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Archive: Barney Google & Snuffy Smith

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“Oh, whoops, I dropped my stethoscope. You’re probably wondering why I own one of these, huh?”

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Mary Worth, 4/29/21

There’s a lot of suspension of disbelief that goes into enjoying a comic strip like Mary Worth, and sometimes I can pull it off and sometimes I can’t. For instance, I absolutely refuse to believe that Drew has managed to become mildly Instagram famous without ever letting slip in one of his captions that he’s a doctor, and yet immediately upon being presented with his meal blurted out “It looks better than the hospital cafeteria food that I’m very familiar with because of all the time I spend in a hospital — and not as a patient! [wink wink]” That sandwich looks like shit, by the way, and also the side of slaw Ashlee so grandly announced is nowhere to be seen, so I’m assuming Northview’s cafeteria is of particularly low quality.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/29/21

If you know me, you know that few things exercise my deranged mind like trying to figure out the socioeconomic/political situation of Hootin’ Holler, so today I’m less interested in Uriah unicycling the mail all over the region than I am in the fact that Silas, who is not a government official but the proprietor of the town’s only store, is paying for his transportation. My current theory: the Post Office was violently ejected from the town decades ago, possibly in reaction to its attempt to impose the “number of the beast” in the form of zip codes. Silas, who needs to maintain a connection to the outside world in order to keep his store of manufactured goods stocked, is the only person still receiving mail, and he’s set Uriah up as his private delivery man, charging townsfolk outrageous markup over regular postage rates. For legal reasons, he refers to his delivery service as the “Newnited States Post Office.”

The Phantom, 4/29/21

I make fun of soap strips all the time when they’re inadvertently funny, so I feel obligated to point out when they’re successfully funny on purpose, like when Heloise begins a Heloise-centric storyline by describing her dad as “off somewhere punching a guy,” an incident I hope we never hear any more details on.

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Maybe the weight-lifting lady should give the jump-rope lady some more space, just a suggestion

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The Lockhorns, 4/22/21

As usual, I admire the craftsmanship that went into today’s Lockhorns. It would be easy to have the panel just consist of Loretta staring dead-eyed at the woman behind the counter, unsure if she’s making a little joke or issuing a serious warning or what, damn it, she just wants to sign up for a class and people seem to like Zumba, maybe some exercise would help pull her out of her decades-deep depression, why does everything have to be a comedy routine around here. But to have that going on in the foreground, while in the background, Leroy is thinking “Oh, ladies in leotards jumping rope and lifting weights in front of a huge window? Don’t mind if I do”? That’s how you know a real professional put this one together.

Dennis the Menace, 4/22/21

This is absolutely not Joey or Dennis’s house, right? Like, they probably don’t even know whose house this is?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/22/21

Weezy’s face in the final panel shows that she knows Snuffy is just joking. He may be generally averse to physical labor, but he never passes up an opportunity to dig a shallow grave for members of the hated Barlow clan who’ve died at Smif hands in the latest backwoods ambush! Plus he absolutely does not give a shit about the environment.

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No exit (from the food court)

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Dennis the Menace, 4/5/21

I like that these two kids and their moms have similar facial expressions, as if both pairs were mirror images of one another. In particular, I’d like to imagine that, while Dennis is cracking wise about this kid living a life no better than a dog’s, the leashèd child is saying, “Look, mommy, that boy is experiencing freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/5/21

When I first saw this strip today, I assumed that it was maybe the anniversary of the first Mary Worth strip or something and there’d be tributes to our favorite gal all across the King Features comics pages today! But no, apparently all that happened was that someone in the Snuffy Smith creative team thought up this pun and declared “Tarnation, fellers, that there’s good synergy!” (For this bit, I’m assuming that a requirement for working on Snuffy Smith is that you have to talk in the fake and borderline offensive Snuffy Smith hillbilly patois at all times when you’re on the clock.)

Mary Worth, 4/5/21

Anyway, Mary has plenty of time to appear in other comics because, even though we all assumed that this storyline had finally, blessedly reach its natural conclusion and we’d need her back to set up the next one, it turns out that’s not true, at all! In fact, it’s never going to end and this is our hell, just two old people half-heartedly flirting by talking about how great dogs and forgiveness are.