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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/27/12

Aww, isn’t that sweet? Hootin’ Holler must be the most loving, romantic community on the entire planet. I say this because Barney Google and Snuffy Smith characters wag their tongues and roll their eyes constantly. Look, they’re wagging their tongues right there in the second panel, as they’re talking about people wagging their tongues! I’m glad to learn that these are symptoms of an overabundance of affection, as I had assumed that residents of Hootin’ Holler were just prone to seizures due to some combination of inbreeding and malnutrition.

Archie, 1/27/12

As noted, the current run of newspaper Archie strips consists of reruns from the ’90s, which is fairly clear when you have it pointed out to you. But never let it be said that Archie Comics is simply digging out strips at random from its no doubt enormous archives (side note: I dearly hope that Archie Comics refers to its archives as “the Archie-ives”) and mails it out to the syndicate. No, first they have some entry-level employee make sure there aren’t any blatant anachronisms in the strip and quickly fix them. Fun game: what non-Glee TV show do you think Mr. Weatherbee was originally referring to in the third panel? I’ll bet its name is significantly longer than four letters!

Dennis the Menace, 1/27/12

Dennis seems to think that his baby sitter will find his mastery of bound morphemes menacing! Sorry, Dennis, but this is not the case.

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Archie, 1/26/12

I don’t know why, but Jughead’s statement that “a lot of famous people take naps” really bothers me. I mean, I guess strictly speaking it’s almost certainly true, as a nontrivial portion of the human race takes naps, and celebrities are humans, but is there anyone who’s actually famous for their napping? (Rip Van Winkle doesn’t count.)

I’m also unsettled by just how vigorously Jughead is laughing in the final panel. It reeks of desperation. “HA HA HA HA TRIGONOMETRY HA HA HA NAPPING HA HA HA but seriously I need to take a God-damned nap right God-damned now.”

Ziggy, 1/26/12

If you weren’t repulsed by Ziggy before when you thought he was just bald, are you repulsed by him now that you know that his smooth, pasty flesh is completely hairless? Do you think he scoops up big piles of dog hair and makes wigs and merkins for himself, of varying styles? Will you ever be able to stop thinking of it again?

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Gil Thorp, 1/25/12

By the way, I’m still totally enjoying the Gil Thorp teen tattoo plot, I don’t care what you think! The latest development is the strange alliance between the transparently gay Lini (who’s against tattoos because, ugh, so tacky) and the assertively Christian Cortez Beecher (who’s against tattoos because Leviticus 19:28). Anyway, if we’re going to have the gay teen saying “Heavens!” and wearing bowties constantly, probably because someone saw it on Glee once or something, I’m pleased at panel three’s revelation that they’re real bowties, not some pre-tied clip-on nonsense. And also I’m going to assume that’s an ironic “Heavens!”

Another fun fact from panel three: Tim Summers thinks that voting, military service, and legal adulthood in general are all nothing but a big pile of garbage.

Family Circus, 1/25/12

Oh, thanks, Jeffy! I had barely noticed your little zipper problem, but now that you’ve called it a “mouth” I can’t stop staring at it, since it looks exactly like a monstrous lamprey-maw leading directly to the infinite blackness of some unspeakable hell-dimension.

Apartment 3-G, 1/25/12

In other news, Lu Ann just told Margo to eat shit! Watch it Lu Ann, you just learned about your real biological parentage, but that doesn’t give you superpowers.