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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/26/21

I’m a big believer that most comic-strip level gags should include exactly the amount of information they need to make the joke work and no more, which is why it drives me up the wall that this strip includes the name of Loweezy’s sister. It would be bad enough that she just named her sister (whom we’ve never see in the strip) for no reason, since it creates the nagging suspicion that this sister, as opposed to some other sister, is important to make the punchline work for some reason. But then they go and name her “Zoney!” “Loweezy” is the post-apocalyptic Hootin’ Holler newspeak for “Louisa,” but what the hell is “Zoney” derived from? Arizona? Does the vague memory of distant Arizona live on in Holler-adjacent onomastics? Gah, the fact that they added this name to her word balloon means that we ended up with two exclamation points alone on their own line! GAH!!!

Blondie, 8/26/21

One has to wonder who the “I” in Dagwood’s proposed social media clickbait headline is intended to be. It’s clearly not Dagwood, who is the star of the video. In fact, one wonders who’s filming this obviously staged scene in the first place, and what sad benefits Dagwood promised them for helping launch him to TikTok stardom.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/26/21

Oh, wow, sorry I said yesterday that this Funky Winkerbean development was going to be about sex, when in fact it’s about the most obvious plot twist anyone could imagine. Don’t worry, thought: Les still had an orgasm.

Mary Worth, 8/26/21

WILBUR’S IN A PISS FIGHT WITH A CAT, EVERYONE

A PISS FIGHT

IT’S CHRISTMAS IN AUGUST

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Slylock Fox, 8/25/21

Based on the animal quiz that accompanies this drawing, that’s clearly supposed to be a wolf out there howling at the moon, and I’m very intrigued that the anonymous syndicate colorist chose to give him Slylock’s bright red fur. Clearly the reality is that they saw “canid in Slylock Fox” and used the fill tool with web-safe bright red without really thinking about it, but I’d like to believe that they briefly contemplated the idea of this strip’s normally cerebral title character stripping off his clothes and howling at the moon, and they said “Honestly? Good for him.”

Dustin, 8/25/21

Sorry, I refuse to believe Dustin’s dad likes impressionism at all. He is absolutely one of those people who would look at any art that isn’t photorealist portraiture and sneer “My kid could’ve done this.” (Then he’d look at Dustin and say, “Well, somebody’s kid could’ve done this, I guess.”)

Gil Thorp, 8/25/21

Oh, wow! Marjie Ducey, the Thorp-friendliest media figure in Milford, is going to retire, and now the paper’s going to hire a woman who was literally Gil’s student like two years ago to replace her! I certainly hope Marty Moon has something to say about this blatant conflict of interest, though we haven’t heard from him in quite a while, and frankly he may still be having some kind of hallucinatory experience in the wooden crate that serves as the Milford press box.

Funky Winkerbean, 8/25/21

We all, of course, have our own personal “what’s the worst recurring theme in Funky Winkerbean?” take, but I think we can all agree that “sometimes the strip hints that there may be multiple rivals for Les’s sexual attention” is in the top five.

Family Circus, 8/25/21

Look, Billy’s all hyped up because he’s been huffing pine cones! And honestly? Good for him.

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Funky Winkerbean, 8/22/21

Continuity comic strips are actually a great example of how you can have a long-running narrative art form with very little narrative tension. Nevertheless, Funky Winkerbean does have one primary source of narrative friction: namely, that Les is a sainted figure who everyone has to acknowledge as a good guy and work to make good things happen for him, but also the universe is a fundamentally dark and hostile place and nothing truly good ever happens to anyone. I guess today’s strip is showing us how we’ll navigate between those two poles: Lisa’s Story: The Movie will be mostly ignored by the yammering, moronic masses who don’t understand how moving it is when a man’s wife dies of cancer but he finds the strength to move on, but the right kind of people will watch it at America’s few remaining art house theaters and be moved, and won’t that be the most important thing? Not from the perspective of the people who invested in this movie, or for anyone’s career who worked on it, but from it is from Les’s perspective, which is the correct one.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/22/21

Speaking of the absence of narrative tension, there’s a lot you could say about the last few years of Rex Morgan and its absence of narrative tension, but one thing you can’t say is that it skimps on good reaction faces. Today Michelle moves from “carefully neutral as she worries what she’s gotten herself into,” “real genuine horror as she sees something the Facebook moderators should’ve removed immediately,” “bone-weary disgust at someone posting a picture of themselves wearing a t-shirt adorned with grotesque sex slang or maybe a racial slur,” and “grudging admiration for what hairspray can do.” We salute you, Michelle, and certainly hope your animated visage helps the seven or so people at your wedding maintain interest in the proceedings.