Really had to resist including some family tree diagrams for this one
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Hagar the Horrible, 7/13/26
In The City of God, St. Augustine famously tells a story of a pirate who had been captured by Alexander the Great: “When that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, ‘What do you mean by seizing the whole earth? Because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor.’” Now, Augustine’s point is that a king who rules without virtue is simply a brigand on a larger scale; but Hagar, whose opinions on the new religion from the south are mixed at best, takes the harder-headed view, more common among modern commentators, that recognizes the similarities between states and criminal enterprises without necessarily applying moral valence to it. The king is stronger than Hagar, so he must submit to his cruelties, but he also looks forward to passing them down the line to his own victims.
Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/13/26
So Lyle Ollman, the inventor of the Mirakle Method, is the grandfather of the scam twins Jean and Jane, and Rene/Jimmy is their uncle, but Lyle is also Rene’s uncle and … I don’t think that really works? I guess it works if whichever of Lyle’s children is a parent to the twins married someone whose sibling married Rene in a weird sibling/cousin double marriage situation, but Rene doesn’t seem like the marrying kind; it could also be that one of Rene’s siblings married his or her own first cousin to produce these two kids. It’s also possible that this whole family suffers from intense, multigenerational nephewism and nobody has any parents at all: it’s just uncles as far back as anyone can remember.
Andy Capp, 7/13/26
“Yeah I’m trying to lose some ugly excess weight … by which I mean my spouse, whom I hate!” is a classic and beloved joke format of course, and I suppose it was inevitable that it would get a GLP-1 spin eventually, but I don’t think anyone expected it to happen in Andy Capp first.
27 replies to “Really had to resist including some family tree diagrams for this one”
Morality is a sham! For example, do you know that if a cartoonist used identical twins as characters, she could just draw once and use copy and paste to fill the panel with minimal effort? It would be unprofessional and ugly, but it would be practical!
GT: Wow, Merrill’s art for today’s strip must have been *horrendous* for the syndicate to simply swap it out for a block of plain text.
CS: So which do we think is worse? That this storyline appears to STILL not be over, or that Batton Thomas continues to lurk just off-panel, biding his time until his next ‘say that reminds me of a story…’?
RMMD: We often talk about copy-paste art in these soap strips, but I think today’s strip just might be the most egregious example we’re ever going to see, unless tomorrow Beatty just has two panels of the ‘twins’ talking and forgets to have Rene in the two-shot.
“Getting plenty of dough through a legal operation? That’s goody-goody nonsense! We want an illegal scheme with a high chance of blowing up in our face!”
“Truly you are my nieces!”
HtH: Where did Hagar manage to pull that sack of gold out of so quickly? On second thought, I don’t think I wanna know…
RMMD C’mon girls, if you really want to maximize your scam profits, you can’t just be running street cons, its got te be scalable. If you don’t like the self-help angle, you could always try crypto or health supplements. Maybe convince people that you’re clones and write a tell-all? Thousands of possibilities!
HtH:
“Say — aren’t you late for your WWF match?*
Don’t stay in school! College is expensive and the college premium is declining. In addition, if more doctors were trained, the end of the artificial scarcity would end the astronomical profits of healthcare in the USA. This is why “Rex Morgan MD” is promoting non-college path to employment, like being a mechanic for vintage cars or artisanal fraud!
RMMD:
“What school does he think you’re in, anyway?”
“The School of Hard Knocks!”
RMMD:
“Of course, Grandpa Ollman also thinks that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
“SNORT! — what a knee-slapper!”
MW: Meanwhile, Carlos Alora is working to complete plumbing repairs at Charterstone when he inadvertently connects the main stack from Tommy Beedie’s apartment to the supply line in Wilbur’s kitchen, just as Wilbur goes to refresh himself with a tall glass of water from the tap.
RMMD:
The anagram of “Grandpa Ollman” is “Droll Pagan Man.”
Coincidence? — I think not.
Andy Capp:
“My nutritionist was at the same soccer match as I was and tried to throw me today’s allotment from his place in the rafters. But it hit a wire that changed its course on the way down, so it never reached me!”
AC So Andy’s wife is getting some kind of injection to get rid of him, if you interpret it as getting some ‘jab’ but not necessarily for *herself*, it could get really dark really fast. I assume Andy’s enormous alcohol intake is somehow interfering with the poison/overdose.
By stealing that line, Hagar shows that he both recognizes intellectual property and considers himself to be a pirate in that sense as well. Surprisingly advanced for the Middle Ages!
@pugfuggly: Pity the poor headsman, who was keeping that spiked club in the same place.
