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Six Chix, 4/18/24

I’ll freely admit that I find floating Poseidon here very charming, with his cheery attitude and his whole … diaper? situation and a single eye perched right on his dick, perhaps in loving memory of his son Polyphemus, cut down in his prime by Odysseus. Anyway, much as it pains me to be pedantic (haha, just kidding, I love pedantry more than I love my own family), Poseidon is specifically the god of the sea, along with earthquakes and, uh, horses, so the water in that glass is very salty and won’t help this poor woman hydrate at all. The guy you’re looking for is Achelous, the river god who is the father of all the freshwater springs.

Hagar the Horrible, 4/18/24

Insurance exists as a risk-pooling technique, and from the perspective of the insurer, the point is to exclude riskier customers from the pool as much as possible, or at least to price that risk appropriately. Normally you’d do this via actuarial science, but if you had the power to scry into the future, you would obviously just exclude future disaster victims from your insurance plan altogether rather than marketing to them. Clearly Hagar is being scammed here, possibly because he already used this lady’s one true crystal ball in battle, and she needs to make up the revenue somehow.

Gearhead Gertie, 4/18/24

Lotta questions about what today’s Gearhead Gertie tells us about this strip’s universe. Are we meant to understand that Gertie is fielding questions at, like, a press conference or something, because her monomania has made her something of a local celebrity? Or is she just breaking the fourth wall and addressing us readers personally? Also, would an internal combustion engine really improve blender performance in any noticeable way? Or is she willing to destroy appliance after appliance just to make a point?

Mary Worth, 4/18/24

All right, fine, I’ve been complaining about yet another Wilbur storyline, but … I gotta give it up for panel two here, where Wilbur’s ex and her new boytoy natter on about how, thanks to their fitness regimen, they’re only getting sexier, while Wilbur stares at them in numb silence. I’m hooked! They got me! They always get me!

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Gearhead Gertie, 4/4/24

I really enjoy the fact that about half of Gearhead Gertie strips are like “here’s a recent NASCAR story or controversy, spelled out in detail for idiots like me who don’t follow NASCAR,” and the other half of them are like “Gertie encounters someone who doesn’t sufficiently enjoy or respect NASCAR and that person just immediately goes to the top of her shit list, and she spends the rest of the week seething about it.”

Beetle Bailey, 4/4/24

My Great-Uncle Stan developed alopecia when he was in the Army, and family lore was that he got a big settlement from the military due to some hush-hush reasons involving some kind of experimental weapons program. I don’t know if that’s really true, but I remember him fondly as an extremely jovial guy who lived in a fun retirement community near Palm Springs that in retrospect was definitely the site of multiple swingers parties every night, so it’s nice to see him getting some representation in Beetle Bailey.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/4/24

Ha ha, yes, this honestly is good advice to give to a child growing up in a town full of notorious violent criminals!

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Gearhead Gertie, 3/21/24

Gearhead Gertie is another new strip I’ve been reading. It’s about Gertie, an old lady who’s monomaniacally hyperfocused on NASCAR and auto racing to the extent that she’s alienated her friends and family. “But Josh,” you’re probably saying, “As a coastal elitist, how am I supposed to appreciate all the jokes about the minutiae of NASCAR, a sport I definitely don’t follow?” Well, good news: each strip gives you all the information you need to appreciate the punchline. For instance, you might not understand why Gertie would call up some guy and ask for his glove because she wants an aerodynamic advantage in traffic, but fortunately, you can quickly see that said guy is named Logano (because his chair is labeled with his name) and that he recently used his webbed gloved to gain an aerodynamic advantage (because he appears to have just moments ago been reading about himself in the newspaper), presumably (you can be pretty sure from the context, which is a comic strip about auto racing) in an auto race of some kind. This saves you the trouble of reading the “Controversy” section of Logano’s Wikipedia article, though you might still want to do some research to learn, say, what his first name is (I myself did not bother).

Gil Thorp, 3/21/24

Gil’s coaching stylings are always a great way to track his mood swings. Now that he’s gotten his groove back, sexually, we’re going to be seeing more of “fun Gil,” and you know what that means: zany trickeration plays! I certainly hope the Milford marching band has “Yakety Sax” ready to go for situations like this.

Mary Worth, 3/21/24

The current Rex Morgan, M.D., storyline is about how old people shouldn’t be too proud to use mobility aids, and that’s what said old people need to hear — but is it what they want to hear? Wouldn’t they rather hear that at some point you might need a cane that you give a goofy nickname to, in order to mask your anger at being betrayed by your own body when in your mind you’re still young and vital, but eventually you’ll get a new artist who makes you look 15 years younger and/or you’ll realize that you’re a doctor who can prescribe yourself the good stuff so you don’t feel any pain or really anything at all anymore, and then your can just laugh off a joke about jogging and not seethe with resentment over it? Sounds a lot more inspiring, doesn’t it? A lot more fun!

Hagar the Horrible, 3/21/24

A fun fact is that, at the first-ever Bayreuth Festival in 1876, costume designer Carl Emil Doepler put horned helmets on the Germanic folklore characters in a production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, and that created largely false stereotypes of both “what Vikings wore” and “what opera singers wear on stage” that has lasted nearly 150 years. I just think it’s neat to see both tropes come together like this.