Ballard Street by Jerry Van Amerongen for May 26, 2020

Deputy Sparky chafes under the leadership of Sherrif Boyd.

A timely comic with the scarves.

Sparky is thinking he would like to ride off into the sunset….alone….now.

Which one is Boyd?

This is not working for me….gotta find a new owner…..

Just in case anybody besides me is interested in comic nerd musings….

The strips we’re seeing now are referred to as “reruns”….

But they actually weren’t uploaded into the GoComics archives until a few years after their original run.

They were published in newspapers…. but not seen online, on a daily basis, because the site, AFAIK, didn’t exist yet.

So unless you read them in a newspaper, or have already read through the archive online… they’re NEW.

It’ll be a few years before we reach the true reruns….

that were shown here, on the then brand new GoComics site, concurrently with newspapers…

Maybe six years after that, we’ll get to dailies colored by hired colorists…

And about eight years from now, I think, Jerry will quit doing Sundays.

Meanwhile… they’ve been following their original sequence…

On the day that GoComics started them over, they began with the first strip in the archive,

and have been running them straight through, without regard to days of the week, or gaps in publication…

so they’re not quite in sync with the current calendar.

That’s why for now, an original “Sunday” strip comes around every Tuesday.

I love to see them, because they were colored by Jerry Van Amerongen himself….

and his palette is wilder and brighter than any hired colorist would probably choose.

Look at that couch!

After a while the dog looks like the owner.

The clothing does appear to be weighing down the diligent deputy.

Sparky’s thoughts about Boyd keep drifting back to “Rawhide”…

Sparky thinks.. it was fun the first time but there better be lots of treats if this is to continue.

Sparky is getting tired of being Boyd’s sidekick.