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Funky Winkerbean, 1/9/13

As threatened, Crazy Harry is about to do some kind of emotionally scarring sybaritic dance, probably while naked. He’s already basically making sweet love to that comics anthology, right in plain sight of everybody. John, powerless to stop his employee, is desperately trying to minimized the damage. “Can’t let the children see,” he thinks. “We’ll be shut down for sure if any of the children see.”

Hagar the Horrible, 1/9/13

All simple sheep-herding peasants who tend flocks on pastureland within a day’s march of the coast of the North Sea: prepare to have your livestock raided, your family killed, and your village burned to the ground.

Dennis the Menace, 1/9/13

“Plus she’s really, really skinny. Why does she talk about dieting all the time? Sometimes I worry that she has an eating disorder!”

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Dennis the Menace, 12/11/12

One of Dennis’s core menacing shticks is repeating things he doesn’t fully understand in a way that causes embarrassment to his parents, usually because it’s something insulting they’ve said about someone behind their backs. Unfortunately, Dennis has now become a self-aware menace, and he now knows that he can get a rise out of people this way; but since the whole thing revolves around him not knowing the meaning of the things he’s saying, he’s sort of blundering around in the dark, latching onto phrases he’s not familiar with in the hopes that someone will be humiliated when he spouts them off. “So it’s a doggie bag, but it’s not for the dog, right? Eh? Eh? I’m saying what everyone’s thinking? Is anyone in trouble yet?”

Pluggers, 12/11/12

The games whose outcomes were so important to pluggers in their youth — grown men, scrambling around in the dirt after a ball! — seem meaningless now. Pluggers know that there’s only one game left in town: survival. They don’t care how many pills they have to choke down, how agonizing it is to carry their creaking frame from chair to chair; the biological imperative carries a thrill all its own. Those names and faces in the obits section belong to family and friends, some of them very dearly missed, and yet in a real sense, just being alive to see the pictures and read the pocket biographies is a victory.

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Hagar the Horrible, 11/28/12

Is “boiling in oil” one of those phrases that only survives in occasional use because it rhymes? I mean, if you’ve heated up some form of oil to the boiling point, and put any variety of organic matter into it, you’d call what you’re really doing “frying,” right? Even if that organic matter is, you know, a dismembered human corpse. Ha ha, these knights are threatening Hagar and his men with a gruesome fate out of the most violent and depraved slasher flick, right here on the funny pages, in front of the children! Yet neither I nor anyone else can take the threat particularly seriously. Look, the colorists have even given everyone wooden swords. Nobody’s getting hurt in this battle!

Beetle Bailey, 11/28/12

And yet I find this Beetle Bailey grim beyond description, despite Beetle’s shaky reassurance that his mangled body will be restored to health tomorrow by narrative artifice. Still, imagine Miss Buxley gasping out “Oh, Beetle! You’re all broken!” in an exaggeratedly childlike Marilyn Monroe-type voice and try to tell me you don’t get the creeps. David Lynch directs!

Dennis the Menace, 11/28/12

Dennis is using an awesome book about bad-ass pirates to illustrate safety lessons for his younger friend. Menace levels: Undetectable by even the most powerful instruments.