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Family Circus, 7/28/23

Ah, sweet, unlearned Jeffy! Having heard his parents and grandparents telling treacly stories of guardian angels, he assumes that everyone must have one, even characters in the fairy tales his parents read to him at night. But Ma Keane’s face shows that she knows the truth: that the protection offered by God and his heavenly messengers does not extend to freakish nightmare-beings like Humpty Dumpty. Man was made in the image of his Creator, and falls under His protective grace; but this egg-demon is clearly born of Hell itself, and being shattered on the ground, his guts oozing everywhere, is the fate he deserves.

Hi and Lois, 7/28/23

I assume, in a fatalistic way, that there are no new newspaper comics fans, and haven’t been for some time, and anyone still left reading them daily has really committed to the genre, and already knows all the lore. Still, I’d like to think that there are a certain number of people — not 10,000, surely, but at least a few — who are only learning today that Lois from Hi and Lois and Beetle from Beetle Bailey are siblings, and those people are absolutely losing their minds.

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Mary Worth, 7/17/23

Congratulations, Greta! You may be depressed due to trauma, but you’re at least seeing a vet who recently started seeing a therapist himself due to his own trauma-based depression. Does that mean that Dr. Ed is as good as a licensed therapist? Ha ha, no, absolutely not, but he’s a lot more forgiving about his patients pooping in the middle of a session than an actual therapist would be.

Hi and Lois, 7/17/23

Congratulations, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and the Horse! Not only were you “shortlisted for the 2020 British Book Awards Non-Fiction Lifestyle Book of the Year,” but you also got a barely legible appearance in a Hi and Lois strip where Hi and Lois are mad at each other for reasons neither will really articulate and the vibes are real bad!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/17/23

Congratulations, pickleball! You’ve reached the stage where the creative team for Barney Google and Snuffy Smith thinks its readership will know what you are, so you must be an integral part of American life at this point! (Bitcoin hit this stage back in 2015.)

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Hi and Lois and The Lockhorns, 7/15/23

Call me “out of touch” all you want — my family certainly does — but golf seems like a hugely expensive and boring waste of time to me, and I have other hugely expensive wastes of time that I actually enjoy, so I will never play golf and you cannot convince me to do it. By “you” here I specifically mean newspaper comic strip creators, for whom golf usually lands somewhere between “relatable pastime” and “holy sacrament,” though these two strips today seem to admit that golf is, in fact, not as enjoyable as they usually make it out to be, and can even add to the overwhelming sense of oppressive ennui that we as middle-class inhabitants of the 21st century West cannot escape. Golf is at least giving Hi and Thirsty the opportunity to avoid their spouses, but somehow Leroy and Loretta have turned the game into yet another opportunity to spend time antagonizing one another while also getting a sunburn. Truly grim stuff!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/15/23

Now, I’m sure the first panel of this strip has raised objections among the more pedantic among you who are well aware that Snuffy’s house and the local church are not situated close together like this in established Googleverse canon. But the composition is in fact symbolic — the two structures are shown next to one another, prefiguring Snuffy and Parson Tuttle’s proximity in the next panel. The art in this strip is not and has never been literally representational; if it were, why does everyone look like [shudders in disgust] that?