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Mary Worth, 4/17/26

Oh, I’m sorry, did you think there were stakes to this storyline? Did you think that losing two hundred thousand American dollars might have some material impact on Harvey’s life? Well, sorry, chumps, this motherfucker’s got ascot money and the whole episode is just kind of embarrassing for him to admit to his daughter, and probably more for horniness reasons than monetary ones. You know what, I’m not just glad “Trixie” escaped the compound; I’m actively glad the money went to a Southeast Asia-based crime lord, who’s at least showing some business acumen by building the compound in the first place.

Andy Capp, 4/17/26

Flo has never really had much character development over the past seven decades beyond “sick of Andy’s bullshit,” so I think today’s strip represents a small victory for feminism, even if the characterization offered is “really smug about not exercising.”

Hagar the Horrible, 4/17/26

“He knows what you Vikings did to Yorkshire and the Shetland Islands — and he wants revenge.”

Blondie, 4/17/26

Notice how Blondie doesn’t recommend Dagwood invest time and energie in their marriage? I mean, what’s the point, really? Anyway, she’s got her Sudokus, so whatever.

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Hagar the Horrible, 3/24/26

I make a lot of jokes on this blog parsing various anachronistic clues trying to figure out where Hagar and his crew are plundering and pillaging at any given time, but … it’s generally France, right? Like, that’s where Norse raiders mostly went in real life, descending on a civilization on the Continent that was wealthier and more advanced than theirs but that had begun to politically unravel as the heirs of Charlemagne fought each other for territory. Today we see a surprising result of this type of cultural contact: one of Hagar’s men, who apparently was getting off on what he thought was an act of sexual dominance over the regional nobility to match his warband’s military success, is clearly devastated to learn that he’s become entangled in what the locals refer to as “an arrangement.”

Beetle Bailey, 3/24/26

This strip actually got me to look up what the experience of a limb “falling asleep” actually is, and I thought it had to do with blood flow but apparently it primarily arises from nerve compression that just cuts off sensation from the affected area altogether. And Beetle is like, wouldn’t it be great if my whole body was cut off from my brain completely? If I were nothing but a pure mind, untethered to physical existence? Killer’s facial expression is appropriate: he is not buying this and neither am I.

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Hagar the Horrible, 2/17/26

This one, I think, adds up: in Viking-era Scandinavia, sugar would’ve been imported at great expense from the Islamic world, but because it was a luxury good those selling sugar and sugar-derived products like rum could charge much higher markups on it than they could on, say, drinks made from local commodity crops like barley or honey. The candle thing was probably real too, but I’m not going to bother looking that one up.

Herb and Jamaal, 2/17/26

Look, if you had been a comics character for 37 years — never aging, never changing, never growing or improving as a person — you might come to feel that you were trapped on the endlessly spinning dharmic wheel, and would pay any price to escape samsara, even if it meant being nice to your mother-in-law.