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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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Crankshaft, 5/16/14

So Crankshaft got a smartphone this week, by the way! I would have settled for some smartphone-themed puns, but I will very much accept Crankshaft being a snarling dick to his best friend, for no reason other than to cover up his own feelings of inadequacies and helplessness, and there’s not even a hint of a joke or wordplay or anything like that, just the main character of this strip salving his own emotional wounds by making everyone around him feel miserable and shitty. Crankshaft, everybody! The “fun” Funkyverse strip!

Heathcliff, 5/16/14

Why don’t the inhabitants of Heathcliff’s leafy suburb ever use garbage bags? They just empty all their waste directly into metal cans, where it putrefies into a more or less homogeneous brown goo. Now Heathcliff and Sonia are painting the town, if by “painting the town” you mean “smearing the streets of the town with the lumpy brown goo that is apparently the end product of rotting garbage.”

Apartment 3-G, 5/16/14

At last, thought Jack, my plan has come to fruition. He had known it wouldn’t be easy to find a suitable partner and then convince her to willingly join him inside his meticulously hand-crafted two-person horse costume for some good old-fashioned equine cosplay. But Jack Riley was nothing if not a patient man.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/11/14

Whoops, looks like June is not being a very good mother on Mother’s Day! How is little Sarah going to get by without her “assistant”/terrified thrall? This is what June is going to get as a Mother’s Day gift: she will wake up suddenly in a panic at 3 a.m., only to find Sarah standing next to the bed and staring at her with those shadowed eyes. “I’m very upset with you, mommy,” she will say. “Very upset.”

Judge Parker, 5/11/14

She’ll still be having a better Mother’s Day than stepmother-of-the-groom Katherine Parker, though! Sure, she’s being held captive by a vicious mercenary with a score to settle, but … she’ll be fine? Probably? This crazed, terminally ill arms dealer/con man says so?

B.C., 5/11/14

Typically an adolescent queen ant takes off from her birth colony on a “nuptial flight” with a swarm of males, most of whom mate with her and then die within a few days. She falls to earth, loses her wings, and begins pumping out worker-slaves, who build a new colony around her; she does nothing but eat and give birth to new workers for decades, using the sperm from her long-dead lovers that she stored inside her body to fertilize herself. That’s a scenario that would make for an interesting Mother’s Day comic, is what I’m trying to say.

Crankshaft, 5/11/14

“Happy Mother’s day! You’re a terrible person and inept mother who scarred me emotionally! I don’t love you or even like you very much! This is not a joke! It’s very very real.”