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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/7/14

The arrival of Loweezy and li’l Bizzy Buzz Buzz at Snuffy’s Den of Bachelor Squalor is such a proudly announced non-sequitur that I immediately assumed Bizzy Buzz Buzz is a beloved recurring character in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, if by “recurring” you mean “hasn’t appeared once in the 10 years I’ve been reading this strip but they’ve been publishing the damn thing since 1919, so who knows.” Some cursory Googling (ha) didn’t bring up any evidence of this, though it did reveal that Bizzy Buzz Buzz was some kind of motorized pen that looked like a bird that was a popular toy in the ’60s and ’70s. By the way, if you’re looking for some super-depressing anecdotes, you could do worse than looking at classic toy discussion forums, apparently:

Funky Winkerbean, 7/7/14

Funky Winkerbean is sadly cutting away from Les’s artistic despair to focus on its suuuuper boring comics collecting plot, but I do like the fact that Holly is giving a shout-out to Crankshaft in the final panel here. “Hey, remember that monstrous old hatebag who used to drive the bus, who made all the stupid puns? Whatever happened to him?” (Spoiler: he’s a vegetative husk in a nursing home, dying unloved and alone).

Judge Parker, 7/7/14

This is all the same stuff from yesterday, which I’m glad about because yesterday I forgot to make a joke about the fact that Neddy is wearing a sleeveless t-shirt that just says “FRANCE” across the front. Do you think she got it in France? Do you think the French make them specifically to sell to Americans, and then laugh and laugh whenever anyone buys one?

Pluggers, 7/7/14

Not sure how many of you have ever clicked on the “MORE” link next to the archive drop-downs at the top of the site. It takes you to the advanced archives page, where you can search the site for posts with specific comics, on specific dates, and with specific keywords. It’s a nice system, built by my fantastic web developer Adam Norwood, and you should use it to your heart’s content, but really I had it set up for my own use. Sometimes I get a little nagging feeling in the back of my mind to the effect of “did I do this joke before?” and the answer is just a search away:

Anyway, feel free to enjoy the joke I wrote on this subject in October of 2012!

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Judge Parker, 7/6/14

Oh boy oh boy, we’ve reached the best part of any Judge Parker storyline: the part where the smug, upper-crust protagonists get paid. Remember last year when Neddy befriended do-gooders Ross and Thalia and also invested in their dubious water filtration scheme, and Ross supposedly got kidnapped in Niger and it looked like maybe it was all a scam, but it turned out it wasn’t and our heroes were able to call in some shadowy black-ops extraction team to save him? Well, Neddy just got her first check for her trouble. Plus interest! Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

Speaking of gettin’ paid, remember how April’s dad Abbott had gone down to his heavily armed Yucatan jungle compound, to die? Well, apparently that’s for suckers, so he’s going to come back to the states and be Judge Parker Senior’s highly paid script consultant/the strip’s wacky neighbor instead. Come on board, Abbott! There’s room on this gravy train for everybody!

Shoe, 7/6/14

A good strategy for writing a comic strip is to take a joke your 10-year-old nephew heard in school, but then have one of your characters describe it, ashen-faced, as a terrible nightmare he had, to emphasize the intrinsic horror of the narrative.

Panel from Spider-Man, 7/6/14

Now that Spider-Man has been displaced from his super-heroic role by Doc Ock, Peter needs to find new employment — so why not as a mashgiach? “Wait, was this cow butchered improperly? My trayf-sense is tingling!”

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One of the fun things about going over my blog history is seeing just how incredibly long it’s taken some plot points to play out. For instance: Judge Parker Senior’s awful unreadable book that everyone loves for some reason? That’s been a plot point in one way or another since 2008! In the first major plotline involving this cursèd tome, Sam was sent to nail down the ludicrous book advance a Parker deserves; he was in the middle of doing just that out on the golf course when his negotiating rival was gunned down by a sniper. The whole thing ended, as you might expect, with Sam standing by stone-faced while a SWAT team unleashed a hail of automatic weapons fire onto murderous, knife-wielding stripper named “Dixie Julep”.

Mary Worth spent the summer of 2009 trying her best to prevent a forbidden love between neglected wife Delilah and Charterstone resident lech Charlie. Despite Mary’s best efforts to physically separate them, Delilah only turned away from the road to harlotry when she saw the hellscape that was Charlie’s bachelor pad.

But my personal favorite plot of this year was a weird, rambling Mark Trail story where one of the weird but virtuous backwoods families Mark is friends with for some reason decided to call our hero in to take care of a problem with the local water table, somehow. The little girl in this family had a pet raccoon named Sneaky, and Mark shook its hand even though he was told up front that it was a filthy little criminal.

The lady in charge of the company draining the swamp met Sneaky too! Doesn’t he look adorable? Doesn’t he look not at all rabid or like he’s just thinking about biting you all the time?

Sneaky later escaped (to the extent that a wild animal leaving a house and going back into the woods can really be construed as “escaping”) and was eventually captured by a band of sinister backwoods folk who ran an illicit dog vs. raccoon fighting ring. There was log-chaining involved.

Mark intervened with both his fists and some opinions about the legality of the whole scene.

This was, hilariously, local front page news, and the raccoon fightmaster, who was named “Rabbit,” was hired by sinister corporate interests to run Mark out of town. This failed, obviously, though Andy the dog did have to lick Mark free from some kidnappers. In the end, water was restored to the swamp, and Sneaky was free … free to plot against us. He’s still plotting today. They say in the night you can hear his sinister chittering.

Anniversaposts will return on Monday! Stay tuned for a review of year six of this blog, which I dubbed “The Year of the Bastard” for reasons that will become delightfully apparent.