Old age, youth, the past, the present, etc.
Post Content
Heathcliff, 7/20/25
I’m a little obsessed with the tiny fish saying “Welcome to the club!” to Jaws. (Side note: Do we agree that the shark from Jaws is named “Jaws”? I hadn’t really thought about it until I started writing this post but now I feel very strongly about it.) I guess the fish is the representative of the entire Heathcliff universe, which itself turned 50 a couple years ago, and is acknowledging on behalf of his mostly land-based comrades that a fellow aquatic character has hit the same milestone. That said, it feels a little off because the Heathcliff characters are perpetually alive and keeping up their wacky antics and you can imagine them knowing at some level that they’ve existed for 50 years, whereas Jaws dies at the end of Jaws (sorry for the spoiler, but as noted this movie is 50 years old now, c’mon). I know there are more Jaws movies but those have different sharks in them. Are those sharks also named “Jaws”? I gotta think about that one, I’ll get back to you on it.
Hagar the Horrible, 7/20/25
Some really harrowing throwaway panels here: they transform a simple strip about Hagar inventing the movie theater freestyle machine so he can get super blotto into one that informs us that (a) somehow beat generation genius/weirdo William S. Burroughs had his strangest novel adapted into a play more than 1,000 years before he wrote it and (b) the canonically illiterate Hagar can’t parse out the word “naked”, but he can read “lunch.”
Pardon My Planet, 7/20/25
Gotta say that I’m impressed that this panel carefully avoided showing us whether or not Adam and Eve had navels, thus avoiding theological controversy, but dared to ask the question “What would Adam’s whole body hair situation have been?” and came up with an answer that’s more fucked up than any of us could’ve dreamed of.
Dustin, 7/20/25
Ha ha, just a couple of Gen Z dudes talking about mailing physical letters, a process they know a lot about from long experience! This strip, which is literally about the differences between young people and old people, demonstrates once again that it has its finger on the pulse of what young people know and do.
74 replies to “Old age, youth, the past, the present, etc.”
Mary Worth Mashups: Meh.
The only thing dumber than Dick Tracy’s Crimestoppers is Heathcliff’s Kitty Korner. “Some rando writes: My cat has an uninteresting habit!” Really? Do tell.
MW:
“OMG! Nightmare at 20,000 feet! There’s a gremlin outside my window! Oh, no…wait a minute…that’s just Wilbur on the wing….”
Heathcliff-You’re going to need a bigger cake.
Hagar the Horrible-“Helga, it’s time for our William Tell act.”
Dustin-What’s so amazing about that? Lots of self addressed envelopes have that in the corner and have had it for decades.
RMMD-“If you want a dad I’ll pass you off to Rex Morgan.”
MW-“My how time flies. My how many Wilbur-centric stories we’ve had.”
MW-“Gah! Lady, if you’re going to do that do it in the bathroom!”
FC-“How did you two meet if we’ve never been outside of the bubble?”
Archie-I see two things at that table I wouldn’t mind eating and it’s not the food.
HtH: I figured Hagar eating bare armed was his idea of naked.
Hagar the Horrible-“I can think of two things wrong with that title,” Nelson Muntz.
HtH:
“They just made me some popcorn on their Viking range!”
I read the Hagar throwaway panels as if Hagar could indeed read “Naked Lunch”, and figured the colorist messed up. or perhaps they colored a version showing Hagar and Helga’s skin and decided no, that’s not it, there’s no way, this is my job and I’ll play by my rules
Pardon My Planet: So dinosaurs were in the Garden of Eden? Playing to the “Answers in Genesis” crowd, i guess.
Also, that rabbit’s gonna need therapy, once that’s invented.
MW:”Can I get you a drink?”
“No thanks, I’m already hallucinating.”
RMMD: Was Varla oblivious to the whole DNA thing, or did she go with the ever-popular, “I’ll be dead, not my problem” thing?
Dustin: The whole strip could have been reduced to the last panel and a better one at that.
Heathcliff: So, Heathcliff is trying to catch Jaws then? And kill him, presumably? Maybe as a long-running pop culture character himself, he knows that it doesn’t get better, and wants to spare his ‘friend’ a similar fate.
