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Dennis the Menace, 3/24/23

Ha ha, that is not the face of a lady who is amused or a little perturbed at the memory of of what went down during her last visit with the Mitchells; that is the face of a lady who, just as Dennis hopes, doesn’t remember that visit at all, and finds that terrifying. Was she here before? Why doesn’t she remember? Is she losing it, finally losing it once and for all?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/24/23

“By the way, don’t mention that to him. I’m not saying that I’m using my power of attorney to blow through all his money, but I am saying that you definitely should not mention anything I just said about his money subsidizing this cruise to him. OK? Nothing to worry about. But don’t say a fucking word to him on this subject.”

Beetle Bailey, 3/24/23

“Like, he knows about my crippling alcoholism, ha ha! Huh. that probably is too well, actually.”

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/23/23

I think it’s worthwhile to occasionally reflect on how weird the newspaper comic Snuffy Smith is, as a cultural object. Starting out as an entirely different strip about city life in the 1920s, during the Great Depression it changed its setting and vibe entirely to cash in on the vogue for vaudeville-derived jokes about hillbillies and kept going with that for more than 80 years. This humor genre only imperfectly mapped onto the lives of the Appalachian rural poor at the time, and has stayed more or less locked in place as reality drifts further and further from it. That’s how you get oddities like today, in which a distant memory of deadly clashes over land and status that arose between kinship groups in the absence of a government with a monopoly on legitimate violence gets processed through decades worth of creative and cultural drift and comes out as “a new world record for stubborness [sic].”

Gil Thorp, 3/23/23

This is pretty much a worst case scenario for a one-day celebrity coaching cameo: the celebrity coach not only completely revamps your team’s overall gameplan, but does so in a way that requires that everyone be at peak physical condition in order to execute the new strategy. Then he leaves and makes it Coaches Thorp and Cami’s problem! At least the Mudlarks will have some time to really perfect their “Apache basketball” techniques before [aide whispers in ear] oh, right, I’ve neglected to tell all of you that in fact Milford has had an undefeated season thanks to its pre-Kareem strategy and now the only game left to play is the championship. This’ll go great!

Pluggers, 3/23/23

Look, I’ve read Pluggers every day since 2006 and I feel pretty confident in saying that this isn’t even remotely true. Pluggers have a ton of problems, and most of them cannot be solved by a cup of coffee. A lot of them can’t be solved at all!

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Beetle Bailey, 3/22/23

Miss Buxley’s baggy, shabby outfit today is going to disappoint both General Halftrack and the legions of Beetle Bailey fans who find “Miss Buxley Wednesday” to be a reliable means of getting off. Anyway, I definitely would like to see General Halftrack fumble his way through this conversation, asking “But wait, what happened to all your other clothes? Like the ones you were just wearing yesterday? The ones where you look like [swallows hard] you, uh, usually do?”

Mary Worth, 3/23/22

Oh, gosh, I guess Estelle was right to worry. Drinking beer straight from the bottle? We need the Santa Royale legal equivalent of a 5150 (a firm talking-to from Mary Worth), stat!