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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/1/12

Here is a True Story from Josh’s Real Life Events: Many years ago, when I in the midst of my failed attempt to acquire a PhD in ancient history, I discovered that getting a humanities grad degree doesn’t pay particularly well, so I used to do office temp work between semesters. So in this one temp gig, I was doing doing filing at a professional association for optometrists with a guy who was getting an MFA in poetry (AND THAT SENTENCE IS A SELF-CONTAINED CAUTIONARY TALE FOR ANYONE THINKING ABOUT GRAD SCHOOL, BY THE WAY). As people do when bored with mindless work, we started shooting the pop-culture breeze, and somehow it came up that I had alway found it amusing that Steve Miller appeared, based on the evidence of the lyrics in his smash hit song “Take The Money And Run,” to believe that “Texas,” “taxes,” “facts is,” and “justice” all rhymed with one another. And the poet-temp, whether to pull my leg or be contrary or because of genuine poetic conviction, made the case that there is a such thing as a “soft rhyme,” which has a long and honorable history in poetry, and thus Miller’s rhyme scheme was perfectly acceptable in that context.

I was already planning on bringing this anecdote up as a lens through which to discuss Mary Beth’s rhyming of “holler,” “dollar,” and “feller.” In my own speech, the first two rhyme with each other but neither with the third, and I wondered if this were an example of soft rhyme or if we were getting a glimpse of the phonology of Hootin’ Holler’s unique, isolated dialect. But then I took one last look at the throwaway panels and finally noticed that Mary Beth begins the strip by reading Emily Dickinson — the very poet my co-temp used as an example of someone who employed soft rhymes frequently. Thus I’m assuming that our young poetess, while still clinging to traditional structural forms like the limerick, is beginning to explore more advanced techniques. This is, in other words, the most cultured Barney Google and Snuffy Smith ever written, not that there’s really much competition for that title.

Blondie, 7/1/12

Speaking of academia, if you’re writing a thesis about the connection between masculinity and earning power in pop-cultural depictions of contemporary society, you could find worse examples than the next-to-last panel here, in which Dagwood, finally realizing that he’s been duped again, crouches a bit and gently protects his crotch with his briefcase.

Mary Worth, 7/1/12

I was going to write the long riff about how Mary’s response is just as vague and bloviating and self-important as the letter that prompted it, but then I got to the final panel, where we learn that Dawn can’t go anywhere without being reminded of her ex-boyfriend’s cock, and literally all other thoughts were sandblasted out of my mind.

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Blondie, 6/27/12

It’s always the glasses-wearing nerdlinger in the office who’s the first to clue you in on how to use cutting-edge high-tech stuff like “Google search” for work.

Ziggy, 6/27/12

Ziggy’s parrot has taken the liberty of whiting out all the typos in the newspaper, with bird poop.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/27/12

A hitherto unexplored source of Funkyverse misery: local law enforcement is willing and able to dish out brutal beatings to anyone who even hints at DUI or illegal alcohol production.

Hi and Lois, 6/27/12

I originally read Trixie’s “I hope Dawg can wait that long” as a poignant reminder that our pets’ lifespans are shorter than ours, and that Dawg might not still be around by the time Trixie is old enough to take him for a walk. But then I realized it was just a joke about how Dawg is about to pee all over the rug.

Gil Thorp, 6/27/12

Man, with all the exciting teen pregnancy action, Gil Thorp neglected to tell us that the boy’s baseball team was on the verge of winning a championship! Don’t worry, though, they didn’t.

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Slylock Fox, 6/25/12

One of the great strengths of Slylock Fox is its ability to create little self-contained stories with only a single panel and a few sentences; still, I think today’s installment could have used a bit more fleshing out, particularly when it comes to how Benny Beaver (aka the “Toothy Tumbler,” a nickname he presumably only earned at this precise moment) came to just fall out of a plane without a parachute. More to the point, why is he taking a flight in tiny airplane with Max and Sly in the first place? We all know that Slylock’s world is a dictatorship where the power of police is not restrained by any kind of independent judiciary, so my first instinct was that Benny was a political dissident that Slylock was eliminating Argentine junta-style, but Slylock’s showy rescue obviously eliminates this possibility. Unless it’s elaborate theater, an attempt (one that Slylock will deliberately botch) to show that he tried his best to rescue the clumsy water-rodent, despite Benny’s known subversive attitudes towards the benevolent Slylockian state? Anyway, since Max appears to have been left alone in the airplane — an airplane with controls that he is far too tiny to operate properly — Slylock may be taking care of several of his rodent problems at once here.

Blondie, 6/25/12

I would find this clerk’s befuddlement more believable were it not for the fact that he’s working in some kind of vintage electronics store, what with the countertop ad for a flip-phone with an antenna and the clearly visible Apple Newton and handheld VHS cameras in the display case.

Archie, 6/25/12

I keep meaning to tell y’all: If you are interested in some of the really quite fetching clothing designs that have appeared in Archie Comics over the years, you owe it to yourself to check out the Betty and Veronica Fashions Tumblr. I bring it up now because if there were some kind of evil mirror-universe version of this Tumblr that focused on hideous, ill-drawn outfits from the mid-’90s reruns in the Archie newspaper strip, Reggie would totally have earned a place in it by wearing whatever the hell it is he has on here.