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Hagar the Horrible, 3/24/26

I make a lot of jokes on this blog parsing various anachronistic clues trying to figure out where Hagar and his crew are plundering and pillaging at any given time, but … it’s generally France, right? Like, that’s where Norse raiders mostly went in real life, descending on a civilization on the Continent that was wealthier and more advanced than theirs but that had begun to politically unravel as the heirs of Charlemagne fought each other for territory. Today we see a surprising result of this type of cultural contact: one of Hagar’s men, who apparently was getting off on what he thought was an act of sexual dominance over the regional nobility to match his warband’s military success, is clearly devastated to learn that he’s become entangled in what the locals refer to as “an arrangement.”

Beetle Bailey, 3/24/26

This strip actually got me to look up what the experience of a limb “falling asleep” actually is, and I thought it had to do with blood flow but apparently it primarily arises from nerve compression that just cuts off sensation from the affected area altogether. And Beetle is like, wouldn’t it be great if my whole body was cut off from my brain completely? If I were nothing but a pure mind, untethered to physical existence? Killer’s facial expression is appropriate: he is not buying this and neither am I.

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Hagar the Horrible, 2/17/26

This one, I think, adds up: in Viking-era Scandinavia, sugar would’ve been imported at great expense from the Islamic world, but because it was a luxury good those selling sugar and sugar-derived products like rum could charge much higher markups on it than they could on, say, drinks made from local commodity crops like barley or honey. The candle thing was probably real too, but I’m not going to bother looking that one up.

Herb and Jamaal, 2/17/26

Look, if you had been a comics character for 37 years — never aging, never changing, never growing or improving as a person — you might come to feel that you were trapped on the endlessly spinning dharmic wheel, and would pay any price to escape samsara, even if it meant being nice to your mother-in-law.

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Mary Worth, 2/10/26

OK, finally, finally we have absorbed the lessons (?) of the great Toby-Ian parrot story, and after eating those vegetables we get our dessert. That dessert is hot beefcake in the form of Dr. Jeff, who, after fitting a hood that’s too long to close onto his sports car, is taking a break to casually lean back, with his lilac shirt unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up to tease us with glimpses of his James Dean-esque undershirt and rippling forearms, like you do. Who wouldn’t want to go on a “sunset cruise” (wink) with this guy? The Mary Worth trufans certainly can’t resist!

Hagar the Horrible, 2/10/26

I guess we have Lucky Eddie awkwardly announcing that he’s staying outside in the first panel so that it would make sense for him to be asking this question to set up the punchline in the second. But I prefer to think that he knows Hagar all too well, and simply doesn’t want to watch Hagar murder the inhabitants of his former home and plunder whatever wealth they have, just like he murders most of the strangers he encounters on their journeys.

B.C., 2/10/26

I appreciate the single tear the cute chick “Grace” is crying for the farmers here. “Being a farmer sounds tough,” she’s thinking. “I’ll definitely urge my nomadic hunter-gatherer band to avoid agriculture indefinitely, and only interact with settled communities when we raid them for surplus goods.”