Old age, youth, the past, the present, etc.
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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.
121 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?).
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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…
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Heathcliff : I interpret the goldfish telling Jaws “Welcome to the club!” as “Welcome to the getting fished and eaten by Heathcliff club”.
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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.
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Pardon my Planet : depicting the Garden of Eden as having unicorns and HERBIVOROUS TYRANNOSAURUS REXES… is a choice.
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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.
I believe Speilberg named the shark “Bruce”.
C’shaft: And now we see why Batiuk insists on beating every single punchline into the ground: he lives in mortal fear that someone, somewhere might not understand the joke.
DT: So our villains are a couple of lesbian scientists who can’t pay their utility bills. I’d say that ranks below “time-traveling art thief” but above “wealthy insurance fraudster with really stupid nephews.”
JP: “No, I’m going back to sleep. Call me in a couple hours if April’s still alive.”
Luann: A boredom of Luann characters
MW Mary’s refusal to speak to anyone who cannot pass the paper bag test plays out in her seatmate’s favor, allowing him to enjoy the Caitlin Clark biography he grabbed from Hudson Books in peace.
Phantom: Any character named Derwood “Buzz” Apple should properly be in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, or Gasoline Alley.
In the late 1960s, filmmaker Antony Balch considered adapting “Naked Lunch” as a musical with Mick Jagger in the lead role. Burroughs even adapted the book for the screenplay, complete with musical numbers. However, the project was abandoned due to a falling out between Balch and Jagger. Following Jagger’s departure, Dennis Hopper was considered for the role.
@pugfuggly: If those girls thought Cronenberg’s filming of Crash and Naked Lunch were disturbing, keep them far away from JG Ballard and Burroughs’ original books!
Cronenberg said of his film of Naked Lunch: ‘If we did it literally, it would be ten hours long and banned in every country in the world.”
@Twinkles the Elf: Oh, really? Don’t tell!
@70 TheDiva: I thought DustGrandDad was the top of the heap. He heaps a lot of crap on his son, the DustDad.
@73 The Rambling Otter: Um, yeah, about that. Janis is definitely not Maris. Janis loves Arlo and willingly spends a lot of time with her. Also lotsa boinking.
Common mistake, Josh. The shark is not called Jaws, but Jaws’ Monster
The Hagar the Horrible creative team may have dropped the ball depicting a naked lunch, but at least Pardon My Planet took the ball(s (ha!)) and ran with it. Hubba hubba! Awwwooooga! [Insert gif here of my eyes popping out of their sockets and my tongue rolling out to the floor as I follow the path of Adam’s chest hair direction arrow.]
I appreciate that the T-rex in Pardon My Planet is eating leaves while standing beside a unicorn. While not laugh out loud funny, it’s the sharpest joke in the comics today.
Not only Vikings were outside Christian-Roman culture, but even in core Europe, theatre practically disappeared with Christianisation and even mystery plays appeared later. Secular theatre would only reappear in the Renaissance. What I am saying is that Hagar watching a play by William S. Burroughs is just as realistic as him watching a play by Plautus
The Original Sin is named after Adam’s pick-up artist persona, Mr Original. I guess the original sin was cringe
Heathcliff: [Comes to microphone at end of panel discussion] This is more of a cute story than a comment, but an assisted living facility I visit recently made a Bruce shark with the mouth cut out so the seniors could take pictures as though they were getting eaten and it was the silliest thing ever.
@82 Tabby Lavalamp: Something like this?
Hagar – Tree Frog Beer is an S. Clay Wilson reference. Same brand of sleazy weirdness as Burroughs, but Wm. Stout and Weber Wheat (presumably referring to Bob Weber Jr.) don’t go with the theme. Whoever writes this thing these days must be on the JUMBO COMBO of drugs.
JP – You’re in the middle of a violent, disruptive incident, so you call someone at least five time zones away. Makes perfect sense. Reminder: Sophie is a genius who can hack into Pentagon drones.
Mary Worth – Floating head alert!
