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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/23/23

I think it’s worthwhile to occasionally reflect on how weird the newspaper comic Snuffy Smith is, as a cultural object. Starting out as an entirely different strip about city life in the 1920s, during the Great Depression it changed its setting and vibe entirely to cash in on the vogue for vaudeville-derived jokes about hillbillies and kept going with that for more than 80 years. This humor genre only imperfectly mapped onto the lives of the Appalachian rural poor at the time, and has stayed more or less locked in place as reality drifts further and further from it. That’s how you get oddities like today, in which a distant memory of deadly clashes over land and status that arose between kinship groups in the absence of a government with a monopoly on legitimate violence gets processed through decades worth of creative and cultural drift and comes out as “a new world record for stubborness [sic].”

Gil Thorp, 3/23/23

This is pretty much a worst case scenario for a one-day celebrity coaching cameo: the celebrity coach not only completely revamps your team’s overall gameplan, but does so in a way that requires that everyone be at peak physical condition in order to execute the new strategy. Then he leaves and makes it Coaches Thorp and Cami’s problem! At least the Mudlarks will have some time to really perfect their “Apache basketball” techniques before [aide whispers in ear] oh, right, I’ve neglected to tell all of you that in fact Milford has had an undefeated season thanks to its pre-Kareem strategy and now the only game left to play is the championship. This’ll go great!

Pluggers, 3/23/23

Look, I’ve read Pluggers every day since 2006 and I feel pretty confident in saying that this isn’t even remotely true. Pluggers have a ton of problems, and most of them cannot be solved by a cup of coffee. A lot of them can’t be solved at all!

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Crock, 3/16/23

A fun fact is that this is literally how World War I started — or, I guess, is literally why World War I couldn’t be stopped after it started even though everyone kind of knew it was a bad idea.

Gasoline Alley, 3/16/23

Ha ha, Ida Noe, the creepy talking doll, seems to know a thing or two about shaking a dead person’s hand! You can cover her mouth all you want, but ultimately you cannot stop her.

Judge Parker, 3/16/23

RANDY PARKER! He’s tanned, rested, and ready for this assignment. Like, really tanned. Leathery. He spent the entire period when he was off the bench in a high-powered tanning booth. Why did he do this to himself. Is he even human anymore, under all that tan???

Pluggers, 3/16/23

Ha ha, were you planning on spending the rest of your day not thinking about your tongue and how old it is? Well, too bad! And here you thought the only body horror Pluggers delivered was its parade of freakish man-animal hybrids.

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Pluggers, 2/27/23

Look, I’m not going to say that there are no plugger or plugger-identified referees, but I feel comfortable in saying that for the vast majority of pluggers, when they see a referee on TV, their first thought is not “ahh, there’s another regular working man, just like me” but is instead “HOLDING? YOU THINK THAT’S HOLDING? FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE”, so I don’t know how well today’s Pluggers is going to land. I do think it’s accurate that pluggers would never rise to a career level where they might come to know interesting corporate or government secrets, though. That part I buy.

Judge Parker, 2/27/23

“I mean, it’s only Monday. He’s gonna be monologuing for the rest of the week. You want him to wrap up on Thursday and then we have to sit around in awkward silence for two more strips? We gotta stretch this out.”

Family Circus, 2/27/23

“And maybe some new glasses. You see how close he’s sitting to the TV?”

Hagar the Horrible, 2/27/23

You know, Hagar the Horrible usually focuses on small, mundane little moments in the life of a band of Viking warriors, but every once in a while you get a glimpse of a hugely important historic moment — like today, when the Varangian Guard was founded.