Post Content

Hagar the Horrible, 4/4/14

In benighted, backwards 10th century Scandinavia, where even the rudimentary medical knowledge of the Greeks and Romans either had never been learned or was long forgotten, doctors worked on some combination of superstition, ignorance, and fraud, and so patients may as well have offered their own suggestions and advice on treatment. Still, Helga seems more pleased than you’d think imagining her husband being gorily dismembered in a scene that sounds less like surgery and more like a bloody sacrifice to the violent Norse pantheon.

Crock, 4/4/14

It’s true: working in retail may be low-paying and low-status, but it sure beats dying in a far-off colonial war when your tiny, isolated fortlet is overrun by a bloodthirsty enemy.

Heathcliff, 4/4/14

Remember when Heathcliff panels about using marine life as sporting equipment seemed to be written so as to include jokes of some kind, even if they weren’t obviously funny in any way? Well, now they’re just naming fish species. Sad, really.

Apartment 3-G, 4/4/14

I was going to make a joke that panel one here featured Tommie’s post-coital request for oral servicing from this rough-hewn large animal vet, or that Lily in panel two had become so crazed with hunger that she learned how to open a car door, but then I got a good look at Tommie’s huge, terrifying claw-flipper in the first panel, so now I’m just going to sit here and gibber wordlessly for a while.

Better Half, 4/4/14

Speaking of horrifying nightmare-things, it looks like Cthulhu has finally awoken from his dreamless billion-year slumber! HAVE PITY ON US, CRUEL OLD ONE, AND CONSUME OUR SOULS WITH A MINIMUM OF AGONY

Post Content

Archie, 3/6/14

Boy, This Archie rerun from the ’90s has turned out to be eerily prescient! It’s true that, in the modern age of atomized, Internet-based media distribution and social networking, many readers have a stronger allegiance to the writers they follow than to the publications those writers work for, especially when those writers can use Twitter and the like to push out information faster than the media outlets’ traditional publication process can. This has resulted in many cases in a change in the power relationships between writers and publishers, exemplified quite nicely by Archie and Reggie’s despair over how their business model can survive now that Veronica has demonstrated how easily it can be disrupted. Let’s all pray that this strip’s prediction of a white-ties-and-black-shirts renaissance isn’t equally accurate!

Spider-Man, 3/6/14

I sincerely hope that J. Jonah Iron Manbot Whateverson realizes eventually that the best way to “crush” Spider-Man is to do so metaphorically, simply by being better at catching criminals than he is. For isn’t it much more satisfying to crush a man’s spirit than to mangle his body? The best would be for him to continue to do this for years, and, every time he emerges victorious, to boast of his superiority over the hated wall-crawler, long after everyone else has forgotten who Spider-Man even is anymore.

Crock, 3/6/14

Uncle Claybo is an animal hoarder, and his pigs got sick because of the unsanitary conditions in his house, and he was arrested for animal cruelty :(

Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 2/14/14

Kudos to the King Features colorists: this is a joke about how Miss Buxley has placed small pieces of plastic directly onto her eyeballs (already one of the most unnatural acts I can possibly imagine) that are covered with so much filth that her normally blue irises appear to be a sort of mud-brown, and in order to sell it we really need to see those dirty specks in the middle of her wide, terrified eyes. And we do! I also like the way that Killer has suddenly stood upright in disgust between panels. “I, uh, I have to be going now. Hope you don’t go blind!”

Crock, 2/14/14

There’s an obvious horror to final panel in today’s Crock, in which a grinning camel invites us to contemplate the fact that he’s managed, through sheer force of will, to shape the fatty deposit on his back into a grotesque parody of a human heart and then urges us to enjoy “humptine’s day,” something that we might associate with the enjoyable pastime of humping a loved one if not for the profoundly unerotic vision on display. But still, for me the most awful vision here is panel two, as the hump jiggles and throbs and extends, all while this eerie sentient camel maintains unbroken eye contact with us. HAPPY HUMPTINE’S DAY EVERYBODY