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Hi and Lois, 7/12/19

Cheer up, Chip! You may not be part of the lucrative stable of intellectual property held by the Walt Disney Company, but Hearst Communications, the parent of King Features, is no slouch! In a tough media landscape, Hearst remains profitable and in fact its revenue grew in 2018. Of course, a closer look a the numbers reveals that nearly 40 percent of 2019’s profits will come from “business and medical data and software operations,” which might mean that the whole comics division is going to be spun off and sold to a private equity fund so Hearst can focus on its core competencies. That’s when you really need to start worrying, buddy! In the meantime, enjoy being subsidized by the aviation-safety data company that’s under the same corporate umbrella as you for whatever reason!

Dick Tracy, 7/12/19

Ha, nice try, Dick, but you don’t get to be a billionaire war profiteer without knowing a thing or two about how to deal with nosy cops, and one thing you know is that you definitely don’t answer casual questions about how it sure looks like you killed your wife without, like, a team of lawyers present.

Six Chix, 7/12/19

I’m not going to lie, y’all: I’m kind of in awe of the extremely bleak turn this joke takes very, very quickly.

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Dustin, 6/21/19

A big part of Dustin’s whole deal is slamming on millennials without really understanding much by way of what millennials’ lives are actually like. The strip has made jokes about Instagram and Twitter despite clearly not knowing how either of them work; so I guess it’s probably for the best that that it refuses to deal at all with the modern romance scene as facilitated by Tinder and other dating apps (which is, according to literally every standup show I go to, an actual rich mine of comedy that millennials simply can’t get enough of). Fortunately the strip has a seemingly endless supply of “guy strikes out trying to pick up chicks at a fern bar” jokes left over from the ’80s lying around. Ha ha, it’s funny because Dustin says “I was into athletics in college,” which is a definitely a phrase a human whose native language is English would use!

Pluggers, 6/21/19

Speaking of millennials and their sex lives, do you ever worry that your mother-in-law thinks you’re cheating on your spouse by fucking your phone? Well, today’s Pluggers isn’t going to set your mind at ease, unfortunately.

Six Chix, 6/21/19

Sure, having noisy upstairs neighbors is annoying. But have these ladies considered maybe getting some furniture that would absorb the sound currently echoing around their vast, entirely empty apartment?

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/17/19

Oh hey, remember that Barney Google and Snuffy Smith crossover business from a couple weeks ago that I quickly lost interest in? Well, it was all a run-up to the strip’s 100th anniversary. Thanks for 100 bodacious years, the strip’s titular characters say, though given how the history of the strip has played out, really Snuffy should be saying “Thanks for 85 bodacious years,” and Barney should reply “Thanks for 35 bodacious years, and then decades of extremely rare bodacious cameos, and then more frequent bodacious appearances starting in 2012 for whatever reason.” I was going to make fun the today’s boast (threat?) that this strip will last another century or maybe even more, but it’s honestly pretty wild it’s lasted this long, so who’s to say what the future holds? Anyway, let’s see how the other strips in the King Features stable are kissing Barney Google and Snuffy Smith’s ass today!

Mark Trail, 6/17/19

Kudos to Mark Trail for dispensing with its contractual obligation with a bit of confusing dialogue rather than trying to integrate Snuffy into the wold of the strip, possibly as a grotesque, gnomish hermit living deep in the Sonoran Desert. Instead we’re just left with Mark looking at Doc thinking “Is this … a bit? Is he doing a bit? Couldn’t he just call from his cell phone? We all have cell phones, right?”

Shoe, 6/17/19

I’m also fond of today’s Shoe, in which the sapient bird-characters threaten to kill and eat (hopefully in that order) the beloved sapient (?) horse-character Spark Plug. Then they’ll eat Barney and Snuffy too! How dare these humans come to the treetop realm of the bird-men! They must be punished!

Six Chix, 6/17/19

Six Chix gives a shoutout to Barney’s … famous … self-driving car? Maybe this is a reference to Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company that spun off of Google, or maybe it’s just acknowledgement that Barney will need a new form of transportation now that the birds have eaten Spark Plug.

Family Circus, 6/17/19

Meanwhile, that other venerable institution of the funny pages, the Family Circus, absolutely cannot be bothered to say anything nice about the birthday boys. Oh, your weird urban-sharpie-turned-hillbilly-minstrel-show strip is a hundred years old? Who cares. It’s Father’s Day week, and that means Jeffy Keane is going do a strip where he pretends to be his brother insulting his sister while giving their dad a day off. Fuck Dolly and her shitty toaster-operation skills and fuck Barney Google and Snuffy Smith: that’s the official Family Circus position.