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Six Chix, 5/11/23

So the thing about “sudden,” as a noun, is that it has completely fallen out of use in English outside the set phrase “all of a sudden,” and even when it was in use there wasn’t any particularly strong syntactical or grammatical reason why it took an indefinite article in that phrase rather than a definite one, so it’s pretty natural for modern-day speakers to start reanalyzing and rearranging the phrase, and as long as people know what you mean it’s hard to say you’re doing it “wrong.” Still, some people care a lot about being right in linguistic matters; I found this out the hard way when I got into a discussion on the comments of this very blog in which I pointed out that “none” is not a contraction for “not one” and has always been used in both the singular and plural, with recorded uses of “none are” going back to Chaucer, and this caused one commenter to melt down at me and then quit the site altogether. I have my own odd things I’m overly attached to, of course, but at least none of them have me visualizing myself as an angry pulsing green blob holding the line against a bunch of purple blobs that look pretty chill, honestly.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/11/23

Now I’m imagining the elaborate beehive coif Snuffy had to create to fit his new hair under his hat so that nobody could catch even a glimpse of it while he dashed from his home to this cave, presumably so he wasn’t immediately burned at the stake for engaging in witchcraft. Granny Creeps is powerful enough, or helps enough leading citizens of the Holler with her potions, to avoid that fate herself, but a local layabout and troublemaker like Snuffy is the sort of person who might be made an example of.

Mary Worth, 5/11/23

There’s not a lot about Dr. Jeff I find particularly worthy of praise or envy, but despite being a core Mary Worth character he seems to not put a ton of effort into keeping up with Wilbur’s sex life, and you have to respect that.

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Gil Thorp, 5/10/23

Still not sure what a “Milford juvenile sports program manager” is or does, but apparently it pays pretty well, enough to get a penthouse at the Gaston (?) Building in Milford’s hip, historic warehouse district. Although based on the anecdote we’ve stumbled into, which involves a teen singing Cab Calloway music, it’s possible that Kaz and Gil are just immortal and eternally young and have been coaching youth athletics for at least 80 years, and Kaz might simply derive his riches from decades of compound interest.

Dennis the Menace, 5/10/23

So if I’m interpreting this right, Henry is getting a birthday cake at a “party” attended only by his wife and son, who he sees every day anyway, and his son proclaims that he “took care of the icing!” for a cake that fairly obviously has no icing. The overall bleakness is in fact quite menacing!

Hi and Lois, 5/10/23

In a conference room at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC, a grim-faced business analyst is pointing at a PowerPoint slide with a graph on it. One line, labelled Marvin, keeps going up; another, labelled Hi and Lois, is in steady decline. Several of the assembled staff members are weeping openly, but others are clearly resolving themselves to do what they must.

Mary Worth, 5/10/23

Wow, this is quite a large boat that Jeff’s purchased, one that could accommodate a good number of passengers. Too bad they don’t have any friends! Seriously, who’s going to get an invite? Wilbur? Ian? Dr. Jeff’s son Dr. Drew lives with him so I’m sure they see quite enough of one another for everyone’s tastes. Guess he should’ve thought of that before he emptied out his 401k just to feel like a big shot for a single moment!

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Daddy Daze, 5/9/23

Daddy Daze is one of the more recent additions to my stable of commented upon comics, and yet I have been commenting on it for more than three years. As a non-child-haver, I am not an expert on child development, but I feel reasonably confident in asserting that the Daddy Daze baby is not, in fact, three years old, and I feel also confident (albeit slightly less so) that a parent would, if given a chance to to keep their child stuck at one particular stage of development for years, and possibly forever, choose this one. Anyway, I wouldn’t be thinking about any of this if the Daddy Daze daddy hadn’t brought up a specific if unnamed date printed on that granola bar wrapper, which I now desperately want to see, though I can’t decide if it would simply resolve into a new and plausible-in-the-moment date every time I looked at it, or if it would shimmer and shift just at the edge of legibility, somehow making it impossible for my eyes to ever focus on it.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/9/23

Ha ha, it’s funny because Snuffy is desperately ill, and the only way to get medical attention is for his wife to carry him for miles along a rough dirt track in a wheelbarrow, which will only compound his misery and may kill him!

Mary Worth, 5/9/23

Wow! Looks like Dr. Jeff’s new Medicare fraud scheme is going great.