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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/10/25

Ha ha, can you imagine? The Smif and Barlow families would be lined up opposite each other, and Steve Harvey would shout out, “Things you carry home in a burlap sack!” And Barlow would buzz in first and smugly shout “Chickens!” but while he’s distracted, Snuffy jumps over the podium and charges at him with a rusty blade he had hidden in his overalls, eager to slit Barlow’s throat and finally declare victory in their long-running clan war, right there on national television. The little bastard doesn’t understand that TV shows aren’t broadcast live, but the footage will leak out anyway. It’s too sensational not to.

Bizarro, 1/10/25

Hey, did you know that the millions of toner cartridges and batteries we’ve produced over the past few decades all have souls? Or maybe they are the souls of the electronic equipment we stick them inside, I’m not 100% that I follow the cosmology here, but the point is we’re going to be encountering this stuff when we die and move on to the next world, and I think it’s going to have some questions for us that I for one am not sure I’ll be able to answer.

Dennis the Menace, 1/10/25

You know what’s real menacing behavior, Gina? Carrying around a 5 x 7 wedding picture of your parents outside in the middle of winter while you tell people about this. What if you drop it in the snow?

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/5/25

Lord knows I’ve spent enough time contemplating the economy and politics of Hootin’ Holler, so I might as well take this opportunity to unpack its cosmology a bit. You are all, I trust, familiar with Granny Creeps, a chthonic sorceress or perhaps demigoddess who creates potions and spells from native roots and lichens and lives in a local cave — indeed, in a strip from a few days ago, we learned that she recently blocked up the cave mouth with rocks so she can “hibernate.” Today, we are reminded that there’s another town resident who tinkers with powers beyond our ordinary plane of existence: Zeldy, who works brighter, more ethereal magic, a being of wind and spirit who looks into the future rather than drawing power from the past. Now, Zeldy hasn’t been seen in this strip since 2013, but I have a terrible suspicion about why this pastel-hued, pale-skinned medium is being brought back to a strip that already has an ominous green figure: it’s called Wicked Fever and Barney Google and Snuffy Smith has, regrettably, caught it.

Hi and Lois, 1/5/25

God, I love the fact that Lois and Irma have gotten into this Hawaiian bit just so they can spend 90 seconds making sure their husbands are getting drunk before they peace out. Sure, they might get weird looks at the mall, but they can be secure in the knowledge that their blotto husbands neither know nor care when they’re coming back.

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No comment of this truncated week, folks — we’ll let pugfuggly have the place of pride till next Friday!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/3/25

OK, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, you have to decide: is Hootin’ Holler an impoverished and isolated community in one of America’s neglected rural byways, or is it, you know, in the past? “Hillbilly times,” or whatever? You could be forgiven for saying “Josh, it’s obviously in the past, what are you talking about” but if that’s the case, then how come the strip’s hillbillies know about bitcoin and pickleball, huh, smart guy? Anyway, my point is that Jughaid absolutely does not know what a pocket watch is, nor does he understand the modern industrial economy, because if he did he’d know that Santa isn’t about to retool his entire production line just because one kid wants a pocket watch, c’mon.

Tina’s Groove, 1/3/25

“Say,” you’re probably wondering, “does Tina, the title character of Tina’s Groove, a comic strip currently in reruns that Josh talks about extremely intermittently on his blog, have much a love life?” Answer: she does, and it’s just as depressing as everything else she has going on. I do like that this guy has a picture of her on his desk, where to me she looks as shockingly depressed as she always does. It’s like he looked right into her gloomy soul and decided “Sure, whatever,” and I think that’s sweet.