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Hagar the Horrible, 5/4/18

I really have to question Hagar’s theatrical eye-roll in the final panel here. Lucky Eddie is often depicted in this strip as too soft to be a Viking warrior, but today, in failing to grasp a metaphor, he seems to understand a deeper truth: the places where we are most needy and open to love are also the spots where we’re the most vulnerable. He also knows that the heart and lungs are protected by the ribcage and sternum, but the belly is exposed to attack. Look for the trail of agonized gut-shot foot soldiers writing in agony as Hagar’s band makes its way inland looking for monasteries to plunder!

Gil Thorp, 5/4/18

Ahhh, the Milford Trumpet, the school newspaper you might remember from Gil Thorp plotlines like the one where a reporter suppressed the information that one of his athlete pals had a dangerous heart condition, and also the one where it seemed like an athlete had beat up his girlfriend but then it turned out he hadn’t, and then probably some others that I can’t remember at the moment. Anyhoo, it seems that the Trumpet staff assumes that, like me, most of the student body at Milford has forgotten that Barry Bader still goes there, so they’re commissioning a hard-hitting investigative piece: “Barry Bader: Does He Still Go Here, And Is He Still An Asshole?”

Mary Worth, 5/4/18

I think we can be … reasonably sure Wilbur hasn’t hurled himself off a cliff in a paroxysm of drunken despair, right? Right? Surely Mary would look just as overwhelmed as she does in panel two upon discovering, say, Wilbur loudly singing country music tunes into a grassy puddle of his own sick. PLEASE DO NOT KILL WILBUR, MARY WORTH CREATIVE TEAM, I ENJOY HIS SUFFERING TOO MUCH

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Gil Thorp, 4/27/18

Finally, our basketball heroes have solved racism forever, so now we’re ready to launch into our spring storyline, which is centering on … Barry Bader! Barry is a tremendous asshole who really leaned in to being a heel even before his father, a travelling salesman and amiable drunk, got a DUI and was sent to jail by the judge-mom of one of his teammates, then got drunk again and was involved in accident that killed a Milford student. This made Barry even more of an asshole and everyone ended up rejecting him socially, which is I think where we left it, like two years ago? I don’t remember any Barry action since, so I assumed he graduated or quietly transferred to another school where none of the students were friends with anyone his dad killed, but it seems the Bader family is being brought back for a very special plotline involving a Mudlark looking to make pen pals with a hot prison DILF.

Spider-Man, 4/27/18

I feel like I need to go back earlier in this storyline to when Spider-Man’s hitherto unheralded jumping powers became an important means of locomotion for the characters, because the whole point of it was that (a) it was a fast way to get a desperately injured man to the hospital while avoiding Miami’s notoriously congested freeways, and (b) it at least involved jumping unnaturally long distances, which is a kind of superpower, even if it’s an extremely dorky one. Now that we’re in the swamp and nobody’s in a big rush, you’d think everyone could just, you know, walk out on their own power, but hilariously “Spider-Man needs to carry Dr. Connors to the hospital while leaping” has morphed into “some characters are going to carry other characters while strolling through the Everglades.” Meanwhile, MJ has arrived on a jet ski, which means an end to this hilarious nonsense but the beginning of even more hilarious nonsense as we watch five people trying to balance precariously on a jet ski.

Mark Trail, 4/27/18

Ha ha, Rusty, you can’t remember the names of ancient Mexican structures or of the various cultures that built them! You just got … mesoamerisplained.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/20/18

I was struck by the first panel of today’s Snuffy Smith, as the strip generally doesn’t do much by way of experimenting with form but today gives us a different perspective of our diminutive title character, just barely visible from the judge’s bench. Perhaps it’s meant to be symbolic of today’s installment’s narrative: normally we see things from the viewpoint of Snuffy Smith, to the extent that we find his layabout criminal attitudes normal and even charming. But the mention of Farmer Clem reminds us that there are in fact honest citizens trying to extract sustenance from Hootin’ Holler’s meager soil, their lives made all the harder by Snuffy’s thievery. And then there are the chickens. My god, think of the horrors the chickens have to suffer! (I’m talking about being killed and eaten, of course. You thought I was talking about weird sex stuff, didn’t you? What, being killed and eaten isn’t bad enough?)

Hi and Lois, 4/20/18

This is an intensely weird setup to this joke, right? The definite vibe I’m getting here is that the “new friend” is going to follow the trail of detritus to Chip’s lair, where he will have to defeat him in combat and either win glory or be devoured.

Gil Thorp, 4/20/18

This seems like an adequate penance for Marty, but I see a big loophole: he’s going to take that ad time he’s forced to buy during the girls’ game and fill it with his own stream-of-consciousness take on what he got from reading the “Latin America: A Land Of Contrasts” ebook while drunk.

Mary Worth, 4/20/18

Oh, I guess Wilbur is only getting dumped from his local paper, so his livelihood won’t be destroyed; it’s just that his ex won’t be reminded of what she gave up every time she opens the Santa Royale News-Intelligencer to the op-ed pages, which, I assume, she probably doesn’t do very often, because print media, am I right? I know we did a whole storyline about how Iris is unusually old to be dating Zak, but come on, she’s not that old. Anyway, I certainly hope that, just as Santa Royale is a thinly veiled stand-in Santa Barbara, the Santa Royale Democrat and Telegraph is similarly modelled on the Santa Barbara News-Press, because that paper’s story is nuts. It’s probably the only small-city daily in America to merit not just a Wikipedia article but an entirely separate Wikipedia “controversy” article, and the idea of Wilbur stomping down there to whine about his columns while the staff is in the midst of labor agitation, ideological purges, and child porn investigations is delicious.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/20/18

“I thought I was going to be paired up with some young guys, some new blood,” Flash Freeman thinks mournfully to himself. “That Wayne and Garth shit is more than 25 years old at this point. This is going to be a disaster.”

Pluggers, 4/20/18

I think I’ve spotted your problem there, sir: your GPS is designed to navigate you from place to place via America’s road system and not, say, across an open field or wherever the hell it is you are.