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Funky Winkerbean, 2/15/22

Look, I have very little credentials to speak as a “Hollywood insider” of any sort, but I feel very confident in saying that box office failures that got zero promotion from the studios that produced them do not get Oscar nominations. They simply do not! Either the studio thinks there’s an Oscar-worthy performance in it, in which case it does promote the movie, at least as something art-house-y award-worthy, or the movie finds an audience perhaps unexpectedly and then the studios do some “for your consideration” lobbying as awards season approaches. Performances in movies nobody saw or liked (“nobody” here meaning both general audiences and film snobs/critics) definitely do not get nominations just out of the blue, buzz-free, no matter how moving they are or how much awareness of breast cancer they raise. Anyway, I guess Mason is saying she’s up for an Oscar nomination rather than she’s actually been nominated, so … maybe the studio is doing a late push, or something? But, overall, if the woman playing Les’s dead wife in a low-budget flop wins an Oscar, I will officially declare that less realistic than the time this strip burned down Los Angeles and created millions of refugees.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/15/22

The days in which people gave the Morgans heaps of money and free boats for no reason seem to be over, for the most part, but you have to admit that a jailhouse snitch derailing Rene’s likely-to-succeed lawsuit out of the goodness of his heart is functionally the same thing as giving them a bunch of money, if you think about it mathematically.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/15/22

Would I have ever predicted that Snuffy Smith would meet his end not at the hands of Sheriff Tait or an aggrieved member of the Barlow clan, but would rather be torn to pieces by a dozens angry squirrels? No, but I’m not complaining about it.

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Gasoline Alley, 2/1/22

Folks, for a long time I’ve been trying to ignore the fact that there’s a movie coming out called Gasoline Alley. As near as I can tell, it has literally zero connection to the comic strip, as its Wikipedia entry informs me its tagline is “Justice Gets Dirty” and it stars Bruce Willis as “Freeman,” Luke Wilson “Vargas,” and “Devon Sawa” as “Jimmy Jayne,” none of that tracking to our beloved comic strip, which is about [thinks long and hard about what you might describe Gasoline Alley, the comic strip, as being “about”] scrapbooking. Anyhoo, I don’t have the energy to do any research on copyright law, but since Gasoline Alley is 103 years old, I’m going to guess that the title, at least, is now in the public domain, and so all the strip can do in revenge for a movie with the lesser-known Wilson brother and “Devon Sawa” in it stealing its name is put out a long, rambling shaggy dog plot involving these two Hollywood producers that will ultimately go absolutely nowhere.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/1/22

I honestly couldn’t tell you what Mother Goose and Grimm is “about” either, but up until today I would’ve been very sure that what it wasn’t about was the seething, unrequited lust its elderly bird-person characters had for one another. You learn something new every day, in the funny pages!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/1/22

One of the great mysteries of Snuffy Smith: how old is Snuffy Smith, exactly? On the one hand, he and Loweezy are young enough to have an infant son; on the other, as we learned today, Snuffy is entirely toothless. I guess it’s possible that, at some point when Snuffy was in his late 20s or early 30s, Doc Pritchart found a rotten tooth or two and decided just to pull them all to “get ahead of the game.”

Dennis the Menace, 2/1/22

“We live in a degraded, fallen world, Mr. Wilson! Don’t bother getting dressed up for it, they’re just going to put you on TikTok and then do a cancel culture on ya.”

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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.