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Six Chix, 6/19/19

Nostalgia is near universal human emotion, but as Proust and his madeleine proved, it’s also one that’s remarkably easy to evoke in a quick, efficient way. Today’s Six Chix is an In Search Of Lost Time for our era, combining a once popular brand of automobile, a once popular media property, and fucking, and boom: it’s like you’re there! I have no idea what the joke is supposed to be.

Mary Worth, 6/19/19

You’d think Dr. Jeff would’ve remembered that he’d already met Iris, Wilbur’s ex-girlfriend, who also lives in Mary and Wilbur’s condo complex, especially considering that her son Tommy, the notorious local drug dealer and addict, figured heavily into some of the most important storylines in this strip’s history. But you know, maybe he hasn’t met her! In fact, maybe all the non-Dr. Jeff storylines in this strip pass by without him noticing or caring! I honestly kind of love the idea that he’s completely unaware of Charterstone gossip. On the other hand, maybe this is precisely the reason Mary persistently refuses to marry him. LOVE ME, LOVE MY DRAMA, JEFF.

Beetle Bailey, 6/19/19

Ha ha, it’s funny because Miss Buxley was specifically created to cater to the male gaze and she can never, ever escape it!

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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.

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Beetle Bailey, 6/16/19

Gotta say, I don’t agree with Sarge here. Beetle is entirely passive in this tale, swept along by events without taking action or seizing control of his own destiny. And then there’s the bear that enters the story in the third act: what’s his deal? Is there an emotional connection between him? What motivates him? Without seeing inside his head he’s just a deus ex machina. Beetle needs to read Robert McKee’s Story or at least Save The Cat and then do some extensive rewrites if he has any hopes of getting this script optioned.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 6/16/19

This is the sort of Crankshaft-esque exaggeration that has no place in the Lockhorns, which is usually brutally realistic both in its setting and in its bleak emotional landscape. That’s why I’m choosing to believe that things really are as they seem: the bombs are dropping, nuclear fire is destroying everything, civilization as we know it is about to be annihilated. Loretta knows that she has only seconds before the shockwave hits and burns the skin off her bones, just seconds left to get in one more passive-aggressive dig in at Leroy. He’ll never know what she said — he’s probably dead already — but she feels like if she doesn’t, in some strange way she will have failed him.

Six Chix, 6/16/19

Fun fact: 96 percent of tadpoles die before they reach adulthood! Happy Father’s Day, frog-dad, sorry about the awful emotional carnage in store for you