds kind of sarcastic and maybe a little euphemistic, I would not let Sarah look at that phone.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/15/23

It’s true: A cardiac clinic could be very lucrative, but this poor and sparsely populated region simply cannot support one, so locals must travel hours via perilous cliffside paths to the big city if they need open-heart surgery.

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Best Makeup and Hairstyling goes to the comic strip Blondie for somehow doing [gestures vaguely at Dagwood] that

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/12/23

Barney Google more or less vanished from his namesake strip in the 1930s as it pivoted to cruel jokes about hillbillies full time, but he started making regular appearances again in the early 2010s. I’ve always been a bit curious about why that decision was made — was it just to mix things up in a strip that had gone stale? Was it to ensure that the valuable Barney and Spark Plug IP didn’t fall into the public domain? But today we learn the awful truth: Barney has returned to Hootin’ Holler because this impoverished, isolated community is at risk of catastrophe due to its limited gene pool, and the women of the town are eager for Barney’s flatlander seed.

Blondie, 3/12/23

This is, frankly, a pretty weak showing in the cluttered genre of Blondie strips that latch onto whatever current event has popped up on the calendar; I’m particularly unimpressed that they didn’t even try to fit into actual Oscar categories, instead making up a bunch of vaguely Oscar-esque ones. Still, my biggest concern arises from the very first panel, in which we learn that Dagwood doesn’t know the difference between Facebook and LinkedIn.

Six Chix, 3/12/23

Ha ha, remember Pizza Rat, the beloved internet sensation from 2015? Well, rats typically live about two years, and even the best treated pet rats five or six, so Pizza Rat is definitely dead now. Don’t let Six Chix fool you into believing that he’s lived a long and happy life in the New York Subway somewhere, he’s 100% dead. RIP Pizza Rat, c. 2014-c. 2016, you will be missed.