Post Content

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/10/17

Snuffy Smith and Pluggers might, broadly speaking, both be lumped together as depicting non-coastal, lower-to-lower-middle-class “real American” experiences that most media neglects. However, there are big differences between the two projects that reveal this categorization to be superficial. The most obvious is that Pluggers is inhabited by chimeric beast-people, while Snuffy Smith presents us with human beings, albeit lumpy, potato-nosed ones. But more importantly, Pluggers is created based on suggestions actually from the ordinary non-elite folk it depicts, whereas Snuffy Smith has always been an exercise in rural poverty caricature, ever since the day the Barney Google creative team decided to get in on the Depression-era vogue for hillbilly jokes and never look back.

Anyway, the strip’s essentially inauthentic origin story, combined with its trapped-in-amber quality, results in characters that didn’t showcase rural poor people with much fidelity in the ’30s and certainly doesn’t depict anything even vaguely resembling their lives today. I realize that, as a coastal elitist living a mere 10-minute drive (without traffic) from Hollywood itself (8 minutes, if you count East Hollywood), I may not be the person most equipped to make that judgement, but I’m pretty sure it’s spot on. I do think I’m the right person to comment on what I guess is supposed to be some smug city slicker who’s wandered into Hootin’ Holler and can’t understand why sushi isn’t sold in every store, as it is in his beloved metropolis. Here’s my take on this chinbearded, cuff-jeaned (?), “G”-hat-wearing (???) Japanese cuisine aficionado: he’s bad. Finally, equal time in this strip for unrecognizable urban stereotypes!

Blondie, 5/10/17

There is probably no sadder person in the world than Guy Who Corrects Current Writers Of A Longrunning Legacy Strip About Their Strip’s Own Continuity, and yet I am compelled to say: it is well known that Dagwood sleeps every weekday morning until the last possible minute, dashing out to the door and barely making his carpool, often trampling his poor mailman in the process. It therefore makes no sense that he has time for a leisurely and apparently daily breakfast at Lou’s! He’s barely making it to work as it is! Although I guess it adds a meta-layer to this strip: like Lou, the Blondie creative team been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to tell this joke, and will jump at any chance to do so.

Six Chix, 5/10/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because normally a horse would be giving you a ride, not the other way around! Also, horses are incredibly bad planners. How did you think you were getting home when you left for work this morning, horse? How did you get here in the first place? Just wearing glasses doesn’t make you smart!

Hi and Lois, 5/10/17

Trixie, of course, hasn’t grown at all since this strip debuted 63 years ago. This is one of the saddest punchlines I’ve ever seen!

Post Content

I’m back, everybody! Huge thanks to all who contributed to the fundraiser, and huge thanks to Uncle Lumpy for his as always hilarious fill-in and fundraising work! I’ll be writing personal thank-yous to all contributors (and, of course, to Uncle Lumpy) this week. But now, on to comics! Say, did any beloved legacy strips take a sharp left turn into explicit vomit fetishism while I was gone?

Hagar the Horrible, 5/8/17

Ha ha! Well, I have to say the year 2017 is exactly as depraved and horrifying as we might’ve all hoped!

Six Chix, 5/8/17

Speaking of the dystopian future, these ladies look like primitive huntresses but I suppose based on their dialogue we’re supposed to imagine this incident as taking place after a worldwide collapse of the interconnected global civilization that made things like “online shopping” and “shopping” and “online” possible. The ladies look perky enough, but the bleak, utterly barren landscape is bad news. I’m not sure if the cataclysm was a climate-change-driven ecological collapse or a global war that scoured the Earth bare with atomic fire, but it’s clear that our heroines are just scavenging for whatever critters are left that haven’t themselves succumbed to starvation, and cannibalism is the logical next and final step.

Slylock Fox, 5/8/17

I was about to brag about the fact that I remembered this strip from when it first ran more than a decade ago, but I was horrified to discover that back then I couldn’t even remember the name of beloved rodent sidekick Max Mouse! For shame! Anyway, I’m still horrified by this story of a grandmother whose response to some low grade cookie theft on the part of her grandchildren is to literally call in the police to browbeat a confession out of them, but I will say that the larger comics images I have access to today definitely let me see how very smug the grandkid on the left is. Smug enough to make this brutal introduction to the police state good grandparenting? No. But you can begin to see the motivation, at least.

Post Content

Click the banner to contribute to the Comics Curmudgeon. Details here.

No Star Wars puns from me this May the Fourth — isn’t that worth a couple bucks? I thought so!

Pluggers, 5/4/17

Not sure what they’re going for here: “Pluggers want all of technology’s benefits with none of the intellectual investment?” “Pluggers parade their ignorance as a point of pride?” “Pluggers are lazy hypocrites?” “Pluggers’ wives are somehow not pluggers?”

Wait, they’re at a bookstore? Ha, ha what a couple of pluggers!

Blondie, 5/4/17

Ha, ha tech and teh olds LMAO.

Beetle Bailey, 5/4/17

Ha, ha tech and teh olds LMAO.

Six Chix, 5/4/17

Six Chix rotates through a roster of six woman author/artists on weekdays, and separately on Sundays — sort of like girls’ softball in Gil Thorp. Here’s the current lineup, highlighting a couple of recent changes:

The rotation gimmick is really clever: at its best, it lets each Chik contribute fresh work without the pressure of daily deadlines. But at its worst, it lets the strip become an afterthought, with dashed-off artwork supporting a weak concept. A lot of recent strips boil down to “look at this thing I don’t like!”, punctuated by a knowing glance between the characters or at the audience.

Maybe before publishing one of these, the Chix should apply a variant of the Bechdel Test: if two woman characters are talking, and it’s not about men, is it about anything else?

Hm, I seem to be posting a lot of Pluggers this week. It can’t possibly mean anything, though.

–Uncle Lumpy