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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/27/19

Things have never been great for Hootin’ Holler, exactly, but I think we can all agree that when an impoverished, isolated community starts clear-cutting ancient forest for short-term economic benefits and otherwise extracting resources at an unsustainable rate, that bodes extremely ill for the future.

Gil Thorp, 3/27/19

Ah ha, our baseball/softball season plot has finally been revealed, and it’s … synchronized skating! That’s right, the girls have been sneaking away from their scrimmages under the guise of “family stuff” in order to cheat on their varsity softball duties by joining a synchronized skating club team. Is synchronized skating even a spring sport? Is this really the Milford athletic department’s fault for not providing the varsity synchronized skating team the kids yearn for? Will Gil and Mimi use this opportunity to petition for a 30% increase in the departmental budget? Let’s hope!

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Dick Tracy, 3/26/19

Oh, huh, I must be losing it, because a couple weeks ago when we were introduced to a new character, a cocky local sports reporter and columnist, it had already slipped my mind that a couple weeks before that we had already been offered a glimpse of a stab-happy sports reporter! I guess this is all just some kind of intra-jock feud. Anyway, this is part of the Dick Tracy narrative M.O. in which the perp is always the most obvious person and the “drama” comes from the MCU’s dogged and violent pursuit of the that person, not any kind of clever “solving” of “crimes” or anything like that. Meanwhile, I can’t tell if “It wasn’t you, was it?” is meant to signify “Oh no, I married a murderer, how could I have been so blind?” or “Ugh, you promised you wouldn’t murder any more gym teachers, can’t you just do this one little thing for me?”

Gil Thorp, 3/26/19

I certainly hope all this mysterious talk of “family stuff” is referring to the Human Family, a local doomsday cult who’s been heavily recruiting Milford teenagers this year. “Well! That explains things,” says Mohawk Guy, around hour four into the Patriarch’s sermon in which he blames the failure of the Cleansing to arrive on the appointed date on the corruption of the “real” Mayan calendar by Spanish conquistadors.

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Spider-Man, 3/21/19

I am, genuinely, done making fun here. If Newspaper Spider-Man wants to spend its last few days in the media landscape engaged in utterly pointless bait-and-switches over readership expectations vis-à-vis whether or not Peter is or is not wearing his spider-costume under his shirt, then I say go for it. One of the very first sequences I went through that really taught me what this strip was all about came in 2005, in which Peter’s undergarments were or perhaps were not a problem, with the changes having nothing to do with Peter’s own on-panel efforts. My point is that this feature is going out very much on its own terms. We should all be so lucky.

Family Circus, 3/21/19

One of my least favorite Family Circus things — and lord knows there’s a list — is when some semi-universal cultural touchstone unfolds in real life, like the Olympics or the NCAA basketball tournament, and we’re expected to believe that the Keane kids can’t stop pulling catchphrases from it. It took me a second to notice that Dolly is rubbing her arm here, indicating (I assume) that Billy hit her with the ball, or maybe just punched her and then quickly grabbed a ball so that he could say “I didn’t punch her! Both my hands are clearly occupied in holding this ball!”; before I realized that, I thought maybe he had just farted.

Gil Thorp, 3/21/19

I’m not really a “sports guy” so I sometimes I find myself in the position of wondering what it is that’s confusing me about Gil Thorp: the sport content or the trademark choppy narrative. Like, today, I don’t get why the idea of a scrimmage seems so freighted, and I don’t understand half of what Gil is talking about in panel two. But I do sincerely hope that panel three takes place nine days later, that the scrimmage drama was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and that the phone call Mimi is wrapping up here is acknowledging that and we never hear anything else about it.

Dick Tracy, 3/21/19

“It’s your case too, Joe. Go ahead, rifle through the drawers and get your fingerprints all over everything. Take a dump in the middle of the floor! Nobody can stop you!”