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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 12/4/20

For those of you who don’t know the history (and really, why would you), this comic strip started out as Barney Google, in 1919, and the titular character was a sharp city slicker, but then the strip aimed to cash in on the Depression-era vogue for hillbilly humor already being exploited by Li’l Abner, so Barney went and visited his pal Snuffy Smith in Hootin’ Holler, who by the 1950s had become the strip’s main character, with increasingly infrequent visits from Barney Google. The current creative team brought back Barney in 2012 in his first appearance in 15 years, and he’s appeared intermittently since, but this week he’s actually taken Barney and company back with him to the city, which raises the question: we all know that this strip’s main setting is a grotesque, distorted caricature of rural life, but what will its take on urbanity be? Well, it appears to be people dancing in brightly lit clubs with floor-to-ceiling windows that make them visible from outside, where various draft animals rear about grotesquely on dirt streets, so, in other words: accurate.

Dick Tracy, 12/4/20

Meanwhile, in Dick Tracy, another decades-old strip whose depiction of everyday life is composed of multiple layers of continually updated nostalgia, one of our villains has terribly injured himself in a sewer while the other is about to be killed by his own giant spider, which he keeps captive for venom-milking purposes. How sad is Dick going to be that he doesn’t get to shoot anybody? Maybe he’ll shoot the spider, but his heart won’t really be in it.

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Six Chix, 12/3/20

Today’s Six Chix is a pretty compelling piece of evidence for the proposition that at least one of the Chix is a space alien attempting to use the medium of comic strips to reason out from a few pieces of data what life on earth is like. Clearly this being got word that something called “toilet paper” was relevant a few months ago. Is it still “in the conversation” today? Do humans still need to remove poop from their buttholes, or have they moved past that? This roll of toilet paper, asking for a friend (a space alien attempting to use the medium of comic strips to reason out from a few pieces of data what life on earth is like), would really like to know!

Gil Thorp, 12/3/20

So it turns out that Corina’s conflict-resolution plan for solving Milford’s quarterback controversy was to bring the two feuding players together and have them hash out their problems in an open, honest discussion. Too bad she didn’t do it a week ago, because Gil has his own solution to the problem: benching both of them and throwing in the third-string quarterback to haplessly flail around in some dumb, wacky old-timey formation that almost certainly will lose Milford most of its remaining games but might at least spawn a viral TikTok or something.

Marvin, 12/3/20

Every once in a while I feel kind of bad that one of my recurring themes on this 16-year-old blog that is essentially my life’s defining project is, “Gross, this comic strip about a baby makes jokes about poop constantly,” and I wonder if I lean too far into it, but you know what? Today’s strip is about the title character’s dad’s desire to use a leaf blower to spray dog shit everywhere, including, presumably, all over the side of his house. So I don’t feel bad anymore, or at least not about that!

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Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft, 12/2/20

It’s December, which means we’re barreling headlong into the Christmas season, and how do the damned residents of our our twin hellscapes of Westview and Centerville celebrate the season? Well, in Funky Winkerbean, we’re reminded that life is just a grinding stretch of continual suffering that can only be alleviated by focusing on some future date when the pain might end, no matter how far away it might be. In Crankshaft, meanwhile, we learn that every totem you cling to as a reminder of a more joyful past will eventually crumble to dust and you’ll be left with nothing. Real grim stuff!

Mary Worth, 12/2/20

December in Santa Royale, meanwhile, is just like every other month in Santa Royale, which is to say a God-damned delight. “Thank God! Did you read my emails?” is probably the funniest thing an ex-junkie who’s gotten his first glimpse of hope that his girlfriend might take him back could say, and I for one feel very blessed to be alive the day that Tommy said it.