Frazz – @Anonymous: “I have a theory where, in Frazz, when what the kid is saying is too stupid and blatantly wrong, instead of having Caulfield saying it, it’s a non-Caulfield kid saying it.” A non-Caulfield kid should be saying this today, because it’s not a good comparison and doesn’t make sense.
Shouldn’t these two be running or mocking Mrs. Olsen behind her back?
9CL: In two panels the diving board is wide enough to sit cross-legged with room to spare on either side. In two panels she staddles the board as if it’s a pole. For someone who spends so much time drawing legs and insinuating what happens between them (nudge, nudge, wink), you would think that he understands how the hips and pelvis works.
Don Abundio, translated:
“Snif! I’m bored”
“I could do something to make my owner think he’s going nuts”
“1… 2… 3… 4… 1… 2… 3… 4… 1… 2… 3…”
@Needless Exposition: Nope sorry. Olive has no choice. She’s going to be an “easily-groomed” mini-Mary, regardless of how “different” she is now. They already tried this with Madi, who had pink hair and cursed a lot (because, ha, ha, aren’t teenagers the worst!? You feel me, right, fellow Boomers?) Of course by the end she ended up imprinting on Mary and staring at our heroine with such worshiped admiration that you knew Cult Mary had captured yet another member (maybe her next appearance will be involved the spontaneous formation of angelic dreams and precognitive powers!)
Sorry, but even a surly gen-Z Olive is no mach for Mary’s
iron dominancegentle mothering.@Baja Gaijin: I love the crazy eyes.
@Baja Gaijin: Heh
This Viking theatre has a nice selection of good beer. I guess they pillaged the right monastery
Gasoline Alley v. Arlo & Janis as noted by Pluggers: Three strips, all alike in dignity, In fair Comiclandia, where we lay our scene.
Beetle Bailey: Plato has a woman on his arm, which I can easily accept. But they didn’t draw Zero chatting up a woman because it was decided nobody would believe it.
Zits: Have the Collyer brothers been living here?
Blondie: Does Rube Goldberg live here?
BG&SS: Snuffy saying “All of ’em!” about which is his sweet tooth assume dentistry not in evidence.
MW: If this were any other comic I’d ask “Shouldn’t this woman’s expressions thinking about a random friend look less dreamy than when she’s rememembering her boyfriend?”
H&L: “My mom made me a costume, but I am a real dog. And Snoopy is a much better shortstop than I am. Seriously, how do you expect me to throw out a runner from deep in the hole with my mouth? If we’re going along with the gag at least put me at first base.”
@94 taig: Let’s see what The Lavalamp has to say about it.
Dustin and his friend must have found a new job: filming themselves being familiar yet incompetent about things boomers care about. It makes their subscribers on OnlyFans the right amount of angry and horny that makes them fell alive. Sorry, you say this scenario is too convoluted? Fine, it’s the maker of the comics strip “Dustin” who is getting paid to satisfy this fetish!
Everyone coming in here to tell me the shark is named “Bruce” is missing the point. Bruce is the name of the actor, I’m talking about the name of the character
@Twinkles the Elf: Heathcliff’s Kitty Korner.
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Did Stale write in about how Libby urinated on Willburp’s seat?
MARY WORTH: Here’s a fun little tidbit for all you non-comic book fans. In X-Men comics around the early 2000’s there was a subplot where Cyclops (Scott Summers) and villain-turned-hero The White Queen (Emma Frost) decided to have a psychic affair. Emma would invade Scott’s dreams in a seductive manner (she’s a telepath) and they would proceed to link their minds together and (mentally) do the nasty.
Why am bringing this up in the context of a Mary Worth where the title character reclines in her seat in an expression of satisfied afterglow after having fantasies about the “fun, exciting” times her “maturing” friend is telling her they’ll have? Oh…no reason….(whistles inconspicuously and then walks away)
@Josh: Bruce is the name of the actor, I’m talking about the name of the character
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Wasn’t the shark played by Abe Vigoda at some point between “Godfather” and “Barney Miller”?
Low and Hi-Less: Underdog is the perfect mascot! He was the first cartoon character to openly use performance enhancing drugs! Did Mom make his pill ring as well?
