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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/3/21

For a brief moment, Snuffy realizes that he’s harvesting worms that he’ll use to catch fish that he’ll presumably eat, which is a little too close to productive economic activity for comfort! Fortunately, he soon turns the whole exercise into yet another opportunity to further drain his household’s rapidly diminishing resources, which is much more his speed.

Dustin, 10/3/21

I’ve gotta say, I do enjoy the few Dustins that don’t focus on the strip’s generation-war shtick. Today there’s no hint of conflict between Dustin and his dad, just a young man giving in to heavy-lidded bliss at the thought that soon he’ll be devoured by this pack of hungry raccoons and all his troubles will be over.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 10/3/21

Leroy retreats to his mind palace, imagining watching the news with his wife and seeing yet another coastal city flooded by a category 5 Hurricane Loretta, the fifth storm with that name this year. “That’s what the mall looks like when you’re done with it,” he says, as scenes of ruined homes and stores flash on the screen. And she can’t do anything about it! It’s the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, that’s naming them, not him!

Panel from Slylock Fox, 10/3/21

I’m sorry, Cassandra is a cat burglar and also an actual cat, so no, I don’t think she’s going to sheepishly reappear in the lobby once she realizes she got in an elevator that only goes up. She’ll be climbing down the side of the building within minutes, or maybe just leaping from rooftop to rooftop to make her escape. The only “error” she’s made is getting those severe bangs.

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Between Friends, 9/22/21

I’ve been reading and very occasionally commenting on Between Friends for a while now, and I absolutely get and accept that the titular “friends” are all women, and their jobs are extremely ill-defined white collar work of some kind, so I definitely shouldn’t expect to know what their husbands/boyfriends, who are definitely the strip’s supporting characters, do for a living. And yet I could not help but be very intrigued by what appears very much to be a coffin behind Susan’s husband in the background of panel one. That looks a lot like a coffin, right? Or, it could be something else (a closed grill, maybe?) and the colorist just thought it looked like a coffin, possibly because Susan’s husband is wearing a black suit with a pocket square and if he’s not an undertaker but just some guy standing near a grill outside during the workday, well, why is he dressed like that? Anyway, I certainly hope there’s a grieving family standing just out of frame, staring at him in increasing agitation as he loudly makes his evening plans.

Gil Thorp, 9/22/21

Good lord, Heather, reporting on Milford games on Twitter so that people can read about them as they happen instead of waiting for tomorrow’s afternoon edition to arrive on their doorstep is one thing, but are you really walking away from Coach Thorp while he’s mid-sentence to talk to one of the children who play for him? Looks like you’re about to make a powerful enemy (Coach Thorp), and just as the Hapsburgs made the seemingly unthinkable decision to ally with Bourbon France in the aftermath of the War of the Austrian Succession, so to will Gil make peace with his hereditary enemy (Marty Moon) to restore the high school sports-local media balance of power.

Barney Google, 9/22/21

Just a reminder that, canonically, Snuffy’s dad was asleep for decades (?) in the woods in a comical Rip Van Winkle-style situation, so who even knows what’s going on inside his body! Pretty weird stuff, I bet!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/26/21

I’m a big believer that most comic-strip level gags should include exactly the amount of information they need to make the joke work and no more, which is why it drives me up the wall that this strip includes the name of Loweezy’s sister. It would be bad enough that she just named her sister (whom we’ve never see in the strip) for no reason, since it creates the nagging suspicion that this sister, as opposed to some other sister, is important to make the punchline work for some reason. But then they go and name her “Zoney!” “Loweezy” is the post-apocalyptic Hootin’ Holler newspeak for “Louisa,” but what the hell is “Zoney” derived from? Arizona? Does the vague memory of distant Arizona live on in Holler-adjacent onomastics? Gah, the fact that they added this name to her word balloon means that we ended up with two exclamation points alone on their own line! GAH!!!

Blondie, 8/26/21

One has to wonder who the “I” in Dagwood’s proposed social media clickbait headline is intended to be. It’s clearly not Dagwood, who is the star of the video. In fact, one wonders who’s filming this obviously staged scene in the first place, and what sad benefits Dagwood promised them for helping launch him to TikTok stardom.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/26/21

Oh, wow, sorry I said yesterday that this Funky Winkerbean development was going to be about sex, when in fact it’s about the most obvious plot twist anyone could imagine. Don’t worry, thought: Les still had an orgasm.

Mary Worth, 8/26/21

WILBUR’S IN A PISS FIGHT WITH A CAT, EVERYONE

A PISS FIGHT

IT’S CHRISTMAS IN AUGUST