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Six Chix, 5/2/19

Hey guys, remember the Smurfs? I do! Sort of! In the sense that I know I watched the show obsessively as a kid and was super into it but honestly couldn’t really recount the plot of a single episode, but I do distinctly remember that Gargamel, the show’s primary antagonist, wants to eat the Smurfs, which I found fairly shocking as a child but honestly Gargamel was a pretty incompetent villain so he never got particularly close to achieving this goal. But these random children sure have, as part of their campfire fun! I’m not sure if that smurf in the s’murf the orange-shirted lad is proudly holding is already dead and nobody’s had the decency to close his eyes, or if he’s alive and trapped between the graham crackers, his screams muffled by the marshmallow goo holding him in place. And what about the guy just sitting there at the lower right, looking stunned? Is he drugged? Is he too frozen in terror to flee? Did he betray his friend, thinking, incorrectly, that the children would let him live? This is without question the most horrifying thing Six Chix has ever presented us with, and this is a strip that once did a joke about having sex with bigfoot.

Mary Worth, 5/2/19

Oh my goodness, “Arthur” has a dog! This changes everything. Maybe Arthur isn’t a bad man, he just needed money for his dog’s expensive operation! That fancy hotel he was staying at was just the equivalent of a Ronald McDonald House for people who need to come in from out of town to go to a high-end vet!

OK, fine, we all know this isn’t true and that Arthur is a bad man, and the way we know is by his dog’s expression of profound ennui. He’s heard all this before, man, and too many times. Sure, it pays for the kibble, but at what spiritual cost?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/2/19

I was going to make a joke along the lines of “Ha ha, Snuffy’s being left alone in his cell to starve to death!” but honestly, look at how rickety that jail is. The door Sheriff Tait is walking out of isn’t even on a hinge! He’s just kind of moving it out of the way! I’m reasonably sure Snuffy will be out chicken thievin’ again before you know it.

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Mary Worth, 4/28/19

Havin failed to convince Estelle with some random article she found on her phone, Mary’s been forced to break out the big guns: Saint Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, and four-time NBA champion Earl “The Pearl” Monroe.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/28/19

The poker players are all shocked because they know that sawmill’s been closed down for years. After years of reading this strip, I refuse to believe there’s any large employer within sleepwalking distance of Hootin’ Holler.

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Dustin, 4/25/19

Sorry to youngsplain at you, Dustin’s Boomer Dad Whose Name I Refuse To Remember Or Look Up, but on the social networking service Twitter, a “tweet” is a post that’s publicly visible, or, if you have a locked account, a post that’s visible to your followers; a “direct message,” as the name implies, is private message visible only to the sender and recipient or recipients. Getting dumped in public has a very different emotional valence than the relative privacy of a direct message, so your “Dear John tweet” joke is inaccurate, and isn’t even as charming as wordplay as the more correct “Dear John DM” would be. Also, your son appears to be experiencing a real emotional crisis, as many people of all ages would if the romantic relationship they were in abruptly came to an end, but sure, the thing to focus on here is the website via which the message happened to be sent, so laff it up.

Mary Worth, 4/25/19

I love that, as Estelle unravels emotionally, Mary is just making unbroken eye contact with her phone while dropping this scam knowledge. “Look, Estelle, I know your boyfriend is on your phone and you think everything on phones is real. Well, my phone is telling me that your boyfriend is probably a fraud! Really makes you think, doesn’t it?”