Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/28/14

Say what you will about the grotesquely stylized hillbilly characters in Snuffy Smith, but their mostly fabricated dialect certain does include some striking turns of phrase! Take, for instance, “’xpectin’ a li’l stranger.” Have you ever heard a pregnancy described in more philosophically melancholy terms. “Sure, th’ li’l tater will be flesh an’ blood to hub and me. But in th’ end, ain’t we all strangers t’each other? Can we ever see into th’ heart of another?”

The throwaway panels, meanwhile, are a bit more straightforwardly depressing. “Th’ good news: No more dietin’ fer you! Th’ bad news: infant moratality in Hootin’ Holler is seven times th’ national average!”

B.C., 9/28/14

The throwaway panels here — “Oh, can’t find one of your beloved possessions, son? Your father may have hocked it, because we’re constantly teetering on the edge of financial ruin!” — may be one of the grimmest things I’ve seen in the comics pages in a while. The rest of the strip fills in the details of the story, though: dad is suffering from a traumatic brain injury, so obviously he can’t be expected to hold down a steady job.

Hi and Lois, 9/28/14

Running through a checklist and then concluding with an eerily contraction-less “I think we are ready”? Spending time during the game quantifying all aspects of the current seasons? Haha, the Flagstons aren’t aliens wearing meatsack disguises and trying to blend into human society at all!

Post Content

Momma, 9/27/14

Today’s Momma is a master class in whiplash, moving from clunky, painfully artificial dialogue clearly meant to set up a joke in the first two panels to gibbering madness in panel three. I guess Momma is doing an exaggerated “hands up” gesture to make it clear she’s responding to Francis’s monetary request neither freely nor cheerfully. But what are we to make of the young men’s dialogue? Francis is only thinking his, and with the darkened bottom of the thought balloon that designates gloom in this strip. “Never mind, Normy,” he muses. “I never wanted you to see this. I didn’t want you to know that this is how things really are in this house.” Normy, meanwhile, similarly troubled, mutters “I dig you…” presumably in reluctant admiration of Francis’s elder-terrifying fundraising techniques.

Mark Trail, 9/27/14

You might think Mark is being awful cold to the obviously smitten Lori, looking at her expressionlessly as she weeps and telling her that he really has nothing to do with her situation and that she should “take care of herself.” But that’s pretty much how he treats his wife, so!

B.C., 9/27/14

Remember when Johnny Hart was alive and B.C. did strips mocking the concept of evolution? I guess you could say that under new management, the strip has … evolved. UGH NO SORRY I EVEN SAID THAT IT WAS TERRIBLE

Post Content

Mark Trail, 6/30/14

Whoops, looks like I misinterpreted the relationship between Lori and Chris earlier — they aren’t a mismatched good gal/bad guy couple, but rather a good gal/bad guy safari buddy pair, in which the bad guy wants more, probably because he’s bad. Tonight Lori is letting Chris down extremely not-easy: she’d be perfectly willing to look past his ruined finances and his life-destroying gambling problem if only she felt even the slightest bit of romantic attraction for him, which, she can’t emphasize enough, she does not. Ha ha, Chris, feel free to think that Lori has “fallen” for asexual weirdo Mark Trail over the past six hours that she’s known him and that’s why she doesn’t want to be your girlfriend! But that’s not it at all. It’s you! It’s just that you’re terrible and nobody could possibly love you!

Shoe, 6/30/14

While traditionally birds and reptiles have been seen as different classes within the animal kingdom, over the past few decades biologists have redefined their taxonomies based on evolutionary descent rather than physical characteristics. Since birds are descended from dinosaurs, the distinction between birds and reptiles is thus false. Crocodiles and alligators, for instance, are more closely related to birds than they are to lizards or turtles. What I’m trying to say here, lady, is that you’re a bird and your feet are scaly and clawed and maybe you shouldn’t be so self-loathing about it.

B.C., 6/30/14

He’d never been fishing before, so he didn’t really know what to expect. Certainly he wasn’t anticipating that he’d get to sweet-talk and then make love to a fish. Not that he was complaining, mind you.

Heathcliff, 6/30/14

The cat wig business is great ha ha ha I have literally no idea what’s happening here or what it could possibly mean