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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/1/18

Ah, Snuffy and Lukey are having a good laff, over the idea of a whole Congression’l District of Smifs! Of course, none of Snuffy’s relatives would have any intention of voting, paying taxes, obeying laws that restrict their whims, or otherwise buying into the scam of representative democracy. That’s why it’s so funny!

Dick Tracy, 9/1/18

I get that Sam and Dick are pleased, but those aren’t “Yay, we’re going to solve a mystery!” smiles. Those are “Looks like someone’s about to be shot multiple times in the face while ‘resisting arrest’” smiles.

Crankshaft, 9/1/18

Hey guys, for total verisimilitude, please go back and read the last year or so of Crankshaft, strips, and for every one that takes place on his bus, imagine a faint but distinct odor of stale vomit.

Gil Thorp, 9/1/18

I guarantee you that Gil has whined about “participation trophies” at some point in his life, but it appears the punchline for this summer’s golf storyline is “not cheating is basically winning!!!!” Bring on the bonfire, I’m begging you

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/18/18

“It’s not as weird as being sent to check in on a patient’s beach house and finding it occupied by a bunch of strippers with hearts of gold, or as weird as stumbling upon a MRSA epidemic spread to teens all over town by infected wrestling mats, or as weird as a nanny and a couple of her friends conspiring to keep a demented old man in charge of a publicly traded corporation for their own financial benefit. Seems like that kind of fun stuff doesn’t really happen around here very much anymore! Just, uh, old comic book art hidden under the floorboards from here on out, I guess.”

Dick Tracy, 8/18/18

Thanks, Dick Tracy Narration Box, for reminding me, a Dick Tracy reader, that I’m consuming serialized content! Without this warning I may have spent the next 24 hours worrying that we’d never learn what Bribery and Lafayette Austin have to talk about, or that maybe the strip was just going to unceremoniously stop publishing altogether.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/18/18

Snuffy Smith trying to latch onto the sovereign citizen movement is possibly the least surprising development in the comics pages this year.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/8/18

So Funky has to go get Holly’s mom in Florida for complex reasons that I’ll probably have to explain at some point if I want to make fun of this strip in the next several weeks but let’s just set them aside at this point, and he’s leaving his dumb stepson Cory (I think he’s his stepson? I’ve never actually been clear on this point) in charge of Montoni’s while he’s away. I’m assuming the joke here is that Cory is trying to relate to his stepdad using awful wordplay, which is the preferred method of establishing intimacy in Westview, but Funky is just getting madder and madder because he never liked Cory and he never will. But it would be much funnier if Cory were trying to convince Funky to roll out his million-dollar idea for a new product, “Pizza Cake,” which the family then sinks all its money into promoting only to discover that Cory has just accidentally reinvented Chicago-style pizza and none of the right-thinking citizens of northeast Ohio want anything to do with it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/8/18

Our fellas are laffin’ it up, but they’re also expressing a genuine frustration about life in Hootin’ Holler: in the absence of a widely accepted system of impartial justice, disputes in this hardscrabble region are settled by the power wielded by interlocking kinship groups, and frequently escalate into violent feuds. Lukey and Snuffy live in a world where no relationship with another person is allowed to be merely tepid or neutral: either someone is your dearest friend who you would defend, literally, to the death, or a hated enemy who must be defeated, all based on an argument that happened in a saloon three generations ago.