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Hi and Lois, 4/27/17

“We had yell-phones. ‘Hey, Dot!’ That’s how we’d yell. And if someone lived outside of yelling distance, well, they weren’t our friends! How could you be friends with someone outside your village? There would be no way to know what clan they were a part of, to know the ties between your ancestors and theirs that defined your status relations! If you encountered any such person outside the palisade, violence was the immediate result! You couldn’t know if they were friend or foe so it was kill or be killed on sight. I have the blood of so many strangers on my hands! What were we talking about? Oh, right, phones, we didn’t have those.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/27/17

I know that Snuffy Smith is a notorious chicken thief — the syndicate apparently considers this more acceptable to joke about in the daily comics than his other traditional livelihood, moonshining — but it took me a while to realize that the joke here was that the chickens were evidence because he stole them. Maybe it’s because I’m a big fan of Roald Dahl and Alfred Hitchcock, but my immediate assumption was that Snuffy and Lukey murdered someone using a chicken as a weapon.

Spider-Man, 4/27/17

“Oh, you wrapped up the story with a couple days left to go? Well, uh, you could talk about some of the characters from the upcoming movie, I guess. Don’t bother looking up any pictures to see what the actors look like. Just work from memory! It’ll be fine!”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/26/17

Oh, hey, what’s been going on in Rex Morgan, M.D.? A lot of boring blah blah about how Kelly and Niki don’t get to spend a lot of time together because of their after-school jobs (babysitting an amnesiac and delivering pizzas, respectively), and then Niki delivered a pizza to this girl’s house and she got real chatty with him. The whole time I thought she was supposed to be Nancy, Kelly’s nemesis (and, I think, rival for Niki’s affections?) but no, she’s just some other blonde who’s trying to steal Kelly’s man, I guess. A blonde art school nerd to boot. God, remember when Niki was a sullen petty thief with dumb hair? Remember when Kelly was a hot, sassy goth with a dangerous punk rocker boyfriend? Now Niki’s standing here in his chump-ass polyester pizza uniform half-assedly flirting with an aspiring commercial illustrator while Kelly’s off somewhere, I dunno, wearing a lame sweater or something. Still, we have to look towards the future, and the future I particularly am looking forward to involves Niki going with this young lady to see her classmates’ production of Snuffy Smith: The Musical.

Gasoline Alley, 4/26/17

Meanwhile, Gasoline Alley’s incredibly boring “Chipper gives a speech at the PA meeting” storyline is wrapping up in a fashion that definitely isn’t changing the mind of anyone who suspects that the strip has somehow become the main way that the AAPA communicates with its members. Anyway, if anyone wants to take a jaunt to Vegas next month, you could see a bunch of physician’s assistants lose lots of money at the craps tables, probably!

Funky Winkerbean, 4/26/17

Remember, one of the iron laws of the Funkyverse is that everyone has to be simultaneously as smug and as passive-aggressive as possible about everything. Can’t wait for Cindy to head over to a refugee camp to tell the kids there, “Wow, it looks like you have it pretty easy compared to a second-rate actor whose only crime was loving Stalin a little too much.”

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Mary Worth, 4/25/17

Oh ho, it looks like we’ve been delightfully misled for the duration of this storyline so far. The “cigarettes” that the Hoosiers have been playfully bantering about ever since they came on board? Just a code word for other ladies that Derek wants to do sex stuff with! The “so in love” attitude? A facade covering their seething resentment of one another! Derek thought he could make this last-ditch effort save his marriage work, but now that he’s seen the goddess that is Entertainer Esme, he knows that he could never be a one-woman man. I mean, look at that skin-tight vest! What man could resist a vest like that?

Dick Tracy, 4/25/17

Oh, right, Dick Tracy is ostensibly a strip about the commission, solving, and prevention of crimes, not just anime and such. It looks like the various Margies are going to, uh, pull some kind of insurance fraud? And walk away a cool $3,000 richer than they would be from just running a legitimate convention? I personally am at the edge of my seat!