HtH — Kinda makes Hagar less “horrible” and more “Tier 2 member of a multi-layer marketing scheme.”
Also, isn’t there an old jungle saying, “Never give extorted money to a man in a mask (because you can’t be sure of who you’re paying off)”
@Bob Tice: “My nutritionist was at the same soccer match as I was and tried to throw me today’s allotment from his place in the rafters. But it hit a wire that changed its course on the way down, so it never reached me!”
I guess you could say he really FIFA’ed it up!
GT Mimi is missing the afternoon wedding because she’s getting the Coach of the Year award … which previously was some fancy evening with the bar open after for Gil to chat up Beth. Either they downgrade the ceremony to an afternoon school district work break any time that Gil doesn’t win, or “I’m sorry the award at 8PM is making me miss my Ex’s remarriage at 4PM” is the most flimsy of fig-leafs Gil and everyone have been accepting to avoid a scene. If Mimi hadn’t gotten the award, she would have needed to skip out for a hair salon appointment.
RMMD: Lyle is Rene’s Great uncle.
FLASH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!: “Set of five! Collect them all, kids!” (and I’m too accustomed to the sight of the perfunctory “TM” superscripted in front of names)
@Bob Tice: Now that you mention it, Hagar does bear a striking resemblance to the Berzerker. Perhaps he should adopt “Huss!” as his new catchphrase.
@CanuckDownSouth, GT: I was expecting the awards ceremony to be attended only by Mimi and that new villain coach at VT, while Gil’s ceremony would be more packed that Madison Square Garden a few weeks ago.
AC: I think it’s dangerous to introduce GLP-1 drugs to Andy Capp. One side effect of the drugs appears to be breaking other addiction pathways in the brain, such as gambling and alcoholism – and without betting and booze, what material is left for the Andy Capp writers?
@Schroduck: Pigeons. Oh, and spousal abuse.
MW: What onomatopoeia would be used if Wilbur were flushed down the toilet?
RMMD: It’s heartwarming; every criminal hopes that their descendents will be more ruthless than they are.
AC: I thought that Flo’s archetypical bitch was that Andy was always off drinking and gambling. She should check; he may have gone to his reward and been propped up there by his mates.
Crankshaft: Tomorrow, we’ll see a hand come close to the doorbell button. The following day we’ll see the finger press the button and see a panel with “ding dong”. Finally the day after that will see him expectantly standing there on the porch waiting.
Gil Thorp: High school gym? C’mon Gil has his own twin engine turboprop plane. He can spring for a civic center or veterans hall. Or is the artist desperately trying to avoid drawing any new backgrounds?
Judge Parker: Give credit to Ann for giving a clear verbal response which Neddy promptly ignored – now give us the missing frame where she deploys a large wrench and swings it at Neddy’s head: “NO means NO, Neddy!” . Charlotte, hearing the commotion, looks on from the hallway, smiles and nods her head in agreement.
Rex Morgan: Now, many have noted the basic cut and paste, but this is actually part of comics tradition. Wally Wood, a famous comic artist noted “Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, and never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.” Of course that was all in the pre-digital era when cut and paste mean literally cutting out and pasting. He is also famous for The 22 Panels The Always Work – something a lot of artists on the strip, Gil Thorp, and others might benefit from a refresher.
@MKay: RMMD: It’s heartwarming; every criminal hopes that their descendents will be more ruthless than they are.
It’s hard to avoid in this case, though. Lyle Ollman invented the “Ollman method” to help people. His nephew-cousin-son(?) Jimmy-Rene was a would-be scammer who rebranded the method and used it to help people. Really at this point the twins’ violin act is much more ruthless, and profitable, than anything Jimmy-Rene ever managed to pull off.
Further headsman thoughts:
I feel like the typical shirtless executioner carries a huge axe or maybe sword? Having someone put their head on the block and then you bash it in with a spiked club would be equally effective but still feels wrong.
Apparently men in the Hagarverse have chest hair but no navels or nipples. I don’t want to think about what that means theologically or biologically.
Rex Morgan, M.D.: I grew up with an aunt and uncle who weren’t actually an aunt and uncle, but rather my one aunt’s sister-in-law and her husband? Anyway, our families were tight and it was just fine to think of them that way, I still do. All of which is to say the easiest explanation here is that Jimmy d.b.a. Rene is fictitious kin, with “Uncle” being somewhere between a nickname and a gloss on the relationship. But of course, this is Rex Morgan, M.D., so the simplest explanation is never the correct one (e.g., twins running a phony music scam) so carry on and I look forward to seeing how the actual explanation involves roots country music but not the title character of the strip.