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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!

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Hey y’all, I would like to remind everyone about the posting and discussion policies for this site, which all boil down to “Don’t be an insufferable prick.” One of the key ways to not be an insufferable prick is to not leave prejudiced comments that are inevitably attacks on your fellow members of this community, who include all kinds of people! The specific kind of comments I’m going to call out at the moment, because I’ve been seeing a weird uptick of them, are those where trans people are the butt of the joke for being trans. Don’t do it! I hate it, and you’ve got trans people you’ve been joking around with all this time even if you don’t know it, and while I don’t always keep track of comments on a moment-by-moment basis, I rule the site with a genial iron fist and reserve the right to ban and block at whim. So be cool, as 99.9% of you are! We know return to our regular programming.

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Mark Trail, 5/9/17

Each of these law enforcement officers is all man, of course: you can tell by their rugged features and aggressively retreating hairlines. But it seems they’re the last bastion of traditional American can-do masculinity in this sadly enfeebled police force. They should be out there rounding up known scumbags and maybe busting a head or two in the interrogation room in order to track down these kidnappers, but instead they’re sitting around the office waiting for the fancy college-boy “analysts” to pinpoint what’s “weird” about the criminals’ “body language” like they work at Us Magazine, for Pete’s sake! Hurry it up in there, brainiacs, Mark can’t keep up his soothing baritone monologue for much longer!

Spider-Man, 5/9/17

Oh, man, remember the greatest Newspaper Spider-Man storyline of all time, when Aunt May wanted to marry the Mole-Man and Spidey tried various techniques to thwart their love but eventually the nuptials had to be called off because Aunt May developed Spelunker’s Lung and couldn’t serve as queen of her beloved’s cave-kingdom? Welp, it looks like Mole-Man has finally decided he needs to see his ex again, if only to know that she’s happy, and since Aunt May has no Instagram for him to stalk, he’s got to do the logical thing: follow her to Los Angeles, keeping a low profile by dressing like a dwarfish pimp, and stare at her longingly through the window of a restaurant that’s recently rebranded itself to cash in on La La Land fever. Sadly, one of LA’s omnipresent Beefy Restaurant Security Guys is going to escalate this situation into an unnecessary mole-fracas.

Beetle Bailey, 5/9/17

I’m not sure who exactly this joke is for. Is it meant to prompt legacy comics trufans into knowing grins as they think to themselves “Ah, yes, Beetle Bailey and Lois Flagston are siblings, one of the comics’ lesser-known trivia items”? Is there a Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC company-wide policy on occasionally reminding readers of this, so as to lay the groundwork for the Bailey-Flagston Cinematic Universe franchise they’re very much hoping to sell to a major studio? All I know is that this postal worker is justifiably horrified to learn about the abuse and bullying that are sadly rife in our armed forces.