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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/15/04

Many times, I’m sure, you’ve read Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and said, “Jus’ whar in tarnation do these folks live, anyhow?” Well, today’s installment answers that question.

The various names of a long sandwich on Italian bread (sub, hero, grinder, hoagie, what have you) have long been the example used when discussing dialectical variations in American English, but I’d argue that the nationwide advent of Subway has killed off most of the variants. In my mind, the most prominent remaining geographical tip-off terms are those used for soft drinks: do you say “pop”, “soda”, or “coke”?

Now, I grew up in Buffalo, New York, which is pop country. I remember going to Los Angeles when I was a kid and asking for a pop at a restaurant, which utterly baffled our waiter. I went to college in soda-land, with a lot of kids from New York City, and had the pop beaten out of me by relentless verbal abuse, but I still get excited when I see it used in print. Even if, you know, it’s being used by toothless, semiliterate hillbillies.

Anyway, the first thing I did when I saw this comic was to go to the alarmingly well researched county-by-county map at popvssoda.com. As you can see, the only traditionally hillbilly-populated areas that fall into the pop zone lie in a relatively restricted corner at the north end of the Appalachians: West Virginia, western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and western Pennsylvania (affectionately known by its inhabitants as “Pennsyltucky”). So there you have it, America: we’ve used linguistic science to narrow down the true location of Hootin’ Holler, which we can now thankfully avoid.

I like the fact that printed matter in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, like the sign in the first panel, is written in the exact same wacky mangled spelling as the word balloons. I’d also like to note that just about every word balloon ends in two exclamation points. If anyone actually gets excited, look out!

Also, while we’re getting all linguistic, I’d like to revisit a comment I made in my last B.B. & S.S. entry, in which I remarked that Whar Th’ Boys Are would be a good beach movie for hillbillies or pirates. Upon further reflection, it seems clear to me that the pirate version would be Whar Th’ Boys Be.

In today’s alarming search engine query, we have a lonely Web-surfing pervert who likes mature, professional women, evidenced by his plugging “+’sally forth’ +nude” into AltaVista.

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Panels from Apartment 3-G and One Big Happy, 10/14/04

Today we come back to our intermittent feature in which I talk about the cartoonist’s craft as if I know a damn thing about it. Mainly, I like the lines radiating off of the willful, dark-haired females in these two panels. Normally lines like these in the comics represent motion (or, in extreme cases, odor), but if that were true here, then these ladies would be vibrating like tuning forks with anxiety and/or manic energy. Actually, more than anything else, these remind me of the energy lines that shoot off of comic book heroes when they’re about to make use of some sort of extraordinary power. I guess when Ruthie starts emitting these waves, she’s about to unleash some supernaturally adorable malapropism. Meanwhile, Gabriella’s Gabriella-sense is no doubt triggered when Margo is about to get herself into some sort of trouble. It therefore is almost certainly going off all the time, which may explain why she always looks kind of constipated.

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Mark Trail, 10/13/04

I consider myself something of an expert on the subject, and I can say with a certain authority that the assemblage in the first panel of today’s Mark Trail is the funniest thing in that strip in the last two years. It’s funnier than Mark downing an airplane with a petrified cactus; it’s funnier than the golfer throwing away his clubs and fleeing in terror from the crocodile; it’s funnier than the burping cows. The totem-poll look to the whole thing, as Primrose balances on the baddie’s bald head and Otto cuts him off at the knees, is great, as is the stock of the rifle caught in mid-air. I guess that Otto’s cat-loving trumps his mustache-having, and presumably Mark will forgive and forget his past involvement in priceless-artifact-smuggling if he turns stool pigeon.

Back in the beginning of this storyline, it looked as if the meat of the conflict was going to come from Mark’s current and former girlfriends having to share space on the same tiny boat. Tension! Cat fights! Hilarity! But Mark Trail can’t turn away from a good Indian artifact yarn, and so we get cat fights of a somewhat different kind.