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Hagar the Horrible, 6/13/23

Look, it’s fun when I do jokes about how Hagar the Horrible, as a Viking warrior chieftain, would realistically be responsible for an endless list of violent horrors perpetrated as he and his band pillage their way across the North Atlantic. But when the strip itself explicitly does a joke that makes it clear that Hagar’s own clothes are canonically drenched in the blood of the Anglo-Saxon soldiers, villagers, and monks who stood in the way of his rapacious greed, I have to say I find it a little off-putting.

Dennis the Menace, 6/13/23

OK, today’s Dennis the Menace gets ten points for acknowledging that even someone of Mr. Wilson’s advanced age is fairly likely to have been using computers for decades now. However, I must subtract several thousand points for the ongoing attempt to turn Dennis the Menace into Mr. Wilson’s Technological Gripes, which, no matter how ambivalent my opinion about Dennis and his menacing quality might be, I feel honor-bound to resist at all costs.

Dustin, 6/13/23

Do you think that the members of Dustin’s family are emotionally stunted nightmare people because they never receive any affection from one another? Or do they all (correctly) perceive each other as unlovable, emotionally stunted nightmare people and that’s why they never express any affection? Discuss.

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Dustin, 6/9/23

Under The Skin is a truly great and unsettlingly weird movie that is, probably, about an alien who’s been sent to Earth to capture and harvest human beings for food. I say “probably” because that’s what the book it’s based on is about, but the movie is quite different in a number of particulars and what’s happening in it is never spelled out for you. Scarlett Johansson is the main character, and is definitely not human, and as she wanders around Glasgow, seductively luring men back to a house where they get submerged into some kind of liquid void, you see everything more or less from her perspective, which makes human society seem alien as she tries to understand and navigate it. I’m not going to give away the rest of it, as you should watch it and it’s free to stream on Kanopy, a service you can access with your public library card, but yes, Johansson does get naked in it, and in the context of the movie it is ultimately profoundly unerotic. Anyway, I love it a lot, obviously, and it has kind of a cult following but very few people actually saw it, which makes it a bizarre thing to build a comic strip punchline around, so I assume that today’s Dustin has Dustin’s dad, possibly my least favorite character in all of present-day syndicated newspaper comics, say all this as an attack on me personally. (I’m joking, of course: I actually assume this strip is a result of someone discovering that there was only a single movie in Scarlett Johansson’s filmography in which she appears nude, which resulted in an anticipated masturbatory session that went terribly wrong.)

Gil Thorp, 6/9/23

You have to respect Marty Moon: he could’ve just texted Gil those pics he took of the Mudlarks doing vape crime (the dorkiest kind of crime there is), but he went to the trouble of getting them printed out so he could flash them in Gil’s face in person before throwing them down on his desk. This is just proof that you don’t spend a lifetime covering high school sports without learning a little something about drama.

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Dustin, 6/7/23

I would hesitate to ever say you have to hand it to the syndicated comic strip Dustin, but you do have to hand it to the syndicated comic strip Dustin for making even imaginary conversations both hostile and confusing. Like, the whole point is that the donut is begging Dustin’s dad to eat it, right? Like it’s talking about how much he wants it (nonsexually) and basically offering itself up to be devoured. So why would Dustin’s dad yell “So there!” rather than “You’re right!” or “Thank you!” or something? Have years of work in the legal system and/or dealing with Dustin left him unable to conceive of any interaction that isn’t at its root adversarial?

Dick Tracy, 6/7/23

I love the sweet innocence of the hiring manager here. “Oh, maybe she just forgot! Maybe she got distracted, didn’t put on shoes, and then went outside and either got in her car, which she uses her feet to operate, or maybe walked or got on a bus or subway, then walked into this building, and never at any point noticed that she didn’t have shoes on, as she was coming in for a job interview. That’s probably the most likely explanation.” Anyway, I guess I buy that if you hold “I worship Mother Earth and keep in touch with her” as a belief system, you might think you should go around barefoot, but I’m not sure why, if you think that Mother Earth can feel you through the depressing industrial carpet and the several layers of subflooring and foundation underneath this call center, throwing a comfy pair of Keds into the mix would really make all that much difference.