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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/4/20

For those of you who don’t know the history (and really, why would you), this comic strip started out as Barney Google, in 1919, and the titular character was a sharp city slicker, but then the strip aimed to cash in on the Depression-era vogue for hillbilly humor already being exploited by Li’l Abner, so Barney went and visited his pal Snuffy Smith in Hootin’ Holler, who by the 1950s had become the strip’s main character, with increasingly infrequent visits from Barney Google. The current creative team brought back Barney in 2012 in his first appearance in 15 years, and he’s appeared intermittently since, but this week he’s actually taken Barney and company back with him to the city, which raises the question: we all know that this strip’s main setting is a grotesque, distorted caricature of rural life, but what will its take on urbanity be? Well, it appears to be people dancing in brightly lit clubs with floor-to-ceiling windows that make them visible from outside, where various draft animals rear about grotesquely on dirt streets, so, in other words: accurate.

Dick Tracy, 12/4/20

Meanwhile, in Dick Tracy, another decades-old strip whose depiction of everyday life is composed of multiple layers of continually updated nostalgia, one of our villains has terribly injured himself in a sewer while the other is about to be killed by his own giant spider, which he keeps captive for venom-milking purposes. How sad is Dick going to be that he doesn’t get to shoot anybody? Maybe he’ll shoot the spider, but his heart won’t really be in it.

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Hi and Lois, 11/15/20

From the fall of 1992 to the spring of 1993, I was a freshman at Cornell University, and at Cornell — and, I assume, at many other universities, although I can only speak to my experience — Spin Doctors’ debut album, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, was absolutely inescapable, and after a few weeks I definitely wanted to escape it, though I admit that during the brief window before I came to loathe the band I did put “Two Princes” on a mix tape for a young lady I was trying, without success, to woo. Anyway, I had mostly managed to purge the music from my head until someone over at Waker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC decided to slip the phrase “pocket full of Kryptonite” into today’s strip, which made me wonder if the album title was maybe a reference to something else, but nope, it’s just a lyric from the album, so there you go: Spin Doctors content in today’s Hi and Lois. While on this journey of discovery, I did learn that that Spin Doctors’ Wikipedia article has one of my very favorite Wikipedia Things, a bar chart showing the comings and goings of various musicians in the band’s lineup over the years, from which I learned that John Popper, later of Blues Traveler, another band unavoidable in Cornell dorms in the early-to-mid ’90s, was briefly in Spin Doctors, which I found noteworthy enough to mention to my wife. Her responses were “Am I supposed to care about this” and “I cannot think of two bands I care less about,” which, I guess, is ultimately why I have a blog, because I have to tell someone this stuff. Anyway, thanks a lot for making me think about this, Hi and Lois. Thanks a lot.

Six Chix, 11/15/20

Honestly, I’m not even sure what to say about this except that I’m kind of in awe of the series of free associations that brought this … allegory? metaphor? fever dream? … into existence. I assume that after utterly defeating the dinosaurs on the court, the asteroids high fived one another, leapt far up into space, and then plummeted back down to earth, obliterating both their vanquished foes and themselves in an apocalyptic blast.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/15/20

Ha ha, Parson, that so-called “currency” doesn’t do you much good in a community that mostly exists as a pre-monetary economy in which social ties mediate almost all economic exchange, does it?

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Daddy Daze, 11/6/20

Daddy Daze launched in June of 2018, with a mission to bring home to readers “all the weirdness that comes with parenting, dealing with small versions of themselves who are inquisitive and sweet, and bewildering all at the same time.” But over the last two years, it’s gotten pretty much all the mileage it can out of that material, and now … now it’s diaper time. Watch out, Marvin, there’s a marginally more sophisticated purveyor of piss jokes in town.

Dustin, 11/6/20

A fun thing about being married to someone for a long time is that you become extremely well attuned to all their annoying little habits, to the point that you can call your spouse out on them before they even do them — a move that they almost certainly consider to be one of your annoying little habits.

Mary Worth, 11/6/20

Damn it, Tommy, Mary likes the excitement, the uncertainty, the chase that comes at the beginning of a new meddle. If you basically just throw yourself at her feet and sob “I suck, fix me,” you’re really going to cut into her enthusiasm for the whole process.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/6/20

Ha ha, it’s funny because Snuffy doesn’t know what “stress” means!