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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/17/20

I’m sure the Smifs and the Barlows could rattle off a list of slights and transgressions going back generations that have kept their blood feud alive, but today’s strip shows the real underlying structural motivation behind it: a battle over access to scarce resources.

Mary Worth, 4/17/20

Sure, Hugo is brusquely rejecting Dawn’s suggestion to look at a Star Wars … exhibit? movie? poster? … which is I guess a thing Dawn likes now, and this is a point against him in her mental calculus. But I think he’s actually growing as person: this was a perfect opportunity for him to go on at great length at how much better Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets was than any American sci-fi flick, but he chose not to.

Beetle Bailey, 4/17/20

As the creator of a long-running entertainment website, I understand the tension between going to the well of my classic running bits that regular fans love and doing jokes don’t require backstory so I can hook in potential new readers; newspaper comics face the same dilemma. Today’s Beetle Bailey presents a double face as a result. Longtime strip readers know that the joke here is about the fact that the General and his wife hate each other, and one thing she particularly hates is him staying out late at bars. But if you just came into this strip cold, with no background on the characters, there would really be one logical and obvious way to interpret this punchline: that the General, despite being weary of America’s endless wars, is about to go home, pick up the phone, and start giving the orders that will set yet another one in motion. You can see in his eyes that the thought of sending the ill-prepared men of Camp Swampy into combat is killing a part of his soul, but he has his orders and sees no way out.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/15/20

You know, in the literal century this strip has been in newspapers, it’s been easy to sometimes lose track of what it’s really about, the true meaning of Snuffy Smith, if you will. Sure, most people probably think of it as a vehicle for increasingly baroque FDR-era hillbilly jokes, playing on stereotypes and a visual vocabulary that literally nobody alive today has any first-hand experience with. But today, on Tax Day (observed), Snuffy reminds you of what he’s really all about: he does not pay taxes, and if you know anything about him, that’s what you should know. It’s not like he has some elaborate political theory about being a sovereign citizen or the U.S. government being illegitimate or anything that; he just don’t truck with the revenooers. Screw you, Commissioner of Internal Revenue Charles P. Rettig! Snuffy isn’t paying you shit!

Crankshaft, 4/15/20

Hey. Hey there, comics fans. I know what you’ve been thinking about but are too shy to ask: “How have Ed Crankshaft’s poops been lately?” Well, the answer is regular, real smooth and regular. Also, he doesn’t have any clue about anything that’s been going on in the world, and honestly, I think that’s a perfectly valid trade-off.

Family Circus, 4/15/20

Speaking of poops and things going on in the world, I have no idea if this one was pulled from the Big Family Circus Vault because of its resonance with our modern TP-hoarding crisis or what, but this is definitely the sort of thing that could get a unloved red-headed middle child “volunteered” to a lab as a human guinea pig for testing coronavirus vaccines, just saying.

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Beetle Bailey, 4/7/20

Way back in the mists of time, like the late ’90s and early ’00s, many people looked at the Internet on primitive CRT screens that could only display 256 different colors, which gave rise to a limited “web-safe color palette” made up of shades that you could be sure all your users would see properly. I’m reasonably certain that when I first started this blog in 2004, the colorized comics from King Features still used that palette, which would explain some of the odder coloring choices, like the electric blue sports coats so beloved by the square gentlemen of my late beloved Apartment 3-G.

Anyway, I assume that the anonymous, underpaid comics colorists long ago shifted to accommodate the literally millions of distinct shades that modern monitors and touchscreen devices are capable of displaying, which is why I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that what Cookie is serving up today isn’t a “sloppy joe” as most of us would understand it, i.e., ground beef in a dark red sauce. No, the men of Camp Swampy have their plates running with bright, red, fresh blood, its color picked out of a near-infinite spectrum to indicate that they’ve been offered the still-steaming viscera of something — or someone — who’s been freshly killed.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/7/20

Wow, I have to admit some deep-rooted prejudice that I wasn’t even conscious of holding: I’ve always assumed that Doc Pritchard was a flatlander who ended up in Hootin’ Holler as part of a federal rural medicine program to clear his loans from med school, or maybe he’s just lying low to avoid multiple active malpractice suits. But no, it looks like he’s actually from this place, or at least is tied to its rocky soil via kin; since he’s familiar with their down-home rural ways, that may explain why he’s cheerfully moonlighting as a large-animal vet today.

Six Chix, 4/7/20

Look, the world’s a little crazy right now, so if you have the modestly prominent platform of a day’s share in a nationally syndicated newspaper comic strip, why not use it to air out your most petty and specific grievance? Do you believe not only that deep-dish pizza is garbage, but that those assholes from Chicago don’t even really like it? Go ahead and tell the world! What are they going to do, violate “safe at home” orders to come get you?