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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/27/24

Ha, get it, you thought she wanted Ernie to stop smoking tobacco, a dangerous and expensive habit … but in fact, “smoking” could mean a number of different things! Thus the ambiguity. Not clear what Ernie’s wife has against smoking brisket. Seems like a pretty harmless and honestly delicious hobby to me. But you can figure that one out on your own. What, am I supposed to hold your hand on every little thing?

Mary Worth, 8/27/24

This is good! She’s going to get to the convention and find out that the reception theme is “fancy ball/exotic zoo,” and see that it’s really tacky and off-putting. “Won’t be doing that for our wedding!” she’ll think. “Really dodged a bullet there.”

Six Chix, 8/27/24

Hey, were you wondering what’s up with the Tuesday Chik, last seen being cucked by avocado toast? Well, she’s cruising for sex at pizza parties now. Sad!

Pluggers, 8/27/24

WHAT THE HELL PLUGGERS I HAVE BEEN READING YOU FOR 18 YEARS AND NEVER ONCE IN THAT TIME HAVE I THOUGHT “I WANT TO SEE A JOKE ABOUT PLUGGER CLEAVAGE” WHAT ARE YOU DOING AND HOW CAN I MAKE YOU STOP

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PROGRAMMING NOTE: haha whoops I screwed up the days for several posts this week, here’s Wednesday’s if you haven’t seen that yet

Dennis the Menace, 8/8/24

Look, I respect the effort here — the fundmental underlying joke is pretty good, Alice’s indignant facial expression is funny, and Dennis looking genuinely hurt in the background is a nice touch. “Lived to tell about it.com” isn’t a great URL, though, because it honestly sounds like a site for something a lot more traumatic and kind of spoils the mood, and a much bigger problem is that it’s a website at all. A group of modern young baby sitters is simply not going to go to the trouble to buy a domain name and then set up a WordPress account for a group blog or whatever. They’d set up a community on social media somewhere — Facebook, maybe, Facebook groups have had a little bit of a comeback with younger people, or maybe whatever the TikTok equivalent is. Or a private Discord server! There probably isn’t a TikTok equivalent, now that I think about it, not that I would know, because I don’t go on there. What happens on TikTok is none of my business. The important thing is that I know that I don’t know, which Socrates would say makes me smart. I’m going to run with that. Anyway, nice try but botched execution, Dennis the Menace, I give this 6 out of 10 stars.

Gearhead Gertie, 8/8/24

I’ve decided that my favorite kind of Gearhead Gertie panels are the ones where she’s antagonizing her husband. This one is great because you could imagine that the joke is that this is the thinnest of pretenses over her attempts to establish a throuple, but it’s actually much more wholesome (or, depending on how you see it, more perverse): it’s all exactly as it seems, she just loves NASCAR that much, and it makes her husband crazy. The cable guy, despite his unconventional new living situation, doesn’t seem to notice this drama, or care about it if he does. He’s just happy to be there!

Pluggers, 8/8/24

These two pluggers aren’t just romantically smiling at each other after dinner. Obviously they are doing that — those tight faces and bugged out eyes simply scream “romance” — but there’s aslo something more to it. Thanks for cluing us in, Pluggers!

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Mary Worth, 7/26/24

Oh, man, sorry I thought this was going to be something “normal” like Wilbur deciding to murder his fish for attention, when in fact he’s going to dream/fantasize about merging with his dead fish as some kind of nearsighted human/fish hybrid. A dead one, too! Remember how he was speculating yesterday about fish heaven? Well, in his imagining, this is fish heaven, when a fish transcends its fishy form and becomes merged with Wilbur. Imagine the sick sort of God who would consider such a nightmare to be a reward for a life well lived: this is the deity that Wilbur worships.

Gil Thorp, 7/26/24

Speaking of cruel Gods, imagine if you were invited, just briefly, to bask in the holy radiance of your Creators, except that it has to take the form of walking by a couple of dudes sitting behind a folding table at Comic-Con, where you’ll be surrounded by absolute dorks. Would probably take a lot of the mystery out of the whole thing, right?

Pluggers, 7/26/24

A lot of people use my Pluggers commentary as evidence that I’m a coastal elitist who hates real, down-home Americans from the heartland, but nothing I’ve ever said about pluggers is anywhere close to as contemptuous as “pluggers get trapped in port-a-pottys all the time, probably they fall down in there accidentally and get all covered with really nasty piss and shit, that’s a classic plugger situation and that’s the tea, sis.”