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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/7/22

I assumed that the distant “Newnited States government” to which Hootin’ Holler owes vague allegiance long ago dispensed with the archaic trial by jury system, but it seems that they’re giving it another go. And who in the Holler is more Snuffy’s “peer” than his mirror image, the patriarch of the region’s other major clan? Sadly, Snuffy has chosen the worst possible day to bust out this particular defense. He seems to be representing himself, but I don’t think he put a lot of though into voir dire.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/7/22

Sad news: Hagar the Horrible, a respected local Viking chieftain, died today of massive third-degree burns all over his body. He is survived by his wife, his two children, and his warrior band, who are currently leaderless and vulnerable to plundering by their opportunistic rivals. He was 48.

Dennis the Menace, 6/7/22

DENNIS DID 9/11

MENACE LEVEL OFF THE CHARTS

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Gil Thorp, 6/6/22

Look, folks, I’ve never claimed to be particularly “baseball savvy,” so I apologize for failing to follow Saturday’s disjointed jargon about Ryne Duren. (Just as a side note, faithful reader/Twitter follower Windier E. Megatons pointed out that Ryne Duren is a classic guy for the Let’s Remember Some Guys genre of sport talk, which you’d think Gil Thorp would engage in more often.) Apparently the point was not that “You should get better glasses, like Ryne Duren did” but rather that “Now that your opponents know your vision is poor, you should ham it up and make it seem like you have very little control, like Ryne Duren did, so that they’re terrified you’re going to ‘accidentally’ murder them with a fastball to the face, something that a coach at the high school level would definitely just let happen.” Remember, kids, using a series of elaborate coded signals to compensate for your disability is the pusillanimous tactic of an effeminate coward and violates the rules of baseball. But pretending to be a true psycho/major legal liability for your school district? That’s all the game, fellas.

Slylock Fox, 6/6/22

A thing that I have noticed in my many years of Slylock Fox studies is that a great many of the “mysteries” simply involve a sapient animal who has been caught in some wrongdoing offering a transparently false alibi that Slylock easily sees through. Today it occurs to me that one of the things that distinguishes humans from (present-day) animals is our ability to imagine counterfactuals: ways that events could have, but did not, play out, or, alternately, explanations that we know to be false for actual events. Perhaps part of the great Animalpocalypse was the non-humans’ sudden ability to dream up counterfactuals of their own, but being so new to them, they find them difficult to refute. Only Slylock, one of the wisest of the new breed of animals, is able to keep is bearings on reality in this brave new world.

Pardon My Planet, 6/6/22

The comics pages are a small-c conservative institution heavily invested traditional institutions like the nuclear family. Only truly radical strips like Pardon My Planet are willing to speak the unpopular truth: raising children is exactly like your soul being condemned for your sins and tortured forever, in hell.

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Hi and Lois, 6/5/22

I think telling stories out of chronological order has gone from being an innovation to something of a crutch or gimmick at this point, but there are times when it still works. Like, I’m thinking about this Hi and Lois from a couple weeks ago totally differently now that I know that the twins are trying to get extra scoops of breakfast ice cream at like 8 in the morning, and their dad is waiting in the car because he’s still groggy and disoriented.

Crankshaft, 6/5/22

One of my very first shocking insider discoveries about the comics-production process when I started doing this blog was that the daily strips were colored in by syndicate folks who aren’t the strip artist, leading to occasionally troubling errors. But the Sunday strips? Those, in theory, are colored by the same people who draw them, which means you can treat the entire scene as a unified whole. That explains why all these people have fallen asleep, because they’ve clearly decided to have their Sunday Afternoon Book Club at a law office and are having a hard time staying engaged while reading the identically bound volumes of the city code cover to cover.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/5/22

I love how angry Rex looks when he says “You want me to come down there in the middle of the night just to save somebody’s life?” but as soon as the cop is like “Nah, you’d just get in the way,” he’s like, “Of course, officer, I’ll help in any way I can. I’m a hero!”