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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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Phantom, 5/9/11

Ooh, it’s a new Phantom adventure, everyone: “The College Kid!” And I am loving panel two, as the college kid taps away on that circa 1995 PC, ignoring the vaguely menacing jibes of the men around him and maintaining a look of withering contempt all the while. “These cretins seem to believe that just shouting can bring about a successful Internet money-making scheme! Soon I’ll produce a victory that will force them to acknowledge my importance to this criminal enterprise, and stop them from making fun of my blazer!”

Apartment 3-G, 5/9/11

Ha ha, the A3G makeover storyline may have flopped due to the artist’s inability to depict clothes that are remotely flattering or interesting-looking, but give him this: when called upon to draw the sort of hideous, unflattering dresses someone like Ruby would force upon her hapless bridesmaids, he fucking nails it.

Funky Winkerbean, 5/9/11

Hey, everyone in Les’s life: won’t you please shove a comforting metaphorical boob of reassurance into his mouth? It will probably shut him up!

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Mark Trail, 5/3/11

Ha ha, remember last week when you were all like “Dudes with mustaches, they must be bad,” but then later you thought, “Oh, I’m not giving this strip enough credit.” Well, you totally were giving it the exact right amount of credit, my friend! I can’t believe this trio — one with a mustache, one with hair that reaches his collar, and one who wears a motorcycle helmet, presumably to hide even worse crimes against grooming — dare to refer to themselves as “clean-cut kids,” mostly because they all appear to be about 35.

B.C., 5/3/11

Hey there, legacy cartoonist or cartoonists now helming B.C. on behalf of John L. Hart FLP, the whole point of the “Wiley’s Dictionary” jokes (aka the “Book on a Rock” jokes) is to slap some clip art around a painfully unfunny joke and/or pun and then head out to the golf course. There’s no need to, say, show whatever random character you have reading the dictionary straighten up in disgust and contempt at the joke’s corniness in the second panel. That sort of thing just smacks of effort.

Phantom, 5/3/11

When Diana decided to call up Savarna, who made a play for the Phantom when everyone thought Diana was dead, I assumed that she just wanted to taunt her. But don’t worry about Savarna! She’s working out her sexual frustrations very nicely, thank you, just shootin’ massive artillery pieces at stuff, by remote control.