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Hagar the Horrible, 5/1/12

You know, I’ve been reading Hagar the Horrible for most of my literate life, and like most people, I had always assumed that the recurring strips where Hagar and Lucky Eddie crack wise on a tiny desert island just served as a place for desert-island gags rejected by the New Yorker. It’s only at this moment — as Hagar wistfully thinks about his wife, who’s thousands of miles away, who has no idea where he is, who he’ll probably never see again — that it occurred to me to try to fit these scenes into the larger narrative of the strip. Now that this conceptual shift has taken place, here’s my first question: what happened to the rest of the crew? Did Hagar and Eddie eat them?

Six Chix, 5/1/12

When I first scanned this strip I thought it was some miracle of life nonsense, but seeing the exhausted expression on momma bird and the frankly terrified look on papa bird, my guess is the real point is that spring made these birds horny and so they had some bird-sex and forgot to use birth control. Or should that be … BIRDTH CONTROL?? Because they’re birds, you see! Ha ha! Anyway, long story short, they have a bunch of children they don’t want now.

Spider-Man, 5/1/12

Oh, man, I don’t know why I’m surprised, but MJ’s supposedly funny play is terrible. Unless maybe the quote marks around all the dialogue indicate that the cast is in on the joke about how terrible the play is, and are playing the entire thing for meta-comedic laughs at the meta-awfulness of it all? That sounds like something that would play in Brooklyn rather than on Broadway, and anyway it’s been repeatedly demonstrated that nobody in the Spider-Man newspaper strip is even a tiny bit self-aware, because if they were they would immediately stalk away in disgust.

Mark Trail, 5/1/12

Just wanted to keep you up to date with the Mark Trail action. Today’s action: a bad guy lets loose with a WHAT TH’, which is always awesome. Also, apparently Andy’s kill switch is hard to turn off! Man, look at that slavering maw in panel two! He’s got a taste for human flesh now!

Funky Winkerbean, 5/1/12

“He used to joke about it, but it’s not a joke anymore. It’s completely true! My father can’t feel any human emotion or grasp ordinary, everyday experience unless it’s mediated through a recording device of some kind. In this way, he has become the archetype of a 21st century human being.”

Beetle Bailey, 5/1/12

Hey, remember back in the ’90s when Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC made a big deal about sending General Halftrack to sensitivity training, because of his constant, actionable sexual harassment of his secretary? Well, it didn’t take

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Mark Trail, 4/18/12

OK, guys, I know that what I’m about to type will sound like pure liquid madness, but: does anyone else think that the current series of Mark Trail events actually somewhat hold together logically? I’m thinking in particular about these two boys here, who, despite their cheery bravado, are not the brightest pair of underemployed mulletheads in the county, as their decision to grow pot on government land indicates, and have arrived at this place in their life because of their inability to clearly plan out the steps they need to reach their goals. Probably a lot of brutal killings that happen in the course of the illegal narcotics trade don’t happen because someone woke up one morning hoping to become an axe murderer; it’s just that someone stumbles upon your grow operation, and he’s seen your stuff and he’s seen your faces, and, well, murder’s a big deal, you probably don’t do it right away, but you can’t let him go, and the hours pass and you can’t think of other options, and, I mean, you’ve already got the axe. It’s right there, you know?

Beetle Bailey, 4/18/12

Everything in Beetle Bailey, meanwhile, only makes sense in a unsettling fugue state of underdeveloped eroticism. Beetle and Miss Buxley are in a field, and it’s the middle of the night, and suddenly she stubs her toe. “Hug me!” she demands, and the Beetle, who’s never shown anything other than platonic interest in her, suddenly becomes a sexually aggressive bear. It’s like what Freud must have thought sex was like, when he was nine.

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Crock, 4/1/12

Hey, check it out, everybody, it’s a vaguely competently executed joke about a more or less topical subject, in Crock! Naturally, it involves a character turning his back on God, just as his isolated fort is about to be overwhelmed by a murderous enemy army.

Beetle Bailey, 4/1/12

It seems that Cookie has found a way to work out his complicated feelings about Sarge. Presumably the day when the cook serves up not just Sarge’s image, but Sarge himself, rendered as “Sarge-Loaf,” is not far off, and no doubt his resentful troops will consume his flesh with the same manic glee.