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Hagar the Horrible, 2/17/26

This one, I think, adds up: in Viking-era Scandinavia, sugar would’ve been imported at great expense from the Islamic world, but because it was a luxury good those selling sugar and sugar-derived products like rum could charge much higher markups on it than they could on, say, drinks made from local commodity crops like barley or honey. The candle thing was probably real too, but I’m not going to bother looking that one up.

Herb and Jamaal, 2/17/26

Look, if you had been a comics character for 37 years — never aging, never changing, never growing or improving as a person — you might come to feel that you were trapped on the endlessly spinning dharmic wheel, and would pay any price to escape samsara, even if it meant being nice to your mother-in-law.

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Gil Thorp, 2/16/26

What’s going on in Gil Thorp? I’m not talking about the day-to-day plot; I’m talking about the near-future background setting, where the heavily armed “New Milford” PD lacks a monopoly on legitimate violence and must negotiate with authorities in schools, which remain separate, self-governed jurisdictions like medieval European universities. I guess we should’ve known that we were dealing with a landscape where centralized constitutional government had broken down completely when it turned out that the local juvenile detention facility doubled as a gladiatorial combat arena.

Dick Tracy, 2/16/26

The “Dick is betrayed by his partner” Dick Tracy storyline has abruptly wrapped up, and now we’re going to smash cut to … the Donbas Front, I guess? Look, the West has been looking for ways to push Russian troops out of Ukraine for years now, and having Dick Tracy shoot them in the back for “resisting arrest” is certainly not the worst idea anyone has come up with.

Mary Worth, 2/16/26

Meanwhile, despite several opportunities, the “Toby and Ian get parrots” Mary Worth storyline has singularly failed to abruptly wrap up, and in fact we seem to have gotten stuck in a “Mary and Jeff enjoy a post-plotline-wrapup at the Bum Boat” loop. Jeff could’ve short-circuited this by choosing his pie “a la mode” as usual and then dying of a massive coronary event, so I guess, against all odds, he’s enjoying this experience, or at least prefers it to death.

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/15/26

You’d think I’d be happy to see a strip that eschews “someone wants to defy the laws of nature and have sex with a half-fish being” for “someone wants to obey the laws of nature and eat a half-fish being,” but sorry, I just don’t find it likely. Why would Atilla become fish-mad in the (literal) face of a being who is, in terms of the bits you usually interact with, mostly human, and yet ignore Ma Goose, who is 100% bird, albeit an anthropomorphized one? And sure, in real life a cat is far too small and a goose far too ornery for that conflict to go well for the cat, but these characters are roughly the same size so the power dynamic is different. You can make your silly fantasy comic setting increasingly convoluted and I will fight it every step of the way!

Luann, 2/15/26

Meanwhile, in Luann, everyone is fully human, yet nobody is acting like a normal human being. “I’m going to give my husband a gift card to a lingerie shop for Valentine’s Day, in the expectation that he will immediately become horny, rush off to purchase some erotic underwear for me, and then come back so I can put it on and then we can have sex. The ideal time to initiate this process? When our college-age daughter is standing inches away from us. She’ll be impressed!”

Dustin, 2/15/26

The thing about Dustin’s mom is that she exists in a reality where the comic strip Dustin is not in the newspaper. Unlike her, we unfortunately will read through the day’s news, feeling terror, anger, jealousy, and encroaching old age in turn, only to get to the comics section, encounter Dustin, and feel mingled contempt and disgust.