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Hagar the Horrible, 11/8/20

Welp, I guess Hagar the Horrible is thoroughly cementing Lucky Eddie’s mermaid-focused sexuality into strip canon. In today’s installment, we learn both that Eddie has attempted without success to conform himself to society’s idea of who he should fall in love with (mammals), and also that, no matter how much Hagar’s family and warband have thrown in with the newly arrived Christian religion, they still have to deal with the occasional pagan diety, especially when they fuck said deity’s daughter.

Mark Trail, 11/8/20

Hey look, it’s Jules Rivera’s first Sunday nature strip! It looks great, fits in with the storied tradition of these Sunday strips, and absolutely includes a piss joke.

The Phantom, 11/8/20

The current Sunday Phantom plot features our hero helping out a Bangallan cop who appears to be the one person outside his inner circle who realizes that the “Man-Who-Cannot-Die” bit is obvious flim-flam, and good for him! Today we learn that the Ghost-Who-Walks not only stores the priceless historic heritage of many cultures in his non-temperature-controlled cave, but also hoards the world’s biodiversity on an island optimistically called “Isle of Eden” but where nevertheless I’m reasonably sure a certain amount of endangered-species-on-endangered-species carnivorism goes on.

Beetle Bailey, 11/8/20

I of course have always assumed that due to the weird chronological discontinuities brought about by comic book time, we’re meant to understand that Beetle walked into a recruiting office in 1951, just like he did in the strips that ran in 1951, and has stayed in the military ever since. But today’s strip seems to have updated the timeline a bit, with Beetle and Sarge (?)’s teenagerhood now having taken place in [squints] the ’80s? Sure, let’s say the ’80s. This still presumably makes Beetle the oldest living serving private in the entire U.S. Army, but at least it’s not that improbable that he’s still alive.

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Hagar the Horrible and Beetle Bailey, 10/12/20

Hope you had a good weekend, everybody! Hagar and his band of grinning Vikings are going to murder these two in their bed. Sarge, meanwhile, is going to murder Beetle with a tank, though it’s not clear if he’s going to disintegrate his body by firing an artillery shell at him at point blank range or just crush him to death under the tank treads.

Mark Trail, 10/12/20

In happier news, it’s new-look Mark Trail day one, y’all! Wow, just last week Mark was getting a big fat raise just for winning some dumb industry award he didn’t even show up to collect, but now he’s off in the woods handling snakes and desperately trying to come up with some viral TikTok content that the kids can relate to. Sad!

Gil Thorp, 10/12/20

Oh hell yeah it’s another Wing-T storyline!!!! You might remember way back in 2007 when one of the shittiest Milford football teams in living memory sort of threw in the towel halfway threw the season and spent a lot of time practicing the Wing-T, an old-timey trickeration play, in total secrecy, to prepare to unleash it at just the right moment. They did, eventually, and it turned out to be boring and confusing, but whatever, this isn’t your father’s Wing-T they’re practicing now, it’s the Delaware Wing-T, which means, uh, there’s no taxes on it or something? More on this story as it develops.

Pluggers, 10/12/20

Gotta say, I’ve been reading Pluggers for more than 15 years and never once in all that time did it occur to me to think about whether the plugger chicken-lady had scaly orange chicken legs under her pants or if she was just basically a humanoid with a chicken head and covered with feathers. But now? Now that I know the answer? I’m going to think about it every God-damned day for the rest of my life.

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Marvin, 9/27/20

It’s become something of a cliche for me to complain on this here blog about how the widely syndicated newspaper comic strip Marvin is just obsessed with poop, but I have to say that I can’t remember of an instance of them actually just showing a steaming turd in the strip? (Other than the noxious title character, of course! [ba-dum-dum]) That’s why I confess I’m vaguely intrigued that the punchline (“punchline”) panel here depicts snowdrift-thick piles of bird shit on Jeff’s car. Why do you suppose they can get away with that and not actual Marvin poop? My guess it’s because bird crap looks just different enough from our own excrement (since this is a Sunday strip, it’s colored by the original artist and really captures that real-life white-brown tinge) that it’s not quite as taboo, but … I dunno man, I feel like this is testing our boundaries and we need to launch a prim letter-writing campaign about community standards or things could get very, very dark in this strip. (Dark brown, I mean, because we’re going to be seeing lots of drawings of Marvin’s feces.)

Hagar the Horrible, 9/27/20

Hagar has come back from a long voyage robbing and pillaging, and his house seems to have been abandoned — maybe his family has left him, or maybe they’ve been kidnapped and enslaved by a rival raiding Viking band. Or they could just be dead! Hagar doesn’t seem to care much, though. Ha … ha?

Dustin, 9/27/20

I’m choosing to believe that Meg overheard yesterday’s stupid conversations about redundancies, got as mad about it as I did, and is now just rubbing her dad’s nose in it so he never, ever brings up the subject again.