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Barney Google and Snuffy, 11/9/23

OK, whew, good news everybody, Sparkplug’s Grandson Li’l Sparky doesn’t need to participate in market economics in order to survive, he can still just happily munch on grass wherever! Now I’m moving onto my next Snuffy Smith world-building gripe, which is that I refuse to believe that Jughaid knows what “salad dressing” is.

Dennis the Menace, 11/9/23

Dennis, meanwhile, is still too naive to understand that money, or its increasingly abstract representations, can be exchanged for goods and services, much to his (oddly proportioned today, am I right? what’s going on here) grandfather’s discomfort. I guess refusing to acknowledge that a chain of labor relations go into the production and delivery of your toys and instead just expecting and indeed insisting that they manifest themselves for you is in fact fairly menacing.

Beetle Bailey, 11/9/23

The fact that someone over at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC looked up the official La-Z-Boy logo and did a passable job of rendering it on Beetle’s helmet ironically makes this one of the least lazy Beetle Bailey strips of the last decade.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/9/23

Not much to say about the content of today’s strip, but, with all apologies to “cellar door,” I don’t think there’s a more beautiful phrase in the English language than “Meanwhile, the Harwoods have also watched the infomercial.”

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Dustin, 11/8/23

There’s a lot of reasons to dislike Dustin, and one of the biggest is that it was cooked up with the premise of “Ha ha, these lazy millennials are moving back in with their parents because they’re slackers who refuse to get a job” and then was launched in newspapers in January of 2010, when the Great Recession was at its peak and unemployment stood at more than 10%. Anyway, the family dynamic has remained constant over the subsequent decade plus of economic change, and so today, with some the strongest employment numbers in living memory, we can maybe start hating Dustin for his own personal shortcomings rather than as a symbol of his generation; but I think we also might need to consider that in the world of Dustin, it has never stopped being 2010. Certainly it would explain why someone in their early 20s might talk about “the Brad Pitt look” as if that were a novel and contemporary cultural reference, although I guess it would make even more sense if the strip were actually taking place in 1997.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/8/23

At least in the context of the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith Present … Sparkplug’s Grandson Li’l Sparky strips, horses in the Snuffyverse are capable of human speech. But still, it makes me very sad that they apparently need to exchange money for goods and services. They’re domesticated animals! Shouldn’t they just get a nice feed bag in their paddock to meet their needs?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/8/23

“It doesn’t have anything to do with health, so it’s not my problem! Some people say that there’s a ‘mental’ kind of health, but I’m not buying it.”

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Slylock Fox, 11/6/23

One thing I’ve never really considered about the post-animalpocalypse Slylockverse: what do the other sapient animals think about the great apes? Are they considered just one more stone in the brilliant mosaic of a multispecies world? Or are they too close to the mostly exterminated H. sapiens for comfort? Today we learn that at least some of these apes unnaturally trim their fur to better resemble stars of the clownish human entertainments that the animals still watch and half-understand. This is, I assume, off-putting for everyone involved, as Slylock’s facial expression here seems to indicate. Yet if Slick Smitty were to catch site of these stooge-apes and fly into a violent rage at their cruel mockery of his massacred fellow humans, he would be the one put in jail! Is there no justice?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/6/23

Sure, there have been a lot of changes to Rex Morgan, M.D., over the years, but we should never forget that this is primarily a strip about Rex and June Morgan, who react to perceived bullshit with some of the most hilariously withering facial expressions known to man. Whether you’re about to start a fight at a funeral or filming an informercial on your recent kidnapee’s cell phone right before you turn yourself in to the cops, the Morgans will not attempt to compose their faces into expressions of polite interest or even mild distaste.