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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/19/16

You know, what with Hootin’ Holler being a largely lawless place, with a rugged landscape and local knowledge about property holdings more likely to be passed down through generations by word of mouth than delineated on any map, bringing in surveyors isn’t the worst idea in the world! It could be a real growth industry, and could probably help cut down on the endless, violent clan feuds whose flareups can often be blamed on property line disputes, even if control of moonshine smuggling turf is ultimately the root cause. And, let’s be real, it’d be pretty useful for someone in the Smif family to have a job.

Dennis the Menace, 8/19/16

If you want to create a portrait of a child as a low-key but effective menace to everything you think about yourself as a person who heads a civilized family, this is a good start: he stares at your guest with dead eyes and shows unfamiliarity with basic concepts, all while drooling freely onto his own dinner.

Beetle Bailey and Crock, 8/19/16

Hey kids, did you know that some of America’s longest-running comic strips take place in the military during actual violent conflicts? Beetle Bailey is stateside, for the most part, but its soldiers must know that they could be deployed at any time; in today’s strip, their nighttime anxieties escalate, from right to left, climaxing with Beetle, who, panicked but clear-eyed, can only think of massive, world-obliterating explosions. Meanwhile, today’s Crock reminds us that most of the main characters are occupation troops in a grinding, brutal colonial war. Happy Friday!

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Crock, 6/3/16

Haha, it’s funny because the patrolmen are dying horribly in flames, miles away from help or rescue or even water! As the fire burns away everything that makes them human, their commanding officers coldly refer to them as “objects.”

Beetle Bailey, 6/3/16

Like many military operations, this started as an attempt to remove something with precision and skill and has now devolved into a test of strength in which someone is probably going to lose a limb.

Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean, 6/3/16

Welp, I guess Jeff wasn’t being fired by his therapist earlier this week; he was being told to go back to his childhood home, to get “closure” or whatever, and also just start pulling up the floorboards of his old attic, despite the distinct lack of enthusiasm displayed by the house’s current resident. Meanwhile, in the future, we’re discovering how this actually ties in with his mother’s death: he’s using the decoder ring he’s found to translate a message from his mother, who is in outer space, which is apparently where hell is.

Mary Worth, 6/3/16

Looks like all the girls who were being super mean to Dawn because they thought she was sleeping with her professor are pals with her again because she’s deigned to spend time with them in between dropping Harlan’s name every other sentence, because that’s how human beings work! I am very much assuming that this upcoming showing of X-Men: Apocalypse that Dawn is being lured to will go pretty much like the prom scene in Carrie, except without the revenge via psychic powers.

Hi and Lois, 6/3/16

“Maybe I’m just not very good at school?”

Pluggers, 6/3/16

You’re a plugger if your grandchildren dislike you and flee from your presence the moment you’re distracted.

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Shoe, 5/17/16

As America’s #1 Blogger Who Thinks The Bird-People Of Shoe Should Behave More Like Actual Birds, my immediate reaction upon reading this strip was to Google “can birds digest gluten?” While evidence is inconclusive, by which I mean I couldn’t find anything on the first page of results, I did learn about “angel wing syndrome,” which, according to a web page with disturbing pictures I found on the Internet, is when baby birds eat too much bread because people like to feed bread to adorable baby birds, and as a result their wings don’t develop properly. But are underdeveloped wings only the first stage in the bird de-evolution caused by eating processed carbohydrates? Is this colony of grotesque bird-people, featherèd and beakèd but also clothèd and handèd, simply the result of too much gluten? Is Roz’s customer not a goof on current dietary fads, but rather a brave soul trying to set her children free of the trap from which her generation can never escape?

Crock, 5/17/16

Hey, guys, remember when Crock’s creator’s son decided he didn’t want to do the strip anymore, back in 2012, and there was going to be maybe a couple years of reruns and that was it? Welp, it’s 2016 and Crock is still happening, at least on King Features’ website, and who knows if its in repeats or what. Like, a beeper joke would be about 20 years out of date, but a lot of jokes in Crock seemed 20 years out of date even when new strips were being produced, so! Anyway, assuming this is a repeat, it’s a good example how the passage of time can totally change the effect of a piece of art: whereas in 1995 or whatever the point of this strip would have been “Ha ha, the kids today, they take their beepers with them everywhere,” today it serves as a eulogy for an important technology that was rapidly displaced before it had a chance to become truly ubiquitous.

Hi and Lois, 5/17/16

Irma’s tragedy is that the day when the American suburb was a hotbed of sexual experimentation has long passed, but the ennui of suburban alienation has endured.