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Gil Thorp, 1/23/23

Maybe I’m going to get pushback for this by people who are and/or know actual teens, but my take on vaping, setting aside for the moment its purpose as a drug delivery system, is that it’s one of the dorkiest things I encounter in the real world on a regular basis. You’re sucking cotton-candy flavored mist out of an object that looks either like a tiny alto saxophone or something that would’ve been called a “deathstick” in a bad late ’90s cyberpunk movie. Not that a teen should take lessons on being cool from me, a 48-year-old man who blogs about comic strips, but it’s just sad that the Magic the Gathering nerds have internalized that vaping is too cool for them. To be fair, Nick refuses to buy into this dichotomy either, and is happy to share his cool guy vaping bounty with them. Nick seems like an all right dude, to be honest, maintaining his generosity despite the nerds’ rudeness!

Slylock Fox, 1/23/23

For some reason I assumed that the answer to “which way” was going to be a cardinal direction and I was about to pen a screed about how the liberal coastal elitists at Slylock Fox have constructed a mystery where you have to know about the relative locations of the zoo and lake in Central Park. But it turns out the answer relies on knowing which side of the bus the doors are on, and as a transit nerd I’m down with this one.

Honestly, the biggest story here is not Harry Ape robbing yet another bank, but the continued existence of a zoo in a post-animalpocalypse world. I suppose the animals could maintain it with empty cages and habitats as a monument to their former enslavement, but there are other possibilities, and they’re all much darker.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/23/23

You know, for someone who’s dirt poor and also doesn’t really seem to care about living a healthy lifestyle, Snuffy sure visits the doctor a lot! And it occurred to me, looking at this strip, that we often see him in that situation with his shirt off and the top half of his overalls unbuckled, which (a) indicates that a decent amount of thought went into the question of “Given how Snuffy canonically dresses, what would it look like if he had to disrobe?” and (b) is really a blessing, considering how much further they could’ve gone with it.

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Dennis the Menace, 1/14/22

Look, Alice, if you don’t want your giant jar of evil black goo spilled out all over the floor, unleashing an ancient demonic power that mankind has no defense against, maybe don’t leave it where your five-year-old son can so easily reach it, you know?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/14/22

Snuffy Smith, notorious layabout, card cheater, and chicken thief, definitely doesn’t give a shit about civility or honesty, but chivalry is at its root a code of honor that provides an ideological justification for violent conflicts over women and status, so I suppose that’s something someone embedded in Hootin’ Holler’s world of clan-based feuds would be interested in maintaining.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 1/14/22

It has come to our attention that some of our readers have found our episodes of June dealing with minor medical problems a little too exciting. That’s why we’ve pivoted to “June transparently tries to get out of a conversation with someone she finds annoying,” to keep everyone’s blood pressure at healthy levels.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/11/23

Look, I get it, if you were in charge of a century-old comics property about hillbillies, you’d have the urge to add new stuff occasionally, which is why we get things like Spark Plug’s Grandson Li’l Sparky. But I refuse to believe that I’ve been reading strips about the tiny, insular hamlet of Hootin’ Holler for more than a decade at this point and this is the first I’ve heard about one of the main characters having a twin sister! Yeah, they have been playing tricks, Loweezy … playing tricks on me, the reader, by pretending they’ve both been living in this town all along! And I don’t appreciate it.

Mary Worth, 1/11/23

“Iris. You know, my friend, Iris? The one who got married here today? Looks like it’s time to ship you off to that facility I’ve already picked out; fortunately I tricked you into signing that power of attorney form a few months back.”

Six Chix, 1/11/23

The thing about puns is that the worse they are, the better they are, making them completely immune to criticism, and the thing about having a syndicated newspaper strip is that if you think of a bad pun, you can draw a cartoon of it and get paid. I’mnot saying I like today’s Six Chix, but I do have to respect it.