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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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Hi and Lois, 11/26/21

Almost every family patriarch in a newspaper comic is a baby boomer, with tickets to the original Woodstock in a scrapbook and a disco leisure suit in the back of their closet, no matter how improbably that maps onto their current apparent age and/or family relationships. I therefore applaud today’s strip; while there’s still a potential interpretation where Hi is talking about himself, albeit with a modicum of self-awareness, I assume we’re really meant to understand that he’s making fun of all those old fogies, whereas he knows the real year that rock and roll changed the world: 1999, when nü metal hit the mainstream and Korn, Orgy, and Staind all had albums that topped the charts.

Funky Winkerbean, 11/26/21

God damn it Funky Winkerbean, you really had me starting to panic that yesterday’s awkward introductions were setting up yet another timeskip because here’s Wally and Rachel’s son and wait a minute when did Wally and Rachel have a son, who’s like six or seven at least? They got married back in 2014, so if people really are aging in real time, then maybe that’s possible? But thank goodness, Uncle Lumpy had already reminded us a year earlier that Rachel already had a kid when she and Wally met, who has now, it appears, been rescued from the memory hole in order to be introduced to Harry Dinkle. Speaking of kids, Rana is not only Becky and Comic Book John’s kid but also Wally’s kid, so yay for blended families, and also yay for extremely convoluted casts of characters in a syndicated newspaper strip. The official Wally Winkerbean page on Funky Winkerbean Dot Com notes that “My dream is to one day produce a Funky family tree (or family jungle) for the website. The thing about dreams is that they don’t always come true, but I haven’t quite given up on this one just yet. Fingers crossed.” This was written in 2018, so keep crossing those fingers, I guess.

Family Circus, 11/26/21

I don’t really even have a joke about this, it just really is one of the saddest things that’s ever appeared in the Family Circus. I hope that kind-hearted grandparents/Family Circus trufans are cutting this out of the paper to hang on the refrigerator, chuckling softly to themselves and saying “Oh, Jeffy, you really are a huge loser.”

Mary Worth, 11/26/21

Ha ha, check out how those two fish are looking at each other! Those are definitely “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, about a murder-suicide pact?” facial expressions.

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Judge Parker, 11/20/21

So, see, the mayor has been launching a vendetta against Abbey, falsely accusing her of burning down her own B&B in both the court of public opinion and also the actual court system. But his deputy mayor has evidence (which the mayor doesn’t know about) that Abbey actually burned down her own B&B, and he’s going to blackmail Sam over it. Got it? Make sense to you? Me neither, but I’m willing to just move along to the “Sam physically assaults and yells at people” stage of proceedings.

Mary Worth, 11/20/21

Hey, remember how Mary was Libby’s original owner, but she had to pawn her off on Estelle because it turned out Dr. Jeff was allergic to cats? I feel like the fact that Estelle is a person who’s acquired a collection of other people’s unwanted pets is a pretty good fit that with the fact that she’s on the verge of becoming a person who, on multiple occasions, has taken Wilbur back as a romantic partner after he’s made an ass of himself in public. The only thing that can save her from this fate now is Mary smugly informing her that only one pet per apartment is allowed under Charterstone rules, leading to her being evicted and blessedly forced to leave town.

Hi and Lois, 11/20/21

Hey, Hi, you ever consider not being a huge fucking downer all the time? Just a thought!