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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/20/18

I was struck by the first panel of today’s Snuffy Smith, as the strip generally doesn’t do much by way of experimenting with form but today gives us a different perspective of our diminutive title character, just barely visible from the judge’s bench. Perhaps it’s meant to be symbolic of today’s installment’s narrative: normally we see things from the viewpoint of Snuffy Smith, to the extent that we find his layabout criminal attitudes normal and even charming. But the mention of Farmer Clem reminds us that there are in fact honest citizens trying to extract sustenance from Hootin’ Holler’s meager soil, their lives made all the harder by Snuffy’s thievery. And then there are the chickens. My god, think of the horrors the chickens have to suffer! (I’m talking about being killed and eaten, of course. You thought I was talking about weird sex stuff, didn’t you? What, being killed and eaten isn’t bad enough?)

Hi and Lois, 4/20/18

This is an intensely weird setup to this joke, right? The definite vibe I’m getting here is that the “new friend” is going to follow the trail of detritus to Chip’s lair, where he will have to defeat him in combat and either win glory or be devoured.

Gil Thorp, 4/20/18

This seems like an adequate penance for Marty, but I see a big loophole: he’s going to take that ad time he’s forced to buy during the girls’ game and fill it with his own stream-of-consciousness take on what he got from reading the “Latin America: A Land Of Contrasts” ebook while drunk.

Mary Worth, 4/20/18

Oh, I guess Wilbur is only getting dumped from his local paper, so his livelihood won’t be destroyed; it’s just that his ex won’t be reminded of what she gave up every time she opens the Santa Royale News-Intelligencer to the op-ed pages, which, I assume, she probably doesn’t do very often, because print media, am I right? I know we did a whole storyline about how Iris is unusually old to be dating Zak, but come on, she’s not that old. Anyway, I certainly hope that, just as Santa Royale is a thinly veiled stand-in Santa Barbara, the Santa Royale Democrat and Telegraph is similarly modelled on the Santa Barbara News-Press, because that paper’s story is nuts. It’s probably the only small-city daily in America to merit not just a Wikipedia article but an entirely separate Wikipedia “controversy” article, and the idea of Wilbur stomping down there to whine about his columns while the staff is in the midst of labor agitation, ideological purges, and child porn investigations is delicious.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/20/18

“I thought I was going to be paired up with some young guys, some new blood,” Flash Freeman thinks mournfully to himself. “That Wayne and Garth shit is more than 25 years old at this point. This is going to be a disaster.”

Pluggers, 4/20/18

I think I’ve spotted your problem there, sir: your GPS is designed to navigate you from place to place via America’s road system and not, say, across an open field or wherever the hell it is you are.

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Gil Thorp, 4/12/18

Hey, guys, remember Aaron Aagard, the hero of last year’s basketball season storyline, who was inconsistent not because he was on drugs but because his mom was, and then he ended up living in a teammate’s basement? Well, he’s playing on the team again this year, it seems. I guess we’ll never know the details, since all media coverage of the Mudlarks has now ceased, which should hopefully break the spell the various high school teams have over Milford in short order and everyone else will get hobbies and Coach Thorp’s budget will get reassigned to the music department and Coach Kaz will have to mortgage his dojo.

Mark Trail, 4/12/18

Based on Mark’s grim facial expression in the final panel, I assume he knows that Jim was crushed to death under the jeep, and is going to allow Marlin to mourn in private. If there’s one thing Mark doesn’t like being around, it’s emotions.

Mary Worth, 4/12/18

I’m not sure what sort of stuff Rick’s sells, exactly, but I’m certainly hoping that Iris and Zak are here to buy, say, a hammock, talking loudly all through their shopping experience about how it’ll easily be converted into a makeshift sex swing.

Crankshaft, 4/12/18

Fun fact: True Crime Addict is a real book, and James Renner is a real person who’s been rendered here relatively faithfully, presumably because he owes someone a terrible debt, or perhaps because he lost a contest.

Spider-Man, 4/12/18

That quote is from the Bible, so in attributing the inerrant word of YHWH to some unspecified “they,” JJJ is proving himself a darn polytheist on top of everything else!

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Gil Thorp, 4/11/18

Well, it was bound to happen: the Social Justice Teens are feeling kind of bad about defeating Marty by goading him into cussing on-air. You’d think they’d take the attitude of “Yay, the sports radio guy who literally nobody liked even before we found out he was a racist isn’t going to be saying rude things about our friends on-air anymore!” But these kids sense, at the periphery of their minds, that they are in fact the current protagonists in an ongoing narrative; and while in real life we actually enjoy getting what we want, within a story a protagonist without an antagonist is dull and lifeless, and they know it.

Mary Worth, 4/11/18

Mary Worth, obviously, doesn’t feel itself restricted by such conventional narrative niceties. Sure, the current storyline of Wilbur’s mid-grade ennui appears to lack dramatic tension, drifting as it is from a little shower singin’ to some light shoe purchasing. But in fact the true interest to the reader is the nature of the story itself: is something actually going to happen one of these days? Or when we picture the future, should we imagine Wilbur thought-ballooning while shopping at various chain stores, forever?

Family Circus, 4/11/18

Generally speaking the circumstances in which you’d eat off a tray like this are that you’re eating dinner in front of the TV, which is literally every child’s fondest wish, so it seems weird that Billy is so outraged here. The prissy face really sells it, though. “Mother, not only are we watching televised entertainment rather than earnestly discussing our day over dinner, but the lack of a table means that there are no arbitrary rules of etiquette to enforce! This is sheer anarchy! Also, I dropped a lot of whatever this green goop is on the rug.”