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Hagar the Horrible, 7/14/23

Wait, did we know that Hagar was bald under his omnipresent trademark horny hat? I did some deep research (went to my advanced archives search page, looked up “bald” for Hagar the Horrible strips, didn’t find any mention of it, looked up “hat” and “head” but there were too many hits and I didn’t feel like going through them all) and have come to the conclusion that I at least did not. Someone is probably going to drop a triumphant link to me talking about it in 2013 or so in the comments, so it’ll be interesting to see if Past Me agrees with Present Me, because Present Me kinda hates it. At least we won’t have to look at bald Hagar very much in the future, because those trolls are very much going to kill him, right? And eat him? Maybe not in that order?

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/14/23

Say what you will about Rex Morgan, M.D., but it does a pretty good job with facial expressions, in my opinion! Like, take Rex in panel two — I feel like this is nicely capturing the two contradictory impulses rising within him: “Ha, do these rubes think I would ever attend a social event at their home, they’re even dumber than they look” and “If next week they’re having yet another drunken rager and they haven’t invited me, I am 100% calling the cops.”

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Gasoline Alley, 7/10/23

Obviously the art in Gasoline Alley is not what you call realistic — see for instance, Rufus’s whole [gestures vaguely at his grotesque face] deal. So while it’s common in real life for a loose-fitting hospital gown to slip down the shoulder of a supine patient still groggy from a head injury, in this context it’s a deliberate choice — a choice to make Rufus look sexy. I don’t care for it. Don’t care for it one bit!

Hagar the Horrible, 7/10/23

Oh, man, for all those years of Lucky Eddie dating a mermaid, he’s been saying “Oh, it’s not that weird, she still has a human top half, ha ha,” when all this time she’s just been a gateway romance leading to much more extreme sea life-fucking.

Gil Thorp, 7/10/23

Just a year ago, the Barajas Era of Gil Thorp began with Gil receiving the Jack Berrill Coach of the Year award. Now Year 2 B.E. is underway and Gil is … receiving the Jack Berrill Coach of the Year Award. What, you thought someone else was going to get an award named after the guy who created the strip? Get real.

Mary Worth, 7/10/23

Hey, everyone! Please add “carrying a leash while stepping into or out of a van” to the list of activities that could get you shot in the back while “resisting arrest.”

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Slylock Fox, 6/19/23

There was a truly incredible report a few months ago that featured extensive quotes from Taliban fighters who, after spending two decades waging a brutal and ultimately successful guerilla war against the mightiest superpower the world has ever known, found to their great surprise and disgust that running the country they had conquered mostly entailed sitting in an office building in Kabul and writing a lot of emails. This was what popped into my mind immediately upon reading this, and for some reason I find this a much funnier and more incongruous scenario than these sapient animals stealing jewels from each other or whatever. These creatures rose up and dispossessed the dominant species of planet Earth, in a paroxysm of genocidal violence, with the intention of building their own civilization in the ruins! And now they’re hacking into one another’s email accounts in order to frame each other for the crime of sending mean notes? The creatures looked from funny animal to man, and from man to funny animal, and from funny animal to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/19/23

I genuinely love how distressed this Hagar’s victim looks in panel two here. He lives in the civilized Carolingian realm, and probably he though that the days of violent Teutonic justice and trial by combat were over; now disputes are settled peacefully in accordance with civil law in the Emperor’s courts. But here are a couple violent men with weapons, sent (or so he thinks) by his wife’s vengeful family, here to make it very clear that, if you cross the wrong people, the old ways are still very much alive.

The Lockhorns, 6/19/23

I am frankly quite pleased to see the whole crypto/web3 scene go through multiple hype and boom/bust cycles to finally achieve its final form: something used in a syndicated newspaper comic strip as a well-understood shorthand for “a topic the most irritating person you meet at a party would talk to you about.” I only find this strip unbelievable because I am 100% certain that Leroy doesn’t need anything explained to him, because he has lost a substantial amount of money in crypto.