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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/1/24

Obviously Snuffy Smith’s whole deal is that he doesn’t care about the greater good of the polity and routinely engages in lawbreaking and antisocial behavior, but I gotta say that this is a new low. Many Hootin’ Holler residents who enjoy a lazy day on the lake fishing from their little canoes — including Snuffy himself! — will now have their leisure disrupted by flatlanders zooming around in their big powerboats. And for what? Was this little joke so irresistible that he had to have the sign in his bedroom, and are his literacy and scrapwood-scavenging skills so lacking that he had to take the extremely nonprofessional looking sign down from the lake?

Dick Tracy, 7/1/24

Mr. Borden is being blackmailed by Mr. Gabriel in some way related to those those salacious pictures in a manila folder that were hinted at a couple of weeks ago. I’m impressed that today’s strip includes a shoutout to the famous album cover of Big Black’s “Songs About Being Blackmailed Over Salacious Pictures In A Manila Folder.”

Hi and Lois, 7/1/24

No you absolutely can not, kids! Something you did is what’s made her so upset in the first place!

Mary Worth, 7/1/24

Oh, silly Wilbur! Fish are innocents, incapable of sin, and you will not be meeting Stellan again in hell.

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Beetle Bailey, 6/30/24

Once again, the throwaway panels across the top of this Sunday strip deepen the narrative considerably. Without them, we just have a story about the General giving up on the pretense of fulfilling his job duties once and for all; with them, we see that, having been denied in his own home, he is chasing his obsessive need to practice putting no matter the professional cost. The throwaway panels also really raise the question of why, given that it’s the middle of summer, he doesn’t simply play golf outside, like a normal person, and so we are left speculate that we’re looking at the world in the wake of some environmental catastrophe that rendered outdoor games like golf unplayable.

Mary Worth, 6/30/24

Loving Dr. Jeff’s face at this big reveal in the bottom left-hand panel. “Wait, so this whole thing is about his ex-girlfriend? The one who dumped him once and for all after he let her think he was dead for a week? That’s … that’s worse than just being bereft over a fish! I can’t put my finger on why but it’s definitely worse!”

Marvin, 6/30/24

Ah, what a nice change of pace, a Marvin without a poop joke! Nope, it’s just about Marvin and a bunch of cats getting into a sandbox-related dispute over who has or has not “put down a deposit” and … oh. Oh, I see. God damn it.

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Rex Morgan, M.D, 6/29/24

Like most observers of Rex Morgan, M.D., I assumed this plot was going to amble on interminably with some low-stakes, low-violence bullying and a lot of philosophical questions about what bullying is and what causes it, but instead our bully has managed to incapacitate and possibly hospitalize poor Parker with a single punch to the gut. At least this will give Rex something to do in this plot, possibly by shaking his head and announcing, stone-faced, “This is the worst case of being punched in the stomach that I’ve ever seen.”

Beetle Bailey, 6/29/24

Whenever we get these “in the field” Beetle Bailey strips, I assume that our characters are in the midst of some kind of war games exercise and haven’t been issued weapons with live ammo. Which means Rocky is probably going to murder Beetle with his bare hands! He looks fuckin’ pissed.

Shoe, 6/29/24

I guess I have to be the keeper of the Shoe knowledge here and make it clear to all that this strip is not in line with established strip lore. Specifically, the Perfesser never smells good. I don’t care if he changes his socks. I’ve seen how he lives. He smells like something died, possibly him.