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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/28/16

“Maw” is a typical Snuffy Smithism meant to signal the characters’ nonstandard, uneducated speech patterns without actually trying to capture any specific dialect. Nevertheless, I am going to interpret it literally. “Aunt Lo says maws are s’posed to, Mary Beth! She says it’s strange to have a hole in the middle of your face, to realize your body is just meat wrapped around a tube, to need to constantly push dead animals and plants into yourself just to keep alive! It’s only when you know that your body is a disgusting prison in which the cruel demiurge has imprisoned your immortal soul that you realize you must shed it order to transcend to the highest heaven!” I’m, uh, not sure how this joke ended up with the Hootin’ Holler folk becoming gnostic dualists? Whatever, let’s just run with it, that’s canon now.

Gil Thorp, 4/28/16

Ah, we have come to the sacred beginning of any Milford sports season: the ritualistic Reciting of the Names! Honestly, Gil does not appear to be treating this occasion with the reverence it deserves. Pretty sure he’s rattling them off into Marty’s phone so quickly that he doesn’t have time to inhale, which is why he’s going a little cross-eyed in that last panel.

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Beetle Bailey, 4/14/16

You might not believe it based on the nonstop stream of cruel vitriol I heap upon comics creators daily, but writing this blog over the years has actually given me a lot of sympathy for the people who write these things. Coming up with a joke a day within the same little world, every day, for years and years is hard, man, even for the team of people they have down at ol’ Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC. I mean, I get it. Some days you’re just staring at a blank panel and are trying to figure out how you can wring a few laughs out of it, and clearly, as the deadline loomed, today’s jokesmith could think of nothing except for falling off a cliff into the sweet embrace of death, which might be something they should talk to a trained therapist about. But anyway, I’d argue that the second panel here is wholly unnecessary. Beetle and Killer dully contemplating the fact that their fellow soldiers just can’t stop falling off cliffs, while staring at a handwritten note on a bulletin board that, in a plea for sanity that will surely go unheeded, urges everyone to “AVOID CLIFF”, is the funniest thing in the comics today, and probably the funniest thing to happen in Beetle Bailey ever.

Gil Thorp, 4/14/16

Boy, the softball action in Gil Thorp sure is a lot more exciting when it’s drawn like an German expressionist film, right? Pitcher and catcher stand at opposite ends of some long corridor, then suddenly are practically on top of one another, representing the way the emotional space between us can sometimes collapse into sudden moments of terrifying intimacy.

Pluggers, 4/14/16

The look of profound shame on those he-pluggers’ faces makes me think that the caption to this panel should actually be “plugger moms seem to be the only ones in the house who actually use toilet paper.”

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Gil Thorp, 4/12/16

Welp, this year’s long and fairly dull basketball season is now over in Gil Thorp, which means we’ve moved on to … baseball/softball season! And after a single day of red-hot spring training action, watching teenagers run out grounders while their bored coaches shout “good hustle” in their general direction, we now jump to Central City, where an avuncular gentleman wants to get amiably blotto after a hard day working the phones to keep his big triethylene glycol buyers happy. Would I be pleased if we just followed this guy around for the next six to eight weeks and didn’t spend any time with high school jocks at all? I’m willing to find out!

Mary Worth, 4/12/16

Whoa whoa whoa, sexy substitute art history lecturer Harlan Jones, who has gone from zero to private home yoga session with Dawn in about 72 hours, lives with a man … named Alfie … in a possibly romantic way???? [comical B-O-I-O-I-O-I-O-I-N-G sound effect] This explains why he suddenly looks like Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury in that last panel. It is fairly shocking to think that Mary Worth might acknowledge that heterosexuality isn’t the only romantic configuration available, so we may just be in for a lecture about how contingent faculty are paid so little that they have to live with roommates in grim orange-painted concrete apartment buildings that make Charterstone look like an Architectural Digest cover, but either way it seems like we’re not going to get a prof/student forbidden love plot after all.