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Hagar the Horrible, 11/10/16

Well, it looks like someone at Hagar the Horrible likes to stoke my fascination with where the Hagarverse falls on the timeline of the Christianization of Scandinavia. Fun fact: the ritual slaughter of horses and eating of horsemeat was deeply ingrained into Germanic pagan ritual, so much so that the Vatican banned the practice in the 8th century as a means to promote Christianity; this is the origin of the modern-day Western taboo on eating horse. Anyway, Helga and the waiter look appalled by Hagar’s discovery, but Hagar himself is more quizzical than anything else. Maybe he’s cautiously feeling out the possibility that this restaurant is a secret hideout for crypto-pagans — and he’s interested in joining them in returning to the Old Ways, where you celebrated blót to gain fertility and good health, and then got to eat some tasty horse.

Shoe, 11/10/16

I love the weird, fossilized cultural nuggets and attitudes you can find embedded in the structural material used to build comic strip punchlines. How ancient is the use of “Wayne Newton” as a signifier for “very bad music,” do you think? Honestly, I would’ve gone with “Justin Bieber,” which is still a solid five years out of date but might tickle the irritation that the old people who read comic strips harbor for anything that’s happened in pop culture since they turned 45.

Meanwhile, I want a lot more information about these two condemned criminals, the Falcon and Guzzwanker. “Guzzwanker and the Falcon” has a better ring to it in my opinion, but maybe they aren’t a criminal duo but just happen to be scheduled for execution on the same day. Guzzwanker is a mild-mannered accountant who, if he hadn’t slipped up and left fingerprints on the murder weapon, nobody would’ve suspected of killing his parents to speed his inheritance. The Falcon, meanwhile, is a notorious international terrorist, and also an actual falcon.

Spider-Man, 11/10/16

“Maybe we’ll never get you convicted for murder, Starr … [one panel of dialogue that distracts you from how this sentence started] … and all four of us heard you confess to murder, so we will definitely get you convicted for it!” God, I hope that camera is still recording. The whole world needs concrete evidence of what dipshits these guys are! And, uh, evidence that Egghead is a murderer, I guess.

Mark Trail, 11/10/16

Ahhh yes, the helicopter explosion will be continuing indefinitely, just as I requested. That’s the stuff we need in these troubled times. That’s the stuff.