HtH: So Hagar is drinking out of a trash bin, huh? He emptied out a trash bin and filled it with beer, and the carbonation is probably lifting all those caked-on little bits of garbage to the bottom and bringing them to the top of his drink? Just want to make sure we all know what we’re looking at here.
PmP: Interesting to see that the Garden of Eden may be free of physical pain, but that ‘cringe’ still exists, even (especially?) among the animals. Maybe our heaven on earth was their hell. Makes you think…
Dustin: My personal theory here is that the writer originally did this whole scene with Dustins’ parents, then looked over it and said ‘Hey, wait a minute: I didn’t say a single shitty thing about someone under 40 here!’ He considered adding a throwaway panel depicting Dustin with his finger up his nose, but then thought it would probably be safer just to redo the art.
Dustin : I have a theory where, in Frazz, when what the kid is saying is too stupid and blatantly wrong, instead of having Caufield say it, it’s a non-Caufield kid saying it. There’s a similar thing at work in this strip, where if something is too stupid and humiliating for DustinDad to do, it’s DustinFriend who does it instead.
I base this entirely on that one time the strip did of “Why do they call them the ‘Los Angeles Angels’? Isn’t that just ‘The Angels Angels’?” TWICE, in a relatively short length of time, once with DustinFriend saying it, the other with DustinDad (in that order, IIRC?).
************
Hagar the Horrible : One more point for this setting being a bunch of REALLY in-character LARPers rather than a merely anachronistic setting. They had the restraint of not making the theater Hagar went to a MOVIE theater, at least…
***********
Heathcliff : I interpret the goldfish telling Jaws “Welcome to the club!” as “Welcome to the getting fished and eaten by Heathcliff club”.
***********
Luann :
1. Yeah, “Brassiere” is the perfect word to describe the union of two boobs.
2. Bernice isn’t freezing up because she couldn’t think of a word, she’s freezing up because “two girls who hang together and give support and comfort” is ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE of them.
**********
Pardon my Planet : depicting the Garden of Eden as having unicorns and HERBIVOROUS TYRANNOSAURUS REXES… is a choice.
**********
Slylock Fox : EXTRA DIFFERENCE : in the upper panel, the boy is hanging from the lamp from having jump due to being startled by the skunk. In the lower panel, the boy had gotten stuck hanging from the lamp for unrelated reasons, and his friends getting him down has been complicated by a skunk walking in.
PmP:
“I figured you could use a good ribbing, Baby Cakes. So to speak.”
Dustin: When we’re supposed to see Dustin’s asshole dad as the relatable character, you know everyone else is going to have the social skills of monkeys who communicate by flinging poop.
MW: I have never hoped for Mary’s dreams to violently splatter like a bug on a windshield the way I do right now.
@Pozzo:
Good to see that Todd the Dinosaur is making a cameo cross-strip appearance in PmP.
Heathcliff: The shark in Jaws was nicknamed “Bruce” by the film’s crew, after Steven Spielberg’s attorney. Which is a pretty good lawyer joke, but not a very scary moniker for a man-eating killing machine.
Hagar:
He drank a whiskey drink
He drank a vodka drink
He drank a lager drink
He drank a mead drink
He saw a show that reminded him of the bad times
He saw a show that reminded him of the worse times.
Pardon My Planet: “I wouldn’t date you if you were the first man on earth!”
Dustin: It’ll be funny when he tries to mail this letter in the book-return case outside his library, which, like a mailbox, is something he’s never actually used before.
Pluggers: Are they spying in you? No. Not a single newspaper in the country in 2025 has a 14-page comics section, so you imagined this whole scenario. (They are taking the artificial colors out of your Trix cereal, in case you’re still looking for something to be paranoid about.)
I believe the shark’s name in Jaws was “Bruce”, not “Jaws”.
@Liam: Both Mary and Wilbur have the same disturbing smile when they’re daydreaming with their hands out of sight. The rarely seen non-white token sitting next to Mary is violently retching into his motion sickness bag.
@Powers: BRUUUUCE!!
