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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/20/18

Today’s Snuffy Smith offers a lot to think about — from Snuffy’s inability to differentiate between dissimulation and imaginative escape, to the thought of some unfortunately door-to-door salesman forced to try to squeeze blood from the stone of impoverished Hootin’ Holler. But primarily, I’m just thinking about Snuffy’s beachwear, and the tan lines it would produce.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/20/18

Good news, everyone! Les’s mopey book about his dead wife didn’t win that Eisner it was nominated for. Bad news: everyone at their table still got unlimited cheesecake. I want these creeps to receive zero rewards, do you year me? Zero.

Shoe, 7/20/18

There’s never been a “Farmer Frank” character in this strip and the fact that he’s a farmer doesn’t have any kind of relationship to the punchline of this joke and that all bothers me so much

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Gil Thorp, 6/12/18

If there’s one thing Gil Thorp is committed to, it’s the lore, so yeah, I guarantee there was a Gil Thorp plot years back about a star baseball prospect who accidentally lost a finger or three to a grain thresher, and I’m devastated that I missed it. Mostly what I love here is how completely Kevin Pelwecki, a delusional quarterback wannabe who, thanks to obsessively watching YouTube videos, has turned out to be Actually Good at baseball, takes this information in stride. A baseball player with a mutilated hand? A football player who accidentally cut off his leg with a chainsaw? It’s all par for the course around the Milford athletic department!

Six Chix, 6/12/18

So, imagine you have a dog holding other dogs at gunpoint yelling “DROP THE BONES!” Would it be funny? No, not at all. Would you at least be able to parse what’s happening? Yes, for the most part. Now, imagine that the “gun” is drawn so that it might not be a gun, but it still looks kind of like one, and the gun(?)-weilding dog also makes a reference to an “app” of some sort. Would you be able to parse that? Not anymore! But would it be funny now? Not really! Anyway, you don’t have to imagine all this, because it just got printed across America, in several newspapers!

Shoe, 6/12/18

The Tip O’Neil-esque bird-senator in Shoe is named Batson Belfrey (it’s wordplay, get it????) and I guess the bat logo on the front of his podium is part of a personal branding effort. I’d like to imagine that today’s somewhat labored punchline is a result of a new Shoe intern being told to write dialogue for a pre-drawn strip without really being given any background, and they saw the bat and thought, “Well, is he … goth? I guess he’s a goth senator? And goths like the Addams Family, right?”

Hi and Lois, 6/12/18

The two garbage men looked at each other in mounting horror. Irma had worn them down over the period of months, with both carrots and sticks they wouldn’t talk about, even to each other, until they said they’d take her husband’s body to the dump. But when the agreed day arrived, it wasn’t what they had signed up for at all. He was still alive. But they were in too deep now. They had no choice.

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Shoe, 6/3/18

This is, I think, is my favorite Shoe Patented Goggle Eyes Of Horror yet. I’m not sure if the Dates R Us lady is supposed to be an employee, in which case she’s worried about getting fired, or if she’s the owner of this small business, in which case she may be realizing that she’s completely unqualified for her chosen field of endeavor, but either way she just seems genuinely appalled that she’s botched things this badly, possibly because she’s ignorant of the meaning of extremely common English phrases.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/3/18

The restaurant industry? Notoriously forgiving to first-timers. The main qualifications you need? Thinking about running a restaurant a lot, and being good at cooking for you and your girlfriend. The main endorsement you want to get? A wealthy nanny who also owns an aerospace company. This scheme can’t fail!