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As foretold in prophecy, Unity Day 2018 is finally here! How are our most important cultural commenters, newspaper comic strips, dealing with the scourge of bullying? Honestly, not great!

Six Chix, 10/24/18

Speaking as someone who was a tremendous nerd as a child and also someone who loves etymology, I can assure you that there are few things more likely to earn a swift punch in the mouth than attempting to parry bullying by delving into some word origins. Also if you’re wondering how exactly bully came to change meanings in this way, it turns out that “a connecting sense between ‘lover’ and ‘ruffian’ might be ‘protector of a prostitute,’ which was one sense of bully (though it is not specifically attested until 1706).” So if our young victim here wanted to show off her bookish nature but avoid violent retribution, she might want to point out that by calling her tormenter a bully she’s also calling him a pimp, though this might not have the sting that she originally intended to deliver via etymological factoids and might instead just puff up the lad’s self-image.

Hagar the Horrible, 10/24/18

Anyway, we all know there’s only one kind of knowledge that bullies respect: knowledge about how to impose your will on others with violence.

Dennis the Menace, 10/24/18

Speaking of which, what’s the “Unity” of “Unity Day” stand for, anyway? Well, as today’s Dennis the Menace demonstrates, it means that smaller, weaker children should “unify” with one another and face down their lone larger tormenter, uniting into an angry mob that can tear their bullies limb from limb in an act of horrific orgiastic revenge.

Mary Worth, 10/24/18

Mary Worth, meanwhile, cuts through the feel-good bullshit to get at the real truth. You see, the whole point of this storyline is that if you bully a sad old man grieving his dead dog long enough, he’ll eventually relent and adopt another dog. And isn’t that a good thing? Why are you against bullying? Do you want sad, abused dogs to languish in shelters, forever?

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Dennis the Menace, 10/21/18

But you couldn’t even follow through with that, could you, Mr. Wilson? You couldn’t just let him get bored and wander off. You had to argue with him from a second story window, at great length. You’re entirely complicit in this thoroughly dysfunctional relationship, sir.

Six Chix, 10/21/18

Six Chix is continuing on with its anti-bullying crusade, but I don’t think today’s lesson — “if you’re being bullied, console yourself with the thought that you’re too disgusting to be killed and eaten the way your delicious tormenters inevitably will be” — is really in the spirit of Unity Day.

Spider-Man, 10/21/18

Man, I know I make fun of Spider-Man’s general uselessness on this blog a lot, but it’s kind of shocking that it’s now explicit canon that you too can be as super-powered as he is, just by working out with Steve down at LA Fitness a couple times a week.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 10/21/18

Look at Leroy and Loretta’s expressions here. Do they look like people engaging in a little light banter? Nope. Leroy definitely tried to fuck those pies, right there in the frozen food aisle.

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Six Chix, 10/16/18

I’m not, like, an expert on the physics of golf or anything, but … the way you’d sort of expect this to go, based on her description, is that she’d hit the ball and it would land on the green and hit and kill a bird on its way down, right? So the bird would be also on the green, hundreds of yards away. Not just dead right in front of her. I mean, if she hit the ball into a bird right off the tee, there’s no way it could have travelled so far away as we see here. So I’m guessing she just, like, killed the bird with her club. And then said this dialogue in a flat, affectless voice while she looked down at its corpse. You notice how she’s golfing alone? There’s a reason she’s golfing alone.

Dennis the Menace, 10/16/18

Ha ha, it’s funny because it doesn’t. Henry is infested with vermin!