I dated the same girl throughout most of high school, and we had a standing date every Friday night to rent a movie, usually something fluffy of her choice. One time, however, I saw that Bravo was airing Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, and I, being a big fan of William S Burroughs, convinced her to make it our choice for that week. She had no idea what it was, and I left it as vague as possible to avoid getting vetoed. To her credit, she did watch the whole thing but when it was over she told me in no uncertain terms that I would never get to pick the movie again.
Funnily enough, not long after a couple of girlfriends of hers had a double date with their respective boyfriends and rented Cronenberg’s Crash, mistakenly thinking it was an action movie about cars. Apparently an extremely awkward experience for all.
Anyhow, all that to say: Hagar, Helge, probably not a great entertainment choice for a date night!
FC: Jeffy sees a newscast about Mardi Gras. “I knew it!!”
@Needless Exposition: I’m hoping/expecting Olive will be far, far from the innocent sweet child Mary remembers. Perhaps she’s gone punk, with facial piercings and tattoos. Hilarity ensues when she shares her CBD gummies with Mary.
The Burroughs novel is sometimes credited with providing the name for the rock subgenre “heavy metal.” That totally fits the umlaut in Hägar’s name. Maybe what he really wants is to party in a mosh pit.
It’s Sunday. Guess what happens next… JUNGLE JIM!
Today, it’s Jungle Jim minus Jungle Jim.
At first the real theological controversy in PMP may be the T.Rex in Eden. But notice the unicorn beside it. I read this as a joke at the expense of creationists like Duane Gish.
@tw and a macchiato: Take a close look at the sleeve of Hagar’s shirt in panel 2.
RMMD:
” ‘Son,’ let’s you and I sing a snippet of somethin’ fun and frothy from Nine Inch Nails together, to lighten up the mood.
“Ahem. ‘Bow down before the one you serve/You’re gonna get what you deserve….’ “
HTH: I was going to laugh at these village hicks sitting down with big grins to watch two hours of sickening hallucinogenic body horror, but then I realised this is the intermission! They know what they’re watching and they love it. Psychosexual insect drug orgies? To the Vikings, that’s basically regular orgies.
Hagar The Horrible: The version of Naked Lunch presented here is at The Village Playhouse and has an intermission which means it’s not the movie but a stage adaptation. Which not only exists but is a musical. Hagar drinking beer out of a trash can is not the weirdest thing happening here.
MW: does KM not realize how creepy this is?
@Ken: Mary thoroughly deserves to have her incredibly disgusting fantasies over a barely teenaged girl crushed by the reality that Olive is no longer the delusional tummy brained weirdo she could easily groom.
Not only is Hagar dropping a Beat Literature reference today, the Lockhorns are doing Abstract Expressionism.
Heathcliff is way out of step – we’re looking for 70 year old references, not 50!
The shark in Jaws is called…..
….
…..Bruce
@Baja Gaijin:
I do genuinely hope Olive has turned into an aggressive goth with substance abuse problems. That would serve Mary right.
Bring back Sauna!
@Needless Exposition: So are we all.
@BigTed:
In addition, In “Finding Nemo,” one of the shark’s trying to stop eating fish was named Bruce, a shoutout to the shark in the movie “Jaws.”
@Professor Well Actually: Creepiness is an endearing quirk among the Charterstone residents such as Ian being married to a woman young enough to be his daughter, Saul’s obsession with his dog of the decade, Keith Hillend’s underhanded tactics to keep his not daughter and her promiscuous mother, and literally everything about Wilbur.
Today’s Mary Worth is the most messed up thing I have ever seen in the comics. I refer, of course, to the quotation taken from the 1985 TV miniseries of Anne of Green Gables but attributed to Lucy Maud Montgomery rather than the screenwriters, Kevin Sullivan and Joe Wiesenfeld. Shame! Shame! Shame!
What Mark Trail was really like.
Heathcliff: Actually, the shark’s name is likely “Bruce,” as that’s how the movie crew referred to the mechanical fish used in the film.
Hagar: I guess everyone’s pissed at Hagar’s huge mug because they didn’t think of it.
