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Mary Worth, 12/4/21

Look, Wilbur, they’re fish. They’re fish! They’re fine, but the gulf between their world and a human’s is much wider than between, say, a human and a cat or dog, and no real emotional bond is going to arise. So you see, she can never love them like she loved y– ohhh, I get it now.

Gil Thorp, 12/4/21

Gotta admit that I’m kind of enjoying how this Gil Thorp storyline is wrapping up: will all the teen characters just shouting the things they’ve learned (?) over the course of the fall at each other at a rapid clip while standing on furniture. Have you kids all internalized these little life lessons? No? Too bad, basketball starts next week!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/4/21

The Hootin’ Holler setting of this strip has always been one created by and for flatlanders to play around with a very specific set of stereotypes about hillbilles, which has been going on for as long as anyone reading this has been alive, so at some level it’s kind of instructive to read it as “what do people living in mainstream America think life is like in Appalachia, or possibly what life was like in Appalachia during the Great Depression?” Anyway, the answer provided by today’s strip is “Well, there’s big piles of animal shit everywhere, but the native peoples have made an alliance with the amphibian world to help mitigate the negative side effects.”

Shoe, 12/4/21

“Yes, you read that right: the cast members gave birth on stage, only for their newly laid eggs to be cracked open, cooked, and devoured to the horror of the audience. We’re birds, remember? Birds! Also, this newspaper only has two employees, so we’re a little loose about what goes into our sensationalist crime coverage and what goes into theater reviews.”

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/30/21

I’m reasonably sure that I’ve never seen the blessings of the Anglo-Norman system of trial by jury granted to the people of Hootin’ Holler, who as near as I can tell are subject to their unelected sheriff and judge, a regime whose arbitrary nature is at least somewhat tempered by its ineffectiveness. Presumably, however, the town courthouse is a relic of the days when the Holler was part of the now only dimly remembered Newnited States. Nobody is sure what the jury box is for, but today Snuffy and Lukey are going to use it as a place to hang out and laugh theatrically at someone else getting sent to jail for once.

Gil Thorp, 11/30/21

Wow, if you had asked me to guess “so what’s the resolution to this Chance Macy storyline going to be, the one that the strip keeps teasing as super boring,” I don’t think I would’ve picked “Chance is going to Canada to play metric football in front of nobody” in a million years! Kudos to Gil Thorp for keeping me guessing in this extremely low-stakes way, I guess?

Hi and Lois, 11/30/21

I’m not usually one to be like “Oh, the children have been raised on digital machines and have no soul, ours is the last truly human generation that will ever walk the earth,” but today’s Hi and Lois, in which the Flagston kids declare their excitement for getting “all kinds of food” delivered and then rattle off not the varieties of food a person might savor but rather than names of various apps, as if their appetite could be sated by a stream of 1s and 0s generated by gullible venture capital, has truly sent a chill up my spine.

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Crock, 11/29/21

“Hmm,” I bet you’re thinking, “a four-digit number that turns out to be the price in dollars and cents of an entire barrel of wine sure is a forced way to do a ‘Ha ha, Maggot is cheap!’ joke.” Well, consider this: 1830 is actually the year the French began their conquest of the Maghreb. So perhaps this is actually a way for French Legionnaire Maggot to taunt his Algerian wife Grossie over her colonial servitude! Surely this is so grotesque a possibility that we can’t blame the waiters for desperately trying to spin some other possibility into existence.

Crankshaft, 11/29/21

Hey, remember a couple weeks ago when Lillian browbeat a local youth into helping her do a Zoom book panel and then was a real dick about it the whole time? Well, turns out that she tried to do a slideshow using an actual slide projector in the process, which I’m sure was a big disaster that she probably blamed the local youth for.

Gil Thorp, 11/29/21

Ah, yes, finally, the big mystery of “Is Chance Macy going to play college football and if so where” is about to get resolved, and frankly if none of the actual characters in this strip are going to get excited about it, I’m not sure why we should even try.