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Hi and Lois, 7/2/12

You know, it’s not like I want to think about the sex lives of middle-aged comic strip characters (wait, no, I just remembered that Luann exists, amend that to “all comic strip characters of any age”). But when Hi leans back in his easy chair with his hands behind his head so as to vaguely thrust his crotch Loisward, throwing her some bedroom eyes and suggesting they go “wherever the road takes us,” I pretty much have to, OK? Lois, meanwhile, after having had four kids and seeing how they turned out, has finally figured out the value of planning when it comes to families.

Gil Thorp, 7/2/12

In other comics couples whose boinking styles I am now involuntarily thinking about news, here’s today’s Gil Thorp! I actually believe that this strip is part of Gil Thorp’s passive-aggressive battle with its own readership, aimed at those of us who are sad that the crazy, unstructured summer storylines when anything could happen have now been replaced by just another season of boring sports action. “Oh, hey, whiny readers, do you want to see a zany summer storyline about Coach Thorp and Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp’s sex life, full of B&D sex scenes so poorly written and illustrated that they make Fifty Shades of Grey look like Anais Nin?” “Nooooo, don’t do that, just show us some golf, please, for the love of God.”

Judge Parker, 7/2/12

Yep, Sam really hankers for the simple life! Just give him a vast estate and a RV bigger than most Americans’ houses and a bottomless pit of money and he’s a happy guy.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/1/12

Here is a True Story from Josh’s Real Life Events: Many years ago, when I in the midst of my failed attempt to acquire a PhD in ancient history, I discovered that getting a humanities grad degree doesn’t pay particularly well, so I used to do office temp work between semesters. So in this one temp gig, I was doing doing filing at a professional association for optometrists with a guy who was getting an MFA in poetry (AND THAT SENTENCE IS A SELF-CONTAINED CAUTIONARY TALE FOR ANYONE THINKING ABOUT GRAD SCHOOL, BY THE WAY). As people do when bored with mindless work, we started shooting the pop-culture breeze, and somehow it came up that I had alway found it amusing that Steve Miller appeared, based on the evidence of the lyrics in his smash hit song “Take The Money And Run,” to believe that “Texas,” “taxes,” “facts is,” and “justice” all rhymed with one another. And the poet-temp, whether to pull my leg or be contrary or because of genuine poetic conviction, made the case that there is a such thing as a “soft rhyme,” which has a long and honorable history in poetry, and thus Miller’s rhyme scheme was perfectly acceptable in that context.

I was already planning on bringing this anecdote up as a lens through which to discuss Mary Beth’s rhyming of “holler,” “dollar,” and “feller.” In my own speech, the first two rhyme with each other but neither with the third, and I wondered if this were an example of soft rhyme or if we were getting a glimpse of the phonology of Hootin’ Holler’s unique, isolated dialect. But then I took one last look at the throwaway panels and finally noticed that Mary Beth begins the strip by reading Emily Dickinson — the very poet my co-temp used as an example of someone who employed soft rhymes frequently. Thus I’m assuming that our young poetess, while still clinging to traditional structural forms like the limerick, is beginning to explore more advanced techniques. This is, in other words, the most cultured Barney Google and Snuffy Smith ever written, not that there’s really much competition for that title.

Blondie, 7/1/12

Speaking of academia, if you’re writing a thesis about the connection between masculinity and earning power in pop-cultural depictions of contemporary society, you could find worse examples than the next-to-last panel here, in which Dagwood, finally realizing that he’s been duped again, crouches a bit and gently protects his crotch with his briefcase.

Mary Worth, 7/1/12

I was going to write the long riff about how Mary’s response is just as vague and bloviating and self-important as the letter that prompted it, but then I got to the final panel, where we learn that Dawn can’t go anywhere without being reminded of her ex-boyfriend’s cock, and literally all other thoughts were sandblasted out of my mind.

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Herb and Jamaal, 6/30/12

I almost have to agree with Herb here? Though maybe “amazing” isn’t the word I would use. More “puzzling.” It’s puzzling to me that Jamaal is just sitting at the counter, staring wide-eyed at nothing in particular, and then suddenly chirping out fun facts about Burmese Buddhist savants. It’s not like he’s reading it from a book or anything, he just says it, as if the thought had been rolling around his skull like a marble and just now popped out. Is Jamaal high? I’m worried that Jamaal is high.

Jumble, 6/30/12

As far as Whimsical Animal Partial Nudity goes, I’ve always found Smokey the Bear’s pants-but-no-shirt look much more unsettling than Donald Duck’s shirt-but-no-pants configuration. I guess I’m just more willing to accept Donald’s sailor shirt as kind of a shorthand for a whole outfit, or maybe I’m just willingly blind to his exposed crotch. Meanwhile, Smokey really looks half-dressed to me, like a forest ranger who one day decided to go shirtless during his work in the great outdoors and show off his furry, muscular torso to the world. Admittedly, he looks classier than his friend over there in the baseball cap and too-small tank top, but still.

Ziggy, 6/30/12

Ziggy looks kind of unsettled by the prospect of someday becoming romantically involved with a dog, but, to my mind, not unsettled enough.