21st century archeologists were stunned to discover a Viking burial ground where all the people had had parasitic fish in their urethras.
@Tonio: Steely Dan is also named after a…uh…character in Naked Lunch.
Hägar the Horrible: I’d really like to know the thought process that went into creating these throwaway panels. For legal purposes.
(P.S.: Naked Lunch is not Burroughs’ weirdest novel, not by a long shot. It’s actually one of the more accessible works of his corpus. But I guess the joke’s not the same with Exterminator! or The Place of Dead Roads.)
FC – Why did they cover her upper half? We all want to see if they could jut when she was Jeffy’s age? My money says she could have.
Curtis: The reader gets to decide the ending? How about Curtis and his dad toss on Tshirts and they all have a civilized chat about not being too shocked by casual clothing in the privacy of one’s own home? And maybe calling ahead if you’re bringing company? Nah, the dad was in pants and long sleeves, Curtis was wearing long jeans and two long-sleeved layers while sweltering – there’s too little common sense to manage that.
@Bob Tice: Fun and absolutely true fact!: People ask “How did Eve come from Adam’s rib? After all, men and women have the same number of ribs.” Well, if you’re thinking about an extra bone that a man would have but not a woman, you might want to travel south, so to speak. In other words: you know Adam! You know damn well where she’s been all your life! This is terrible foreplay!
@Bob Tice: “Wilbur on the Wing” was the greatest rejected Pink Floyd album.
So, when Adam and Eve fell and were ejected from Eden, simultaneously the T-Rex was likewise evicted and turned from its vegetarian ways to meat-eating to express its rebellious feelings towards the Lord? Or perhaps the meat-eating, of the unicorn, was its original sin?
MW: Did Mary pass peacefully in the next to last panel? Is the flight her metaphorical journey to heaven? Is Olive poised to take over the strip?
Meanwhile, a panic stricken God asks his angel corps for a loophole to keep her out of paradise.
“Didn’t she eat a lot of pork, or something?”
Hägar the Horrible: Doesn’t Naked Lunch include a character with a talking anus? Was he the inspiration for Les Moore?
Hagar is another “the colorist didn’t read the strip” screw-up – note that you can’t see Hagar’s sleeve in his thought balloon. They’re supposed to be naked. I guess they’re wearing body paint?
Batton Thomas yesterday: uses the word “nictitating” in a comic strip.
Batton Thomas today: gets upset when people don’t get his writing.
@pugfuggly: I hope they’re watching the stage production of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.
“The great white shark in Jaws is never given a name, but off screen, during the production of the 1975 classic, it got names aplenty.
The mechanical shark was known as everything from the great white turd to flaws, both because of him not always working very well in the salt water. But the one name that stuck and is fondly used by Jaws fans to this day is that of Bruce the shark.”
Heathcliff: Based on the “welcome to the club” line, we are to assume this throwaway fish has lived 50 years too. I find that highly suspect, unless it belongs to a heretofore unknown species of fish of that size with an extended life span and full of toxins that make predators avoid it like it’s Wilbur Weston in a Speedo.
PMP: The unicorn spontaneously stopped existing upon hearing that pickup line.
Dustin: Dustin forgot Fitch really likes tonguing envelopes.
After reading 50+ comments it appears that the shark in Jaws was named Bruce. I don’t know what scares me most, that so many people knew that or that I didn’t. Well, now I know and I thank you all. “Hey Alex, I’ll take Jaws for 100 please.”
@58 Unca Bob: You’re a plugger if you know the nickname of a half-century old movie prop.
MW: Now that we know Mary and Olive have the Shining, we know they’re both in Stephen King’s Dark Tower universe. I think that would make Wilbur the Crimson King.
FC: Please, Lord, I don’t want to see any more peeks into Jeffy’s imagination.
Heathcliff – I have to give props to this strip for being exactly one month late wishing Jaws a happy fiftieth anniversary. Well played.
Luann: You’re more like an underwire.
CS: And yet somehow, Batiuk has survived all these years…
Also, why the fuck are you distracting from the customer’s Tight Five? You don’t always have to be the center of attention.
9CL: Brooke’s working out some weird phallic symbolism. Again.