@Baja Gaijin: Oh, no no. I mean the comic itself gives Maris vibes, because everyone talks about it but I’ve yet to actually see it.
@Baja Gaijin: Arlo and Janis: Is that the one with the two guys who run an unspecified soul food restaurant?
@Pozzo: Bwahaha!
CS: Can I just point out that “Batton Thomas” failed to get an entry-level job in the comic books industry? And his getting “triggered” on their behalf is pathetic?
@Josh: In that case, according to “Saturday Night Live”‘s famous Jaws II (“land shark”) sketch, the character refers to himself as Walter.
PMP: I’ve always liked the Mark Twain version of the Garden of Eden in which Adam and Eve, portrayed as the first scientists, figured out that some of the vegetation-eating animals in the garden had teeth that were obviously designed for meat-eating, and were a little bewildered by that. And now we see a possible homage to Twain’s vision via the Tyrannosaurid noshing on a tree. Very nice! As for Adam’s body hair, I don’t remember ever seeing a chest wedge like that, but I’ve seen much worse things on CC, with Wilbur in his Speedo being high on that horrid list.
I accept that Hagar is intrinsically anachronistic, as all but the most esoteric newspaper strips set in the distant past would have to be. But the Flintstones business, where they’ve recreated modern society with pre medieval technology. This is too far.
Guess Hagar is no longer under contract to Skol™ beer.
MW – “I remember when we first met, my dear girl…” is one of the most menacingly super-villainish things Mary Worth has ever said.
@taig: The *musical* stage production of Naked Lunch.
@Buck Ripsnort: Cronenberg said of his film of Naked Lunch: ‘If we did it literally, it would be ten hours long and banned in every country in the world.”
It would also be pretty…unfilmable? It’s been a while since I’ve read it but I seem to recall a number of passages that were interesting but completely nonsensical from a narrative point of view. I did like the Cronenberg film a lot but it seems like they’re almost two related but separate works
@104 The Rambling Otter: Ah. Got it. It’s rarely snarkable thus it’s only mentioned in passing. It’s a good read too.
@105 GarrisonSkunk: No, that’s
Peaches andHerb and Jamaal.@I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV: A steel, battery powered character….
BB: How nice! Miss Buxley came over to “entertain” the enlisted men, and brought prostitutes along.
HtH: It’s been at least 45 years since I read Naked Lunch. I remember mainly a LOT of homosexual butt-fucking and erotic asphyxiation, plus The Mugwump. I wonder if this will get angry letters to the editors.
@Peanut Gallery: Tree Frog was also Gilbert Shelton’s iconic underground comix beer: I remember Fat Freddy watching a teevee commercial that announced “Drink TREE FROG BEER! You’ll feel great and have lots of girl friends!” I wonder whether Shelton or Wilson came up with it first? Feels more like Shelton’s whimsical dope humor than Wilson’s surrealistic porn sadism.
Crankshaft-I don’t get it.
HtH: I spent longer than I’d like trying to figure out the grinning theatre patron sitting behind Hagar. I THINK he’s a bald guy with a beard, but at first glance he seemed to have a burlap sack over his head and left me wondering about what other events this theatre has planned today.
PMP: “Wait,” thinks Tim the Tyrannosaur, “Why the hell am I eating a plant? And what’s a unicorn doing here?”
MW:
“On a plane, for hours it seems
I keep thinking of you, Olive, thinking of you
These daydreams, what do they mean?
They keep haunting me, are they warning me?
Daylight turns into night
We try and find LaGuardia, but it’s nowhere in sight
It’s always the same, Ken Kensington is to blame
You know what I’m saying, still we keep on playing
Floating Head games, that’s all I get from you
Floating Head games, and I can’t take it anymore
Floating Head games
Don’t wanna play the floating head games”
@The Man With The Man: Ok well I misspelled my own username but I’m not a frequent enough commentator to where it really matters and also it’s kinda funny.
@MKay: Well it would have been the mid 90s…80s…70s? Regardless, impulse buying dna testing wasn’t a thing until recently.