Archive: Barney Google & Snuffy Smith

Post Content

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.

Post Content

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?

Post Content

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.