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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/5/23

Oh, man, look at the shift on Jughaid’s face between panels here. His relationship with Mary Beth is generally of the stereotypical “girl has crush on boy but boy is a just a bit too young to have crushes” you see in newspaper comics, so it can’t be her affections that he’s considering. No, he’s truly absorbed the lawless culture of his family at a young age and is positively gleeful to learn that even the other rustics of Hootin’ Holler consider him and his kinfolk animalistic savages, like the vicious … cow? This metaphor needs work, admittedly, but when you’re a bunch’a wild animals like the Smifs, you don’t care much for “metaphors.”

Gil Thorp, 1/5/23

The Milford player getting bumped out of the way in panel one (and doing the STEAL!ing in panel two) is in fact a high school junior, which is I guess the source of the insult the Forest View player lobs at him in panel one. Do teenagers consider straightforward descriptions of what grade they’re in to be insulting? I wouldn’t know, I don’t talk to teenagers and I don’t care to. Honestly it would be funny if “junior” is meant to be insulting just because the Milford player is a teenager generally, since the Forest View player is, by all appearances, in his mid to late 40s.

Family Circus, 1/5/23

Nooo, Billy, that’s the evil tome with the spell that Summoned you and your siblings! The lock was put on because four of you is all our reality can handle, do not unlock it under any circumstances

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Between Friends, 12/21/22

So Monday and Tuesday’s Between Friends were about one of the families in the Between Friends gang watching the Twilight saga, which, for those young people who aren’t aware, was a popular series of films about sexy teen vampires and werewolves that came out in the late ’00s and early ’10s, primarily remembered now for delivering so much cash to its stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattison that they can now afford to spend time doing weirdo art-house films directed by David Cronenberg and various French people. Monday featured the mother and daughter of the [note to self: look up the names of these people, or maybe don’t if you’re too busy or it seems hard] family lusting after Pattison, and Tuesday was about the father getting excited that he recognized Pattison from the new Batman movie, but now it’s day three and we’ve got to reckon with the question of why on earth a syndicated comic strip would spend time making Twilight jokes in the Year of our Lord 2022. Turns out that it’s because some of us were too busy raising a family ten years ago to get horned up over teen vampires acting out some really regressive sexual and gender roles, OK? Thank god for streaming services that allow us to catch up now! Ultimately the upshot of all this is that it got me to look up where you can stream the Twilight movies, and it turns out the only place is on something called “Fubo,” so if Fubo paid for this subtle sponcon in Between Friends, then congrats, I guess, it worked.

Gil Thorp, 12/21/22

Oh, whoops, it looks like Gil lost the big game to his arch-rival and … wait, we have a last minute-reversal of that call, it looks like Gil is the real winner because he coaches for the love of the game and competition, not because he’s obsessed with winning. Who could have seen this one coming, Gil triumphing over all by being the bigger man, and I mean that quite literally, as panel one makes very clear. “Is someone talking?” Gil asks in panel three, as he gazes over Coach Martinez’s head. “I think I hear something, but I don’t see anyone.”

Curtis, 12/21/22

Hmm, Greg is a stickler for rules and a civil servant to boot, so I’m kind of surprised he isn’t aware that mail carriers aren’t supposed to accept cash tips. Maybe he’s never looked into the regs because, as a DMV employee, this hasn’t really ever come up for him personally.

Family Circus, 12/21/22

Look, I don’t want to say that the Family Circus is just a bunch of clip art mashed over decades-old panels, but … what is going on with this closet door. Why does it look like this? Did the Keane Kompound get featured on some second-tier HGTV show that just shiplapped everything?

Mary Worth, 12/21/22

We’ve all wondered why Wilbur hasn’t yet been formally ostracized by the Charterstone condo board and forcibly exiled to the Outer Wastes. Well, it looks like Mary has learned from Dawn how useful he is as a foil and is now using him to really cut down on the work that goes into her meddling. Instead of needing to come up with bespoke advice for everyone’s specific problems, she can just ask everyone WWWD: What Wouldn’t Wilbur Do?

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Crankshaft, 12/16/22

Hey, did you know that “deja vu” means “seen again,” and that “vu” is the past participle of the verb “voir,” which means “to see,” and that an earlier form of the same French word entered English after the Norman conquest and gave rise to the English word “view”? Or, to put it more succinctly, did you know that “view” and “vu” are basically the same word? And so this isn’t really much of a pun or anything at all? I know the bar for Crankshaft wordplay is very low, but surely it should be higher than this?

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/16/22

It probably won’t come as surprise to you that I’ve been reading Mother Goose and Grimm for a long time, possible since it first launched in 1984. I have a vague memory that Ralph (the Boston terrier) was not an original character, but was introduced some time into the strip’s run, maybe? But if so he’s been around for years. Years. You’d think … Grimm would know if his friend had a job? Or at least, some politics weird enough that he’d she tears over Mr. Potter?

Crock, 12/16/22

I’d like to think that whoever on the Crock creative team wrote this strip in the 1990s or whenever this first ran had heard of boom boxes, by which I mean had heard the phrase “boom box,” but didn’t really know what they were. A box that booms, probably? That’s why they call it that, right? Not sure what the box looks like, better not draw it, but we can be pretty confident about the booms.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/16/22

You absolutely cannot make me care about this conversation Rex and June are having about not having any more kids, but I am profoundly unnerved by the way each frame is a closer and closer zoom in on one of their faces. Here’s hoping this trend continues and by Sunday we just have word balloons emerging from six panels of undifferentiated, featureless pinky-peach flesh.

Family Circus, 12/16/22

Uh oh! Big Daddy Keane’s gonna get arrested!