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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.

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Hagar the Horrible, 11/22/21

Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas famously begins with its main character, Henry Hill, going on at great length about how much fun it is to be a gangster, but by the end of it he’s a paranoid, coked-up mess, pursued by the cops and convinced his fellow mobsters are going to turn on him. Anyway, lately there have been lots of Hagar the Horribles about how it’s actually pretty chill being a Viking chieftain, because you can just plunder villages and castles alike without suffering any consequences. But now it appears that post-Carolingian Europe has managed to reorganize itself and the new feudal armies led by French and German aristocrats are capable of kicking Viking ass and even hunting them down when they’re not on raids! I’m looking forward to this new, darker Hagar the Horrible chapter, where he eventually turns King’s evidence against his own war-band because being a Viking just stops being worth the effort.

Gil Thorp, 11/22/21

If the moral of this fall’s Gil Thorp storyline turns out to be “psychological science is a harmful sham, only hypnosis can truly aid sports performance,” I will be very amused and somewhat impressed. I won’t even care if it turns out to be sponsored content from the Church of Scientology or some guy’s hypnosis YouTube channel.