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Apartment 3-G, 8/2/11

So it’s becoming increasingly clear that Lu Ann’s ex-fiance’s wife is cousins with Lady Gaga (actual name: Stefani Germanotta), who will somehow be convinced to take time off from her fulfilling and lucrative career as a musician/provocateur to engage in some antics for little or no money at a middlebrow art gallery whose idea of a great show involved Lu Ann’s dumb paintings of ferns. This bizarre development fills me with trepidation over the A3G artist’s stubborn refusal to depict clothing that’s interesting or different from the norm in any way. Even if we just stay with the strip’s standard only-show-’em-above-the-shoulders technique, how will the art grapple with Lady Gaga’s well-known propensity for wacky hats?

Mark Trail, 8/2/11

Mark survived a vicious goose attack and discovered just why that old goose was so cranky: it had a heavy gold band around one of its legs! Look for Lost Forest to suddenly be overrun by grizzled old prospectors, attempting to strike it rich and mine the local goose population for precious metal.

IMPORTANT GEOPOLITICAL NEWS: Thanks to the many, many people who sent me definitive proof that Crankshaft is the 21st century’s greatest monster!

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Judge Parker, 8/1/11

Judge Emeritus Parker, having become a best-selling author and a world-renowned hero by falling off a building, is heading for levels of smugness unprecedented even in this strip. But watch out, judge! The ancient Greeks knew that retribution follows fast on the heels of hubris. You can’t just butter your toast without even looking at it! That way lies disaster.

Apartment 3-G, 8/1/11

I’m very sorry that we didn’t get to see dinner, with Margo sitting there sporting a secret smile while Tommie looked down at her plate in absolute silence. “I want to ask her, but … I can’t! She demands absolute silence during meals! Says my blathering interferes with her chewing.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/1/11

“Guess we just have to admit our husbands are inveterate criminals!”

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/31/11

Today’s Snuffy Smith demonstrates how complicated it can be using visual signifiers in a strip that’s nearly a century old and that takes place in some difficult-to-pin-down time and place. Obviously the joke here is that our rustic hillbillies are living a lifestyle that very modern environmental and local-food advocates would endorse. And yet the only way the strip can depict someone as a fancy city-dwelling type is to dress them up in clothes that seem to date from roughly the Coolidge Administration, a time during which a flatlander would be much more likely to head up into the hills looking for precious coal to strip mine, not researching sustainable agriculture. Of course, it’s wholly possible that there’s a Brooklyn subculture of young lefty hipsters for whom bow ties, suspenders, and straw hats are the height of fashion, so maybe I’m just not with it enough to get what’s happening here.

As a side note, I’m pretty impressed that the strip managed to sneak in a joke about mule farts in the middle there.

Mary Worth, 7/31/11

I love that Mary has to consciously remind herself not to stiff the waitress on the tip. “Normally I assume that the trampy young women the waitressing lifestyle attracts just spend all their free cash on prophylactics and reefer, so I leave them nothing. But this one gets the full 10 percent!”

Phantom, 7/31/11

High-tech superhero lairs sure seemed a lot cooler before the Internet, didn’t they? It’s not as exciting to see the Phantom get a crucial piece of information from a Google News alert.