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Hagar the Horrible, 11/15/26

Say what you will about the various Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC strips, but Hagar the Horrible is definitely the one that’s most likely to prompt me to do research that yields fun and interesting facts. With Beetle Bailey I’m mostly checking to see if they’ve screwed up the rank insignia, and Hi and Lois gets me to occasionally check if “suburban ennui” has been added to the DSM yet, but Hagar is a treasure trove of potential anachronisms that send me down fun Wikipedia paths. For instance: did you know that chickens, native to and first domesticated in Southeast Asia, generally start out as exotic, high-status creatures when they first hit a new region, cultivated for feathers and eggs, and only later become a staple food product? This is a pattern we see repeated in multiple places: they get to the Mediterranean around the 8th century BCE, then to Denmark in Roman times, but not to Norway until the Viking Age — and crucially don’t really become a widespread food source until the 1100s or so, well after the age when Hagar takes place. This structure Hagar is stealing from is probably an outbuilding on the estate of a high-status noble, in other words, and this is a more daring raid than it looks like at first!

Dennis the Menace, 11/15/26

Dennis’s seemingly passive shtick of just hanging around observing the friction adults experience when interacting with one another is more menacing than I initially gave it credit for. This would normally be a minor dispute in a long marriage no doubt full of them. But the fact that Martha has by all appearances actively chosen to bring Dennis into the situation to silently observe things really ups the levels of passive aggression.