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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/28/25

Imagine: You’ve just finished putting together the script for a perfectly serviceable Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip, which hinges on wordplay around the phrase “Mr. Right.” But then you remember: in Hootin’ Holler patois, they never say “mister”; they say “mistopher.” Does this make the joke clunkier and weirder, and leave the reader wondering if “mistopher” itself is part of the punchline? Well, yes. But it doesn’t matter. You are the keeper of the sacred trust that is Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. You must scrupulously adhere to the lore, or else what’s the point? Would you jettison decades of tradition for a single day’s laugh? You wouldn’t dare.

Pluggers, 8/28/25

The joke here is whatever, but I’m very unsettled by the look on this plugger’s face as he approaches the bathroom. He looks like he knows he has a journey of awful discovery in store for him in there, and it is not reading-media-related. It’s something much darker and more visceral; he knows something awful is about to begin, but he can’t guess when or how it will end.

Heathcliff, 8/28/25

The robot’s smooth, featureless crotch is a reminder that cybernetic organisms are ghastly parodies of humanity, lacking the natural urges and drives that, troublesome as they may be, make us people. Grandma Nutmeg’s right to demand it be hidden from sight!

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Luann, 8/22/25

In the current Luann plot, Tiffany has dragged Les to a spa to get a mani-pedi and other treatments, and has been annoyed that he still wants to talk about video games, only to discover that [record scratch] the spa attendant is a gamer as well????? I was wondering if Leviathan was a real game, but the only game by that name I could find links to online is “a multiplayer extraction shooter set in a sci-fi universe where humanity has been abducted by a gargantuan, interstellar beast and changed over the course of several millennia. The abducted were ultimately discarded onto foreign planets. To survive, they have been forced to evolve into three factions of biologically and ideologically distinct lifeforms. Recently, a second wave of abductions have occurred. Fate has brought them together to the surface of the bountiful world of Domusalus; where only ONE FACTION can establish dominance for their survival.” So I guess Luann’s long-term goal is to woo gentle and impressionable young people attracted by the idea of a sea life simulator into a nightmarish world of violent mutants. Fun! Just the sort of thing that would send a hard-core gamer like Les into a state of orgasmic joy, which he appears to have achieved in panel three here.

Mark Trail, 8/22/25

Last week Uncle Lumpy declared gator-travel-assistance to be “not quite Fists of Justice™ territory, but at least macho-heroics-adjacent,” which Mark apparently took as a personal challenge! Today’s punch is less about putting a stop to imminent danger and more about putting a stop to a fight that some golf course developer jerk started, but I do enjoy the POV angle we get on the punching in panel three. Usually Mark is a “chin music” guy rather than a “nose bopping” guy, but this dude doesn’t have much of a chin, so you gotta do what you gotta do!

Heathcliff, 8/22/25

As the theme song to the mid-80s Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats cartoon so wisely put it: “Heathcliff, Heathcliff, no one should terrify their neighborhood. But Heathcliff just won’t be undone, playing pranks on everyone.” So why does the Nutmeg family tolerate his presence? Well, as today’s panel demonstrates, a pet who refuses to acknowledge the bounds of polite conventions can be a real asset. Look how happy they are to be relieved of their social obligations! Heathcliff says (via signs, flags, and so on) the truths that others won’t!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/22/25

Boy, Ma Goose sure takes a lot of pills! That’s … the joke, I guess? That’s a joke, I guess? They wouldn’t print it in the paper if it weren’t a joke, right?

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Beetle Bailey, 7/29/25

There’s a lot of Beetle Baileys where the joke is that Sarge has beaten Beetle into an undifferentiated mass of broken limbs and shattered organs for some minor infraction, but for my money this one is much, much funnier. Just imagine Sarge going red-faced with rage over this extremely sub-par bit of wordplay, grabbing Beetle by the shoulders and huffing and puffing a bit as the two of them grapple, and then stalking off, leaving Beetle with his uniform hiked partway over his head as we see here, unhurt but also humiliated. All the while Killer stood absolutely still, watching the whole thing go down and hoping he isn’t next.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/29/25

I took Snuffy’s whispering in the first panel as a sign that he wanted to go easy on Horace, either because he genuinely didn’t want to hurt the man’s feelings or because he knew that any perceived slight could lead to violence in Hootin’ Holler’s clan-based culture. But it turns out he’s willing to take some risks! Congrats to Snuffy Smith for producing a strip that actually subverted my expectations, for the first time [checks notes] ever???

Curtis, 7/29/25

Curtis has gotten a summer job helping take care of a semi-comatose old woman who turns out to have telekinetic powers, which I think is a pretty normal sentence to write, and the plot hasn’t risen to the interest level necessary for me to blog about it, until today. Static snow is, of course, an artifact of the age before the transition to digital TV in 2009, which now gives it a sort of old-timey spookiness, and it has always been foreign to smartphones and similar devices. A video taken on your phone that’s just been deleted is a mild mystery; a video taken on your phone that’s been replaced with static snow is deeply unsettling, and Curtis, as an aficionado of the horror genre, should hopefully recognize the truly terrifying situation in which he’s found himself now.

Heathcliff, 7/29/25

One thing I love about Heathcliff doing elaborate bits in Heathcliff is how everyone else seems to view them mostly with gentle bemusement, even the very elaborate ones. I’m not sure if Heathcliff built this stadium, a project that would’ve cost tens of millions of dollars and taken years, or if he merely somehow managed to gain control of an existing facility by agreement or force, but either way there would’ve been a lot of steps leading up to this moment, which presumably Grandpa and Iggy watched with their hands in their pockets, mostly in silence, before finally remarking, “Ah, yeah, this looks like an opening ceremony of some sort.”