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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/15/25

Hey, here’s a fun fact for you: did you know that ventriloquists don’t “throw” their voices anywhere? They just learn to speak with their mouths closed while working a puppet to match their speech, which creates the illusion that the voice is coming from elsewhere, because our sense of vision is much more precise than our sense of hearing and we tend to lock on to the moving puppet and assume that’s where the sound is coming from (and it’s generally not too far from the puppeteer anyway). Advanced practitioners can alter their voice to be softer so it seems to be coming from far away, but nobody can actually make it sound like it’s coming from a completely different direction. And yet there are so many comics and cartoons that imply otherwise! Much like this one! I attribute it to comics and ventriloquism emerging from the same milieu of popular entertainment and so cartoonists felt they would be violating kayfabe if they let on how it worked, but it’s also possible they didn’t know either because you couldn’t just look stuff up on Wikipedia back then, and now we’re stuck with the tropes. Anyway, my point is that as a child, I, like I assume many of you, had wildly incorrect ideas about ventriloquism, so thanks a lot, comics. And don’t even get me started on quicksand!

Heathcliff, 2/15/25

Oh, are you saying a robot and a cat can’t be friends, Grandpa Nutmeg??? I guess this really is the last acceptable prejudice, huh. (Not going into the details of what “this” might refer to, please write some fanfic about it if it interests you.)

Dennis the Menace, 2/15/25

I’m not sure what exactly Dennis is blathering on about — like is he saying that he did a bunch of sins over the past week because he hadn’t heard the good news about how he shouldn’t or something, maybe? — but I don’t actually think that’s important, because he’s only talking to distract the minister so he can get close enough to deliver a solid punch to the nuts. And the minister knows it! That’s good defensive use of the Holy Bible there, rev, I know they don’t teach that at seminary, you learned it from hard experience.

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The Lockhorns, 2/12/25

Inexpensive compared to what, Leroy? Eating at a “nice” restaurant? It still is! Eating at home? It never was! No, you’ve just decided to make Loretta feel bad because she begged to go out to eat somewhere, anywhere for once. Isn’t it cruel enough that you’re forcing her to split a single order of fries with you? Why can’t you be more like the guy in the background, who sincerely appreciates all the fast food industry’s deep bench of food scientists have done in terms of creating meal-like experiences suffused with the proper combinations of chemicals to activate the exact same part of your brain that reacts to cocaine?

Dennis the Menace, 2/12/25

Normally I’m not a fan of the “Dennis shit-talks his mom’s cooking” strips, but I gotta admit he’s really selling it here. That’s the face a guy with a mouthful of sawdust. That’s the face a guy who hasn’t tasted anything other than sawdust in years.

Pluggers, 2/12/25

Either pluggers swap sexual partners so often they can no longer be bothered to keep track of their fuckbuddies’ names, or they’re suffering from some kind of tragic brain ailment that’s causing early onset dementia. I leave it up to you to decide which possibility is more disturbing.

Mary Worth, 2/12/25

“I am now that Jared has pointed out that ‘Dirk’ rhymes with ‘jerk’! That’s a great mnemonic to remind me that he’s a jerk! Usually I just see his pretty eyes and beefy forearms and forget.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/12/25

Ha ha, it’s funny because everyone in town knows that Snuffy is a financial, legal, and emotional burden on all of his loved ones!

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Tina’s Groove, 1/24/25

A thing about being a monarch is that nobody can stop you from doing all sorts of awful sicko stuff, and usually this takes the form of wars or religious persecution or what have you, but sometimes it just means they get to play out their sadistic whims. A particularly sadistic one is “raising a baby that nobody ever speaks to in the hopes that it will talk and we’ll learn what God’s original language is,” and there really must be something to this because supposedly four different rulers — Pharaoh Psamtik I, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, King James IV of Scotland, and the Mughal Emperor Akbar — supposedly tried it. There’s some doubt that any of these experiments really took place, although the recorded end of Frederick’s — “But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments” — seems grimly plausible.

Anyway, it doesn’t sound like Greg’s upbringing was that extreme, but still, it does seem like he’s the subject of some kind of experiment? Maybe to see if, never having met another soul outside his family in his whole sad sack life, he’d fall in love with the anxious, depressive protagonist of Tina’s Groove? She had a boyfriend a a couple weeks ago, but she’s on the prowl for hot (?) friends’ cousins now, apparently!

Blondie, 1/24/25

Speaking of people isolated from outside stimulus, I will note that Blondie appears to be hearing “I am woman, hear me roar,” a line from a Helen Reddy song released in 1971, for the first time, and I would actually like to see an analysis of what parts of her brain are “modern suburban wife and caterer” and what parts are “flapper girl from the 1930s.” I think that’d be a real interesting experiment, honestly! Not sure if we could do it with an MRI machine or what, I leave the implementation details to the eggheads.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/24/25

I was going to suggest that Hootin’ Holler was so isolated from mainstream society that its inhabitants are ignorant of even basic cryptid information, which explains why Jughaid seems to confuse “snowman” in the sense of the folk art he’s creating in his yard with the mysterious shaggy man-like beast of the Himalayas. But clearly Snuffy is well steeped in the lore, so I guess we just have to admit that Jughaid is kind of dumb.