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Hagar the Horrible, 5/29/14

In the 9th and 10th centuries, spices were unfathomably expensive in Western Europe; most came from the Muslim world and beyond, where the states were much more powerful than the chaotic post-Carolingian kingdoms, and so the Vikings usually had to offer money or legitimate trade items, rather than going with their usual M.O. of just raiding and looting. In other words, this scene is pretty much the early medieval Norse equivalent of a millionaire couple having sex on a bed covered in hundred-dollar bills.

Dennis the Menace, 5/29/14

“C’mon, Joey,” said Dennis. “Let’s go outside.”

“But … but Dennis, it’s pouring out. It’s been pouring out all day.”

“Whatever. We’re going out to play.”

And then they just stood there, under the umbrella that didn’t quite cover them both, for more than an hour. Dennis was staring at the sidewalk and the sign with an angry intensity. The silence was tense, electric. Joey didn’t dare move. He knew Dennis was thinking something, was about to say something, that he had brought him here for a reason — but for what? What did he have on his mind? What was he going to say? It was the most menacing evening Joey had ever spent. He knew his mother was waiting for him to come home, but he was too scared to leave.

Momma, 5/29/14

“Ha ha,” said the Hobbes siblings to each other, “Momma sure is having trouble parsing easy-to-understand English sentences!” None of them mentioned it, but they knew what they felt, that moment they walked into the living room and found her sitting in the chair, the TV still on, her head lolled grotesquely off to one side. For just a second, before her eyes jerked open and she started babbling nonsense, they all felt, deep in their hearts, the purest kind of freedom they’d ever known. They never talked about it, of course, but then again, they never had to.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/29/14

Hootin’ Holler’s soil is so poor and rocky that it cannot feed itself through subsistence agriculture; and yet, since it has nothing much else to offer economically, what food the inhabitants do manage to import from the outside world isn’t particularly plentiful or nourishing either.

Crankshaft, 5/29/14

Crankshaft is just a straight-up dick about everything, all the time.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 5/25/14

Let’s ignore, for the moment, that Count Weirdly has developed a functional, practical, and presumably quite marketable virtual reality device and is only using it to irritate Sly and Max. I think that the form he’s chosen for his holo-annoyance is quite revealing. Forget about random geographic inaccuracies; it’s more important that Slylock and Max have been thrust back to a world of pre-sapient animals, one where humans like Count Weirdly are still the dominant species. It would be as if we were suddenly confronted by specimens of Australopithecus africanus, Homo erectus, and Homo neanderthalensis: we would be far too unsettled at an encounter with our primitive ancestors, very much like us but at the same time separated by a vast intellectual gulf, to really spend much time griping that the native habitats of these various species were separated by thousands of miles and millions of years.

Perhaps Weirdly’s choice of holo-program reveals why his incredible invention has remained in his castle lab. If ultimately he can only imagine the animal species who dominate the outside world in terms of the primitive forms from his own childhood, then surely the idea of selling advanced technology to them must fill him with horror and contempt.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/25/14

Speaking of primitive societies, Snuffy Smith is here to remind us that notions of romantic love are a luxury available only to the global elite. In most times and places, simple economic calculations are the primary factors in choosing a mate.

Panels from Beetle Bailey, 5/25/14

On Memorial Day weekend, the soldiers of Beetle Bailey finally achieve a tragic degree of self-awareness — just enough to understand their predicament as characters in an absurdist comic strip, but not enough to do anything about it.

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B.C., 4/1/14

B.C. was groundbreaking in a number of ways when it debuted in the late 1950s, but if you were born in the ’70s or ’80s, probably your chief memory of it is how it came to reflect creator Johnny Hart’s sincere and also somewhat aggressive Christianity. Hart died in 2007, with a new creative team led by Hart’s grandson taking over, and after a rough start B.C. has settled back into the groove as a perfectly serviceable legacy syndicated comic strip that will continue to extract declining revenue from the print newspaper industry until that industry inevitably collapses in the next 10 to 15 years.

Anyway, while I have no clue as to the religious convictions of the current strip creative team, the universe of B.C.’s cavemen has been free of Christianity or indeed any other identifiable religion from our own world over the past seven years. But today’s strip reveals that the characters are still subject to the whims of a capricious and cruel deity — specifically, of MASON, whose signature stands in for the ineffable godhead like the flaming Aleph of Jewish mysticism. “APRIL FOOL’S” the god-name announces, as one of its puny creations, expecting only a pleasant swim, plummets to an agonizing death, his final moments spent in confusion and terror.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/1/14

Meanwhile, poor Uriah the mailman, the only representative of the hated Federal government who dares to set foot in Hootin’ Holler, is about to be subject to a much more human prank. What lurks in that mailbox? An angry baby rattlesnake? A rabid raccoon? A low-grade explosive device? Whatever it is, it’s bound to be hilarious, for people who aren’t Uriah!