Post Content

Gil Thorp, 10/24/09

So it turns out that all imprisoned-brother-haunted ticking time bomb Duncan Daley needed to do to find emotional support was to let his idiot friends in on his little secret! Hopefully I’m not offending any current or future high school jocks by questioning how willing and eager Shep and Robb (or perhaps two other interchangeable friends with stupid names) are to help, as this isn’t a social class known for its nurturing attitudes. Even Ted Peare’s teammates pretended that he was infected with a deadly disease when they found out he was homeless!

Anyway, with the Mudlark locker room softened by this outbreak of drama-killing, touchy-feeling emotional support, we have only one place left to turn for hard-hitting narrative action: prison! Let’s hope that we just gloss over the rest of Milford’s undoubtedly doomed football season and just focus on the shankings.

Barney Googe and Snuffy Smith, 10/24/09

Good lord, now we know why the malformed child known only as “Tater” has remained an infant throughout this strip’s multi-decade run: Loweezy has been forced by rural poverty to birth a whole series of little Taters and hand them over to the greedy Silas, who as the owner of the General Store is the only resident of Hootin’ Holler who participates at all in the national non-barter-based economy, and to whom the Smif clan is presumably heavily indebted. We can only hope that this sinister shopkeep is selling the babies to parents so desperate to adopt that they won’t question too closely the size of the gene pool that spawned them, as the other possibilities are even more terrifying.

(Side note: Showing the limits of the modern information age, the name of Snuffy Smith’s store owner character is one of the no doubt many bits of data that cannot be easily found with a quick Google search. I had to find it the old-fashioned way: looking through the archives until I found a strip where one of the other characters addressed him by name. My God, it was like living in 1997!)

(UPDATE: Uh, yeah, as several posters have pointed out, Silas’s name is in fact right there in the strip. Of more interest however is the person who mentioned that his name is also in the Snuffy Smith Wikipedia article. I had of course consulted Wikipedia on this important subject, but had looked up the feature under its official name, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, which does not include this vital data. Why on earth are there two articles on this subject? Oh, there’s an angry merge template going up on those articles tomorrow, believe you me.)

Family Circus, 10/24/09

I’m not sure what’s more unsettling: that Jeffy can’t determine the relative ages of the people he sees on the TV, or that he can’t differentiate between displays of maternal and romantic affection. For his sake, I’m hoping that his horrified parents will realize what he’s watching and ratchet the V-chip protection levels on this TV set up so high that the only thing it will get is the Weather Channel.

Ziggy, 10/25/09

Ziggy is using a slight variation on the ancient “they asked for a number to call in case of emergency, so I wrote ‘911’” joke to draw attention away from the fact that nobody on Earth would lose a moment’s sleep if he were hospitalized or dead.

Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 10/13/09

Many people turn to Beetle Bailey in their local newspaper and say “What, they still publish this?” Wait, did I say “many”? Because I meant “all.” Anyway, of those who put forth any more brain effort than that to the matter, many wonder what, exactly, Camp Swampy is for, since none of its soldiers are ever shipped out to fight in America’s various wars, which is just as well because their training regimen seems suspiciously lax. But today’s strip reveals that the sloth and squalor exhibited by the base’s inhabitants are just a cover for its real purpose as the secret research center for the next generation of deadly military technologies. Just look at that blackboard! Numbers … arithmetic … physics … my God, what sort of superbombs are these geniuses working on? Known braniac Plato is of course one of the top researchers, living incognito as an enlisted man to throw off suspicion. It’s too bad Beetle’s got a little too interested in matters above his pay grade, though, because now Plato’s going to have to beat him to death with a broom.

Crankshaft, 10/13/09

Oh, look at these two damned souls! Every non-recurring Crankshaft character must fulfill one of two roles: “Person who makes an unfunny pun or play on words while smirking grotesquely” or “person who responds dubiously to said wordplay.” Like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, they manifest themselves to occasionally offer a commentary on the other fate-crushed denizens of the strip, only to fade back into the wings, ready to appear again later as another smirking/dubiously responding pair.

Apartment 3-G, 10/13/09

Someday, we’ll look back and say, “Gee, Apartment 3-G turned into Aristotle Papagoras Gets So Much Middle-Aged Ass so gradually we barely even noticed it.” Margo gets plenty of facetime in this strip, so I’m willing to allow for her brief absence, but if I were Lu Ann I’d be a little miffed that we’re following the swath Dr. P is cutting through Manhattan’s ladies rather than her tormented family life. Tommie, of course, is glad to avoid to narrative’s glare, because every time she appears in the strip she suffers terribly.

Family Circus, 10/13/09

And that’s when Jeffy learned that he wasn’t the fairest of them all, at all.

Pluggers, 10/13/09

I have to admit that I am charmed by the look of shock on the he-plugger’s face in the background. “My goodness, my poor wife has been possessed by that demon-widget! It’s going to take a lot of snake-handling to fix this!”

Funky Winkerbean, 10/13/09

“Someday soon, because we’re going to be in the hospital, because of illness. It could happen at any time! Cancer! Hospital! Cancer death hospital death death death!”

Post Content

Crankshaft, 10/9/09

This week’s Crankshaft has involved the angry, befuddled members of this investment group talking themselves into selling their stock at the bottom of the market. Jeff’s sole contribution has been to compulsively offer up terrible, Crankshaft-style puns, all the while wearing the look of anxious self-loathing you see in panel two. It’s as if he’s actually been possessed by his father-in-law, which scenario does have the benefit of probably meaning that Crankshaft is dead.

Mary Worth, 10/9/09

There’s been a lot of unsettling imagery in Mary Worth over the years, but I’m not sure anything in this feature has creeped me out as much as what appears to be the weird afterimage of Mary’s face at the far right of panel two here. Is this a mirror in which her reflection has become detached from her corporal form, indicating that her soul is no longer firmly associated with her body? Or are Mary and Dr. Jeff passing through the section of the hospital where all of Mary’s clones float in enormous brine-filled tanks, just waiting for the day when she needs to harvest their organs to keep her alive?

Family Circus, 10/9/09

At long last, one of the Family Circus pets is depicted doing something useful!

Funky Winkerbean, 10/9/09

In this strip? Good luck with that.