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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/20/18

Today’s Snuffy Smith offers a lot to think about — from Snuffy’s inability to differentiate between dissimulation and imaginative escape, to the thought of some unfortunately door-to-door salesman forced to try to squeeze blood from the stone of impoverished Hootin’ Holler. But primarily, I’m just thinking about Snuffy’s beachwear, and the tan lines it would produce.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/20/18

Good news, everyone! Les’s mopey book about his dead wife didn’t win that Eisner it was nominated for. Bad news: everyone at their table still got unlimited cheesecake. I want these creeps to receive zero rewards, do you year me? Zero.

Shoe, 7/20/18

There’s never been a “Farmer Frank” character in this strip and the fact that he’s a farmer doesn’t have any kind of relationship to the punchline of this joke and that all bothers me so much

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Judge Parker, 7/19/18

Prediction time: my guess is that this whole Godiva murder storyline is actually Neddy’s screenplay that she’s been working on since moving to LA! I’ve been suspecting it for a while (there have been narration boxes that are scene headings), but today has really pushed me over the edge into believing it. Think about it: they say “write what you know,” but like most screenwriters, she’s writing what she wants to know, e.g., martial arts and how to make friends with her cooler, savvier boss. It’s nice at least to see a shoutout to the backstory on the Spencer-Driver foundlings, who were homeless and living rough with their grandfather when they accidentally set up camp on Sam and Abbey’s vast estate, and then their grandfather died and Sam and Abbey adopted them, presumably without too much legal fuss. (Abbey promised their grandfather would be buried in a beautiful clearing and definitely not ground up into a special treat for Abbey’s most handsome stallions.) Through the magic of fiction, Neddy is imagining a world where her tough childhood left her with near-superhuman abilities of self-protection, rather than just a host of emotional problems.

Gil Thorp, 7/19/18

I was sort of pretending to myself, just to force the world to make some kind of sense, that Barry’s big intervention was happening over the summer, that Gil Thorp was experiencing the same summer that we all were here in the United States, but nope, it looks like high school baseball is still happening! Is Gil going to risk defeat by starting Jay Bhatia on the mound today? Who cares, we’re more than halfway through July, how can any of this possibly matter.

The Lockhorns, 7/19/18

WHEN ZIP-A-TONE ATTACKS

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Blondie, 7/18/18

Blondie is of course absurdly scrupulous about never using actual brand names in the strip. I’ll accept “Online To-Go” as Dagwood trying to come up with a generic phrase that describes the process of ordering food from various apps whose names he cannot be bothered to remember, but the real problem becomes apparent in panel two, as, faced with the prospect of having to come up with four names in short order, the strip verges from the dopey (“Cheesey Chuck’s”) to the uncanny valley of restaurant names (“Copogna’s,” “Gleerou’s” (?)).

Spider-Man, 7/18/18

The Newspaper Spider-Man strip is finally starting to explain one of its longest-standing mysteries, which is: what exactly are the parameters of its hero’s “spider sense” in this iteration of the spideyverse, and what good is it if it can’t, say, prevent its hero from bludgeoned with a pipe or a club, or just bonked on the head by falling masonry? Well, a few weeks ago we learned that Spider-Man has to be paying attention in order for spider-sense to work (which, if you were paying attention, why would you … need spider-sense in the first place?). Today nicely demonstrates that this is a particular problem for our hero because he is in fact extremely distractible. “OK, my spider-sense is tingling very powerfully, which means I have to pay very careful attention to my surroundings in order to avoid dang–OH MY GOD THAT DOOR IS SLIGHTLY AJAR THIS IS AMAZING”