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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/31/11

Today’s Snuffy Smith demonstrates how complicated it can be using visual signifiers in a strip that’s nearly a century old and that takes place in some difficult-to-pin-down time and place. Obviously the joke here is that our rustic hillbillies are living a lifestyle that very modern environmental and local-food advocates would endorse. And yet the only way the strip can depict someone as a fancy city-dwelling type is to dress them up in clothes that seem to date from roughly the Coolidge Administration, a time during which a flatlander would be much more likely to head up into the hills looking for precious coal to strip mine, not researching sustainable agriculture. Of course, it’s wholly possible that there’s a Brooklyn subculture of young lefty hipsters for whom bow ties, suspenders, and straw hats are the height of fashion, so maybe I’m just not with it enough to get what’s happening here.

As a side note, I’m pretty impressed that the strip managed to sneak in a joke about mule farts in the middle there.

Mary Worth, 7/31/11

I love that Mary has to consciously remind herself not to stiff the waitress on the tip. “Normally I assume that the trampy young women the waitressing lifestyle attracts just spend all their free cash on prophylactics and reefer, so I leave them nothing. But this one gets the full 10 percent!”

Phantom, 7/31/11

High-tech superhero lairs sure seemed a lot cooler before the Internet, didn’t they? It’s not as exciting to see the Phantom get a crucial piece of information from a Google News alert.

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Marvin, 7/28/11

Every once in a while, I question some of my comics obsessions and bêtes noires. Do the newspaper comics really have the horrible tendencies that I attribute to them, or am I just being uncharitable because of my own particular mission as a curmudgeonly comics commentator? Take Marvin; is this strip really the shit-stained horror that I make it out to be, or is it merely a whimsical take on infancy that happens to include the occasional joke about diaper-changing? When I’m wracked with self-doubt of this kind, it’s almost a relief to see strips like today’s, in which Marvin spasms uncontrollably while taking a huge dump in his pants, and then cracks wise about how gross it is, inside his pants. Thanks, Marvin, for reinforcing all my worst opinions about you!

Mark Trail, 7/28/11

Because Mark was able to convince mountain man John Thrasher to come down from the mountains and also no longer have PTSD, he’s now gotten cocky and believes that he can convince anyone or anything to do whatever he asks. If there’s a something more hilarious than Mark Trail wading towards a goose and bellowing “WAIT! RELAX!” at it, I’m not sure what it could possibly be.

Mary Worth, 7/28/11

Oh, wait, never mind, some poor waitress running away from Mary Worth and vomiting in terror and disgust is definitely funnier.

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Gil Thorp, 7/27/11

Hey, everyone, in case you were wondering, Gil Thorp hasn’t been cancelled or anything. Due to my extreme displeasure at the second summer in a row featuring a shenanigan-free golf plot, I refuse to do even a cursory job summarizing the storyline for you, but I do want to point out with icy disdain the “FOOZLE!” in panel two. Can you imagine any circumstance under which hitting a golf ball would result in a noise that sounds even remotely like “FOOZLE”? No, of course you can’t, other than maybe Dr. Scavuzzo has a special wacky trick club that emits hilarious vaudeville noises. Gil Thorp, we want our insane summer plot! We will not be bought off by supposedly zany sound effects.

Mary Worth, 7/27/11

Potential reasons why our waitress is flabbergasted at Mary’s very mild health-based oversharing:

• “Oh, no, we don’t have anything even remotely healthy on our menu! Even the salad is garnished with fried onion rings and lard-flavored dressing! Literally anything I serve to this woman will kill her right here in the booth!”
• “Wait, I wasn’t listening to anything she said until the very end. ‘Dodged a bullet?’ Is this seemingly feeble old woman a ninja with superhuman powers?”
• “Hey, it’s that jerk Mary Worth, who meddled in my affairs a few years back and ruined my life!”

Archie, 7/27/11

Of course we all know that Jughead loves a good hot dog, but now we’re discovering just how much: take one from him and in his rage he’ll commit genocide.