@Baja Gaijin: I like Mary’s “woo woo” eyes.
A&J: Arlo popped a boner.
@Bob Tice: #3
In his tiny black spandex Speedo!!!
-PMD: To quote American Dad!
God (Playing with plastic dinosaur toys): These guys are great! Why did I ever sent them to Mars?
-PMD: When I was younger, I made a “joke” about what Adam may have said when he first saw Eve.
“Woah, Man!!”
And the term Woman stuck.
(I hope that this doesn’t come off sounding sexist, I was just being silly at the time)
@Weaselboy: Although today is the first day of “Shark Week” they got that right…
I loved in Jaws 3, the 3D effects were laughable, and the plot was of Jaws causing havoc in Seaworld.
HOW… no… WHY… would Seaworld agree to that? It’s about a monster shark in their park KILLING people.
Arlo and Janis: Janis is horny, Arlo. It’s as if you know nothing about your wife.
Dustin: The Dustin universe is an elaborate hierarchy of cruelty and spite, everyone heaping contempt on those beneath them in the pecking order*. Dustfriend, being the only person Dustin is allowed to be superior to, is at the very bottom of this chain of abuse, which makes him…not sympathetic exactly, but the subject of a kind of horrified pity, such that one might feel for a dead animal on the side of the road, or the forsaken child of Omelas.
* Despite what you might think, it is not Dustdad who is at the top of this order but his doctor, the only person who is allowed to tell him he’s fat, lazy, and a drain on the health care system without consequence.
Heathcliff: The effect of Jaws on popular culture was a huge setback for shark conservation programs, to the point that both Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg devoted huge amounts of time and money to counteracting the damage, so….Happy Birthday, I guess? (Hey, it could be worse, you could be decaying on a beach while your fins are bottled up on a shelf in some Chinese apothecary.)
Crank: “Especially one who hears it all the time, like me!”
Dustin: So Dustfriend thinks this is the kind of envelope where you have to moisten the adhesive, which he does after he carefully peels off the backing strip? Good grief, this strip can’t even think through its own stupid premise.
FC: I guess the joke here is Jeffy imagining his parents’ adult heads on little-kid bodies, but the thing is, that is much less weird than how little kids’ heads are normally drawn in this strip.
HtH: Shout-out to the guy grinning just behind Hägar’s shoulder. Everyone else is horrifed by this, but he finds Hägar’s antics much more entertaining than watching some kind of writing-machine turn into a giant insect. (Yes, that’s the only thing I know about Naked Lunch, and I’m prepared to bet it’s one more thing than Walker-Browne LLC know.)
I realise questioning the historical accuracy of a strip where Vikings are watching a play based on the works of a 1950s Beat Generation surrealist feels like missing the point, but just for the record, lager and wheat beer were invented in the fifteenth century, and stout in the eighteenth. Hägar’s options should be barley ale, mead, or a slightly different barley ale.
JP: Of course. If you’re panicking and don’t know what to do, call Neddy! She has much more experience in panicking and not knowing what to do!
OTF: Today’s “visual metaphors that don’t work” is an absolute triumph. Deth’s work is forcing her to stretch in multiple directions and now she needs to unwind! And in order for this to even approach coherence she has to “wind” from her tangled state off panel! And the funniest part is that “pulling myself together” was right there!
I’m no fan of Pardon My Planet‘s vaguely Far Side shaped stylings. However, the details in this strip make it work for me! The vegetarian t-rex devouring foliage alongside a giraffe and a unicorn? I honestly can’t tell if this is parroting Creationist talking points or parodying them. Sometimes, that’s the best kind of satire.
The joke is coherent and kinda works, too, so god-tier PMP, IMO!
I don’t go seeking comics that Josh doesn’t cover, so imagine my surprise so many comments about Arlo and Janis.
Seeing as Josh never covers Arlo and Janis, so in turn I’ve literally never seen it, the comic honestly gives Maris from Frasier vibes here.
@TheDiva: (Dustin) Undoubtedly, the doctor is married to a harridan who mocks him as a “general practitioner,” thus not affording her the lifestyle she expected from marrying a doctor.