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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/30/20

What’s your favorite part of this extremely improbable scene? Some might say it’s that the makeshift Hootin’ Holler clinic, which is in such dire shape that the waiting area is separated from the rest of the facility by a patched sheet in what is almost certainly a serious HIPAA violation, somehow has a functioning EKG machine, even if the accompanying treadmill is predictably not in operation. But for me, it’s that Snuffy has stripped to the waist so the electrodes can be attached to his gnomish torso, but is still wearing his overalls, the straps flapping behind him as he hops.

Blondie, 3/30/20

The only way this smash-cut joke actually works is if Blondie chloroformed Dagwood between panels one and two, changed him out if his work vest into his casual sweater, then hauled his unresponsive body to the car, dragged him into a restaurant booth, and waited for him to come to before delivering this zinger. It would mess with the rhythm of the strip to show all that, of course, but I do sincerely want to see it.

Mark Trail, 3/30/20

Wow, this really takes a lot of the weight off of Rusty, who thought he was going to have explain this! Thanks, Eric, for breaking the bad news to Kevin. You’re the real hero!

Six Chix, 3/30/20

“If You Truly Want To Be One Of The Six Chix, You Need To Do A Vaguely Pervy Bigfoot Strip”: another installment in a continuing series.

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Funky Winkerbean, 3/29/20

One of my least favorite running Funky Winkerbean bits — amazingly, I do have a hierarchy — is jokes at the school that are set up by the teacher saying “Can anyone tell me [fairly obscure fact X]” in a way that really seems to strongly imply that the students have never encountered fact X in their curriculum, but he’s mad at them for not knowing the answer anyway, because it’s their fault they don’t know the name of, for instance, random Kuiper Belt objects off the top of their head. Anyway, did you know that this particular Kuiper Belt object isn’t even called Ultima Thule anymore? Science teacher dude whose name I forget hates kids, hates teaching, doesn’t keep up with his field of study, and probably should look into retiring as soon as possible, is what I’m saying.

Blondie, 3/29/20

Today’s Blondie is kind of interesting because it doesn’t really make sense if you don’t know that Dagwood lives in an impeccably manicured suburb where, anachronistically, people let their dogs roam free at night, but I’m more interested in the throwaway panels, where Dagwood identifies himself and his neighbor responds with an excruciatingly neutral “Yes”, implying that she knows exactly who he is and has some opinions about him that she is not eager to share.

Six Chix, 3/29/20

oh no the cartoons are getting horny and no one will help them

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Six Chix, 3/19/20

I think the joke here is that the mummy is very bad at cooking because he … doesn’t have … eyes? Like, can mummies not see, in the classic horror-movie mummy canon? As near as I can tell, mummies’ traditional powers involve shuffling forward very slowly and moaning, so the fact that they can’t see anything makes them even less scary. Anyway, if I were doing this comic, I’d make the joke about how the mummy is covered with highly flammable linen cloth, preserved over the centuries by the bone-dry Egyptian desert, which would have hilarious results next to a stove’s heating elements, but I guess that’s why I’ve always been deemed “too edgy” for the newspaper funny pages.

Dick Tracy, 3/19/20

DICK TRACY UPDATE: Shaky (remember him?) had his big meetup with the Tracys and ended up getting shot in the shoulder, and now he’s laying low at some criminal safehouse for which he had the keys, except it also happens to be where crime-family-adjacent characters Ugly Crystal and her bio-dad (remember them?) are living. Anyway, this has all been funny because Shaky has been trying to “play it cool” despite slowly bleeding out from his bullet wound, and while it isn’t quite as theatrically awful a death as you would’ve seen in the Dick Locher years of this strip, watching his agony mount has been pretty impressively grim, I’ll say that.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 3/19/20

Wait, do all the characters in Mother Goose and Grimm live in the Land of Oz? It would explain all the talking animals, I’ll say that much.