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Family Circus, 1/10/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because kids instinctively know that adults long ago lost their capacity for make believe and are trapped in the dull, grey prison of everyday life!

Crankshaft, 1/10/21

Ha ha, it’s funny because Crankshaft desperately needs to hold onto some small specific joy in life or else he gets terribly depressed!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/10/21

Well, that got … too grim, probably! Anyway, let’s talk about horses. You wouldn’t know it now, but back before Snuffy Smith was ever dreamed up, Barney Google was a wildly popular media property, and that popularity was almost entirely driven by Spark Plug, Barney’s universally beloved horse, to the extent that for a while the strip was called Barney Google and Spark Plug. And yeah, it’s been a while — like, literally 99 years — but surely King Features Syndicate and Hearst Communications, the current owners of the Spark Plug intellectual property, can capture lightning in a bottle here again, right? Spark Plug may have had his day, but Li’l Sparky will be the character whose ancillary marketing products every child will be asking for this summer, probably! Kids like horses still, right? Horses and wordplay? Horses and … newspaper comic strips?

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Gil Thorp, 1/9/21

So what’s going in with Gil Thorp, literally several of you are wondering? Well, it turns out that Vic Doucette is killing it at P.A. announcing during the basketball games, thanks to his wordplay that dazzles the Mudlark players, whose prowess lies in the physical rather than the verbal realm. Also, it turns out that, like Vic, Doug Guthrie is a nerd, and in fact is the one kind of nerd that jocks truly respect: a car nerd, who may drive a sweet classic Pontiac but is fascinated by automobiles in all their forms, even utilitarian GM vans from the ’00s. It also came up that Vic has cerebral palsy, not that you can really tell from the art, and Chevy Astros are apparently commonly converted for wheelchair use, but Vic doesn’t use a wheelchair so this may or may not be relevant? Maybe Doug is a car monomaniac and literally has to ask about the make and model of every single vehicle he sees. He’s just another brightly colored piece of glass in the rich mosaic of Milford High.

Family Circus, 1/9/21

Jeffy is a simple child, and looks smug because he thinks he’s about to get a cookie. But Billy? Billy, for all his faults (and there are many), plays a longer game, and has realized that even the guy who graduates bottom of his class from the easiest medical school to get into has access to a prescription pad, which will open up a lot of opportunities for a guy with frankly not much of a moral compass.

Pluggers, 1/9/21

Hey, Pluggers, a more succinct and better caption here would’ve been “Plugger CSI,” you’re welcome

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/9/20

Say what you will about Snuffy Smith, but this is a strip that respects its own world-building. It has been long established that, while Hootin’ Holler’s denizens may engage in a certain amount of chicken-based barter with one another, and occasionally pay for potions from unlicensed apothecary Granny Creeps, Silas’s general store is the only place in town where money is exchanged for legitimate goods and services in the manner in which we flatlanders are accustomed. Does it seem weird to order pizzas from such an establishment? Maybe, but any Snuffy trufan knows it would be even weirder if we pretended that Hootin’ Holler had a local Domino’s or some such.

Family Circus, 12/9/20

The question of “If our religion is the only way to salvation, what happened to everyone who never heard about our religion because they died before it started or reached their part of the world?” is old and widespread enough that it has a fancy theological name, “The Fate of the Unlearned.” Still, part of the fun of the Family Circus is seeing kids say the darnedest things as they begin the encounter the problems of the adult world, and indeed I did actually chuckle to myself at seeing Billy look at that picture and think “Gee, it’s sad these cavemen never got a visit from Santa! Also, they’re probably in hell now.”