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Blondie, 4/3/21

Not sure why but I’m very fixated on the choice to do a pink-to-blue gradient in the background here. Specifically, I’m very curious as to whether we’re looking at sunrise or sunset. Typically, Dagwood and Mr. Beasley the mailman crash into one another as Dagwood runs out the door in the morning to catch his carpool, but that usually happens because he’s running late, so it seems unlikely that our notorious snoozemeister would be up and around literally at the break of down. Mostly I’m curious as to whether the madness Mr. Beasley is displaying in today’s strip arises from beginning-of-day manic enthusiasm or end-of-day exhaustion verging on psychosis. I’m sure I could comb through hundreds of Blondie strips looking for clues as to the geographic orientation of the Bumstead home to determine whether we’re looking east or west here, but I’m proud to report that I’m not quite at that level of comics obsession.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/3/21

Man, this strip always does its best to extract grim laffs from its characters’ economically desperate situation, but “Snuffy begs Doc Pritchart to freeze his face into immobility with off-label botox, giving him a marginal advantage in the games of chance where the few circulating dollars in Hootin’ Holler are passed back and forth among the town’s impoverished residents” is really on another level.

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Marvin, 3/19/21

I assume Marvin creator Tom Armstrong has been drunk with power ever since he successfully fought off a lawsuit filed by a Mercedes dealership who was cruelly lampooned on comics pages across the nation for alleged bad service, but let me say this: the Flintstones, along with all other intellectual property developed by Hanna-Barbera, are currently owned by Warner Bros. Animation, a subsidiary of AT&T, which is a company with substantially deeper pockets and a much stronger urge to dominate than some hapless car dealer.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/19/21

The idea that divorces in Hootin’ Holler are settled via some legal process with attorneys involved, rather than by violent multigenerational clan feuds, has frankly shaken me to my very core.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/19/21

Wait, so Buck is supposed to be … comedy relief? He’s intended to be funny, you say? Huh. Huh.

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Dustin, 3/8/21

Look, I tolerated it when the obsessive neurotics of the late lamented (?) Edge City tried to get into mild S&M, and I endured it when the neurotic obsessives of the gone but not forgotten (??) Pajama Diaries casually referenced their own kink. That’s because I what I felt for those couples wasn’t warmth exactly, but at least was sort of a mild contempt. But these two? These two I don’t like at all, and the thought of them having any fun infuriates me, especially if that fun involves getting horned up watching a John Wayne movie.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/8/21

“Or, p’rhaps when the fellas get a whiff, they lose all their inhibitions and our poker night will b’come an evenin’ o’ unbridled sexual passion, which we’ll ne’er speak of agin! Or the card-cheatin’ thing, that’d be good too.”