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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/28/14

Say what you will about the grotesquely stylized hillbilly characters in Snuffy Smith, but their mostly fabricated dialect certain does include some striking turns of phrase! Take, for instance, “’xpectin’ a li’l stranger.” Have you ever heard a pregnancy described in more philosophically melancholy terms. “Sure, th’ li’l tater will be flesh an’ blood to hub and me. But in th’ end, ain’t we all strangers t’each other? Can we ever see into th’ heart of another?”

The throwaway panels, meanwhile, are a bit more straightforwardly depressing. “Th’ good news: No more dietin’ fer you! Th’ bad news: infant moratality in Hootin’ Holler is seven times th’ national average!”

B.C., 9/28/14

The throwaway panels here — “Oh, can’t find one of your beloved possessions, son? Your father may have hocked it, because we’re constantly teetering on the edge of financial ruin!” — may be one of the grimmest things I’ve seen in the comics pages in a while. The rest of the strip fills in the details of the story, though: dad is suffering from a traumatic brain injury, so obviously he can’t be expected to hold down a steady job.

Hi and Lois, 9/28/14

Running through a checklist and then concluding with an eerily contraction-less “I think we are ready”? Spending time during the game quantifying all aspects of the current seasons? Haha, the Flagstons aren’t aliens wearing meatsack disguises and trying to blend into human society at all!

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Hi and Lois, 9/25/14

I generally spend as little time around children as I can manage, so I often have hard time either figuring out how old kids are without being explicitly told or knowing what exactly the appropriate behavior and/or cognitive development is for whatever age they end up being. Figuring out the ages of the extremely stylized children of the comics is even harder. I’ve always pegged Dot and Ditto at around … eight? Or ten? Eight to ten, maybe? Anyhoo, I guess what I’m trying to say is that even if Ditto is nine-ish, I’m not sure if that’s an age where you’re supposed to earnestly walk through a Socratic dialogue designed to logically prove that your children should follow the ethical systems you’ve established, of if you should just announce “because I said so” and send them to their rooms. At any rate, I suppose Ditto is perfectly capable at understanding the locally prevailing moral code, considering he’s developed an elaborate persona specifically to circumvent it.

Marvin, 9/25/14

Marvin, for all its other faults, spares you any need to try to map any of its baby-characters onto the real developmental timeline of actual human infants, since it’s less concerned with verisimilitude than it is in creating a horrifying dreamscape of infantilized scat humor. “What could be worse than the strip’s constant focus on diapers?” you might say. “Maybe if the strip’s baby-characters were sexually attracted to each other, and one decided to flirt with another by complimenting her diaper?” you’d say. “That’d be awful,” you’d say. “Surely no punchline to such a strip could make the initial premise worse,” you’d say. You’d be wrong, though!

Mark Trail, 9/25/14

“I’ve heard the horns of those rhinos are aphrodisiacs, and customers in China will pay big money for them! I’ve got to harvest as many horns as I can before the species is driven to extinction!”

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Apartment 3-G, 7/9/14

For the past five days, Tommie has been letting Tina believe that Lily is a human baby, rather than a fawn who Tommie started raising after killing her mother with her car. That’s all that’s been happening, and it’s going to keep happening, forever. It’s been … kind of amazing? I think time is running backwards now.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/9/14

OH BOY, IT’S THE FUNKY WINKERBEAN COMICS NERDS GO TO COMIC-CON PLOT YOU’VE BEEN ASKING FOR!!! You … you have been asking for it, right? No? Oh well, too bad! Anyway, I’m actually genuinely surprised to learn that any actual comics business happens at Comic-Con anymore, as I assumed it had long ago turned into a marketing channel for major media conglomerates’ more explosion-heavy properties. Good luck finding that last Starbucks Jones issue while waiting in line three hours to see a teaser trailer for whatever the big Marvel Cinematic Universe release is going to be in 2017, Holly!

Hi and Lois, 7/9/14

Sunbeam’s little brother is … a laser beam? A laser beam blasting into Trixie’s room from the depths of space? Sure, I guess!