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Mary Worth, 8/14/22

Behold DaWnilbur, everyone! I love the way this matches up with realistic dream logic in that Dawn was spending hours before falling asleep saying “It’s like I’m turning into my father!” but once in the dreamscape she’s totally unsuspecting and when her hair starts falling out she doesn’t immediately grasp the metaphor, but just looks at it quizzically as the Transformation gets underway. Anyway, I truly enjoy the next-to-last panel here, in which we learn that even fully Wilburized, Dawn will still have pretty, pretty eyes.

Dick Tracy, 8/14/22

It’s never been entirely clear what form of energy the Lunarians harness/generate with their antennae, but I guess we now know that it definitely raises temperature, right? Like if poor Marina had been torn apart by, like, magnetism or antigravity or something, her killers wouldn’t be staring at the carnage in icy disdain making a cruel remark about how it all smelled, the way they would about charred flesh? Or maybe they would. I don’t know what it smells like when someone is killed horribly by space aliens, I live my life correctly, thank you very much.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/14/22

Here’s a strip where the throwaway panels at the beginning make the whole thing profoundly sad. Like, Jughaid was explicitly invited to join a band, and but then sometime afterwards either left or was forced out and is now trying and failing to make it as a solo act. What emotionally fraught Fleetwood Mac-level band drama are we not being shown here?

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Gil Thorp, 7/26/22

Wow, sorry, I guess because I’m an effete urban liberal I interpreted yesterday’s Gil Thorp scene as a bunch of public school employees enjoying an afternoon at a coffee shop, when in fact it’s a bunch of manly coaches pounding down hard liquor at a bar! The sort of bar where the bartenders will awkwardly flirt with you after you’ve been recently (?) abandoned (?) by your family, and also where you can just get your ass extremely kicked by the rowdy fellas from New Thayer.

Mary Worth, 7/26/22

OK, I know I’ve made it clear that I hate Jared very much and that by and large his simpering facial expressions send me into paroxysms of contempt, but I have to admit that the weird thing Jared’s doing with his mouth here in panel two is a wholly appropriate reaction to unexpectedly having to have lunch (and talk about your relationship problems) with Mary Worth.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/26/22

“Also, Hootin’ Holler’s tenuous connection to the economy of the outside world means that it’s just good sense to harvest whatever local calories we can! Store up fat for the winter now, paw!”

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Pluggers, 6/10/22

I have been writing this blog for far too many years, and a trend that I have noticed over that entire period is that syndicated newspaper comics have always felt like they need to be doing something to keep up with “the modern world” in some way. It keeps not working, but also there have continued to be syndicated newspaper comics for that entire period as well, so maybe they don’t, in fact, have to do anything at all, but their attempts are inevitably pretty funny. For instance, way back in 2006, For Better Or For Worse (only real ones will remember the Foobs) started posting animated versions of the strips on its website, except these were the same strips that went to physical newspapers where animation wouldn’t work so the only animation was that the characters would blink, and fairly slowly, so you could miss it and then see it out of the corner of your eye and be like “What the fuck was that, am I going crazy, are these people moving????” It wasn’t great! It wasn’t great for a number of reasons, not least of which is that the idea was planted that maybe some other cartoonist would try this stunt, and that they might try it at any time: that some image you assumed was static would suddenly start moving. This would be unsettling at any time, of course, but with some strips it would be much, much more traumatizing than others.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/10/22

In order to experience the round of inflation that rest of us are all going through, Hootin’ Holler would have to be connected to global supply chains and the worldwide central banking systems, which we all know is absolutely not the case. I assume this is just a coincidence and what actually happened is that a plane crashed on the edge of town that had a cargo hold full of $100 bills, or possibly Chuck E. Cheese ski-ball tickets.