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Hagar the Horrible
Ziggy, 4/1/09
That’s right, Ziggy! Borneo has many exotic and exciting tourist attractions that might be just a thing to put a smile on your face! Would you be interested in going on a jungle trek or swimming with dolphins? Perhaps a big city is more your style — you might want to experience historic Kuching, with its fascinating cuisine that reflects the region’s cultural mix! Or maybe you just want to relax on the beach. Borneo has it all! If you’re after a good exchange rate, well, depending on which side of the border you travel to, the Indonesian Rupiah is currently at 11,500 to the dollar, and the Malaysian Ringgit at about 3.60 to the dollar — definitely high historically, but better than it was six months ago, that’s for sure — and your money still goes much further than it would in Europe or the Caribbean!
Oh, wait, isn’t there supposed to be a joke here of some sort? Uh … ha, ha, that man accidentally left the house with no pants on!
Hagar the Horrible, 4/1/09
Oh, look, yet another cartoon character is begging her God for release from the terrible situation that defines her role in the strip. Poor Helga, who was no doubt either captured by Hagar’s viking band in a raid that left her village destroyed or handed over to the Norse chieftain by her father in order to avoid such an attack, has no recourse to improve her life but divine intervention. I’m curious as to which religious hierarchy she’s beseeching here, though. Is it the new God and his Son, recently imported from the south, or is it Odin and his pantheon, the old Gods of her people? If the latter, her requests might be bumped a little further up the queue with a human sacrifice or two. Surely her pacifist son Hamlet would make a choice offering?
Apartment 3-G, 4/1/09
See, there is an advantage to living with Margo: you can have conversations with enraged, half-asleep, foul-mouthed, possibly drunk or high women in their underwear, and still maintain that vacant little smile, unfazed, as if this happens to you every day, because it does.
Apartment 3-G, 2/19/09
No Apartment 3-G girl can find happiness in love, so obviously the next box Margo receives will contain Eric’s neatly packaged non-transplantable organs, courtesy of the Chinese government, but for the moment let’s just appreciate this gesture, in which he lets her know that her many, many previous sexual partners don’t bother him. If we’re really lucky Margo will let Tommie play dress-up with it, to mock her, because it’s the closest she’ll ever come to getting married, or having anyone love her.
Baldo, 2/19/08
Notice that the customer is blushing in the final panel. The only legitimate response to a sub-pun this awful is to be terribly embarrassed for the perpetrator.
Crankshaft, 2/19/09
Oh, that Crankshaft, always combining corny, unoriginal jokes with death! Our flight attendant looks wholly uninterested in saving her own or anybody else’s life in the case of emergency, and will probably cap off her little safety talk by hanging herself with the demonstration seatbelt.
Family Circus, 2/19/09
“No, Jeffy! You know full well what the judge said.”
Marmaduke, 2/19/09
“Why are you so restrained, for once?” Phil thinks. “Go on, eat him!”
Hagar the Horrible, 2/19/09
HAW HAW HAW THE FEMINISM
Mark Trail, 12/15/08
A couple of months back, I posited that this could in fact be the ultimate Mark Trail storyline, including as it does all of the strip’s favorite plot devices — gentle forest hermits, rapacious mustachioed developers, a “hot” chick who wants to do Mark, terrible pet-napping hillbillies with sinister designs and stupid names, etc. In fact, there’s only been really one major Trail bugaboo missing, and that’s Indian artifact smuggling! So naturally Mark, in an attempt to fit his terrible ordeal in with the nature of the world he knows, assumes that Salty and his gang are “smugglers of some sort” (hint: the sort that smuggle PRICELESS INDIAN ARTIFACTS!) despite no evidence pointing in that direction. Maybe they’re just run-of-the-mill baddies who tie up local irritants on their disused shrimp boat, then fall asleep, for money!
Also absent in this storyline, up until today: a word balloon emanating from Andy’s crotch. So, there’s that.
Mary Worth, 12/15/08
Poor Lynn is starved for the human affection conveyed by simple hug, since everyone in her life (“everyone” consisting entirely of her father, ever since he had the brake lines cut on Greg’s brother’s car) is repulsed by such niceties as “physical contact.” Our heartbroken skater calculates (probably correctly) that Mary is in the “no touch” club, so in panel one she skillfully feints a dramatic pose against a convenient tree before pivoting and hurling herself into Mary’s arms. I give it a 9.8 (ideally her left arm would have come in below Mary’s right).
Another possibility is that Lynn is speaking literally when she says that her heart stopped when she heard about Greg’s death; this whole boring story was meant only to lull Mary into complacency, and now Zombie Lynn will lunge at her victim and feast on her brains.
Hagar the Horrible, 12/15/08
Oh, Hagar the Horrible, what a pretty and atmospheric winter scene you have for us here! It almost seems petty to point out that you seem to have forgotten to include a punchline of any sort in today’s strip.
Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/15/08
This is today’s Mother Goose and Grimm. It’s about dog-on-tree necrophilia! Yes, Ralph, it’s no coloring error that those hearts above your head are inky black, as your love for Lana is dirty and shameful.
Family Circus and Hagar the Horrible, 9/27/08
Two legacy strips check in with mind-bending unjokes today. Little Billy, having grown bored with physical violence, threats of physical violence, and crude insults, has decided to use some Philosophy 101 semantics and ontology to harass his sister. “Dolly, when is a thing not a thing? When do names not encode true meaning? Huh? Huh? Do you get it? Do you?” Dolly’s expression of anxiety proves that her big brother’s reign of terror is continuing on unchecked — only this time, she’ll have no bruises to show Mommy, so the torture will continue.
Meanwhile, Hagar is forcing an existential dilemma on his poor dog. “Why do you have to be what you are? Why can’t you be something else?” The idea that a question like “why” can even be applied to the essence of existence is enough to send anyone into paroxysms of depression — I didn’t make me! Why can’t love me as I am! Fortunately, Snert seems to have a great deal more self-assurance than Dolly, and is unfazed.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/27/08
You hear that, doc? You stay away from Niki, if you like that pretty little face of yours! And if there’s one thing we know about Rex, it’s that he likes that pretty little face of his.
Shoe, 9/27/08
I always assume that, when it appears in a newspaper comic strip, “dating” is a euphemism for “fucking,” which assumption really pays off when it comes to making this strip funnier. There’s a joke about hitting balls with clubs to be made here as well, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Gil Thorp, 8/8/08
If there was a terrifying malformed human feature that defined the Frank McLaughlin era of Gil Thorp, it was the hair. The Rod Whigham era has just begun, but it’s pretty clear that in the new regime, it’s the hands that are most likely to make you feel queasy and uncomfortable. Whether we’re talking about malformed flippers or severed forearms attached to nothing particular, from the elbow down everything in the modern-day Gil Thorp is a little dodgy. Today’s panel three seems to be a direct response to criticism on this point. “You want well-drawn hands?” it practically shouts. “Well, here they are, by God, straight out of an anatomy textbook, disproportionally huge, and held up at an angle that nobody would ever actually use when clapping. Are you happy? Are you happy now?”
Hagar the Horrible, 8/8/08
That sly look on Helga’s face in panel two makes me think that “rock-a-bye, baby, in the tree top” is some incredibly filthy Viking sex act, possibly involving an actual tree and the sacrifice of a dozen virgins to Freya.
Mary Worth, 8/8/08
Hey, everybody! You can follow along with Toby’s amazing phishing journey at the newly updated Enormoushop.com! Be sure to give it a few moments so as to get the full-on identity-stealing experience. (UPDATE: And by “give it a few moments” I mean “wait about 10 seconds for the redirect, then wait again for another redirect, all three screens are funny, you won’t regret it.”)
Shoe, 8/8/08
Sexual affairs? I’m much more concerned about the emotional affairs. What with all the suppressed longing and daydreaming, the ostensibly “platonic” outings crackling with sexual tension, the long, tortured e-mails about why anything more is impossible — why, it doesn’t leave any time for the important work of the elected official, like meeting with lobbyists and raising money for re-election.
I’ve long been on the record as opposing Shoe’s depiction of birds with human-lady-style breasts, since actual birds do not have such things and they look creepy and weird. Well, do you know what else birds don’t have? Teeth. You hear me, panel three? Teeth.
Marmaduke, 8/8/08
With the back yard now essentially one vast mass grave, Marmaduke has begun storing the decomposing bodies of his victims in the house.
Ziggy, 8/8/08
Ha ha! Those angry little birds are going to feast on Ziggy’s flesh!
Hagar the Horrible, 7/22/08
You know, the “joke” in this comic would have worked just as well (which is to say NOT VERY WELL AT ALL) if Lucky Eddie hadn’t been drawn to look like the Nazis in Raiders Of The Lost Ark right after they opened the Ark of the Covenant. As it is, we are left to wonder why Doctor Zook is handing out platitudes about a healthy diet to a patient who obviously either hasn’t slept in six days or has just been hit in the face with a brick.
Apartment 3-G, 7/22/08
“Ha, I knew it would be dangerous to bring my diary on this mission — why, it could have fallen into the hands of the Red Chinese! It was a stroke of genius to call my personal assistant on this landline and have her write in my diary for me, which is safely back at home in the U.S. Now the Chinese police will be none the wiser. I’d better use everyone’s full name, too, in case I forget who I was talking about years later when I look at what she wrote.”
Mary Worth, 7/22/08
As she finally resigns herself to this “human affection” thing she’s heard so much about, Mary Worth decides to try putting her head on Jeff’s shoulder, a romance technique she learned from a song on the local oldies station. A good first effort, Mary, but next time you might want to bend at the neck, not the waist.
Judge Parker, 7/22/08
You know, like Freud almost said, sometimes a golf club is just a golf club.
Not in this case, though. This strip is obviously about the fact that Sam and Abbey haven’t had sex since 1995.
