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Archive: Barney Google & Snuffy Smith

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Chip is trying to hold it together and not doing a great job

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Hi and Lois, 1/29/22

Man, all the facial expressions in that last panel are great: Hi and Lois, desperate to salvage whatever joy they can from their planned date night; the maître d’, furious because this is not, in fact, how reservations work; the twins, deeply suspicious of any meal that isn’t buttered noodles at room temperature, just the way they like them. But most heartbreaking of all is Trixie, who is absolutely beaming, presumably because for once her family has decided to not just leave her crawling unattended on the floor for the day but are actually including her in their activities.

Gil Thorp, 1/29/22

The non-gambling spring Gil Thorp plot involves the girl’s basketball team captain figuring out how to be a leader, and possibly it’s just by berating teammates with questions about their bodies? She recently got into the Air Force Academy, so this is going to have to do with her future as an officer, maybe? Anyway, it’s so boring that the Kellogg Company has refused to allow the Pop-Tarts® brand to be associated with it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/29/22

Look, I don’t want to just throw around terms like “incitement to genocide,” but I am saying that any flatlander communities immediately downhill from Hootin’ Holler should be wary of “Sterilizin’ Exp’dishuns” being sent out as this kind of rhetoric escalates.

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Crime and punishment

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 1/16/22

I just want to offer my 100% unironic appreciation of everything going on in this panel. I love the weird angle we’re seeing Shady from, I love his expression as he watches his nemeses through the grate, I love the way he’s cradling that bag of cash and the way Max is ogling the few scattered bills on the floor, and I definitely love the look of smug triumph on Sly’s face as he gets ready to hit the dial button, knowing exactly what’s coming next. Shady is definitely dumb enough to leave his ringer on while doing crimes, but is he dumb enough to give his cell number to Slylock in the first place? Maybe, but it’s just as likely that the Forest Kingdom’s NSA equivalent is happy to hand out the phone numbers of known undesirables to law enforcement. There’s no such thing as human rights in a state where humans have been hunted to near extinction!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/16/22

Oh, man, remember a few years ago how Snuffy found his dad in the woods where he had been asleep for decades, Rip Van Winkle style? You’d think that would make him really appreciate the world’s possibilities and work to make the most of his new lease on life, but no, he’s just going back to chicken-based crime. You hate to see it!

Funky Winkerbean, 1/16/22

I sincerely hope that that is the helmet that Bull died in. We deserve that much.

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Step out of the shade and into the SUN OF GLORY

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Slylock Fox, 1/10/22

This is at least the third time this mystery has appeared in Slylock Fox: it showed up in 2013, with exactly the same art albeit with different coloring, and had previously appeared in 2011, with different art but the same basic mystery and solution. My earlier commentary on those strips in both cases was predicated on the same scenario: that Shady Shrew had enslaved sapient silkworms and was forcing them to manufacture clothes from which he profited. But I must be mellowing in my old age, because my first thought today on reading the strip was “But wait! What if Shady has actually developed a new plant-based silk substitute, liberating his fellow animals from toil? Did you put that possibility into your ratiocination calculus, Slylock? Of course not, but Shady doesn’t need your approval! Society will hail him as a hero, at least until the plants become sapient too.”

Dick Tracy, 1/10/22

Not much to say specifically here, I just think this is a pretty good Dick Tracy fight panel, with the moody shadows and the KRAKing and BLAMing and such! I don’t really expect either of the participants to die in some baroquely violent way like in the good old days, but I won’t pretend I don’t enjoy this!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/10/22

You ever get a bunch of annoying car warranty scam calls and think of a great joke for your hillbilly-themed comic strip, then remember that your hillbilly characters don’t actually have access to phones, but you don’t feel like coming up with a new joke so you just kind of work around it? Because if you did, the result would look a lot like today’s Snuffy Smith. Also, does Snuffy think that mules live forever? If so, he’s in for an extremely rude surprise, possibly soon.