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Hagar the Horrible, 1/29/21

Here’s a fun fact for you: many names that we think of as stereotypically Russian are actually derived from Old Norse, because the first Russian state was founded by Vikings who quickly assimilated into the Slavic culture of the people they ruled but left their marks in a number of ways, including in the names of the nobility, which eventually filtered down to ordinary people. For instance, Igor is derived from Ingvar and Olga is derived from Helga. What I’m trying to say here is that “Olga” is just Helga’s “bad girl” personality, and that Hagar used to enjoy this spicy role play but lately has been getting less and less into it.

Mary Worth, 1/29/21

“I thought, ‘In Santa Royale I’m not going to fall over. I’ll be safe!’ But I was a fool, Saul, a fool! They have gravity everywhere — even in Santa Royale!”

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Pluggers, 12/7/20

So before this year, I was never really a coffee guy, and my wife had her coffee when she got to the office. But I decided as a New Year’s resolution to find out if it would be better for me, anxiety-wise and not-consuming-massive-amounts-of-artificial-sweetener-wise, to have one cup of coffee in the morning rather than chain-drinking cans of Coke Zero all day, and a couple months later due to COVID my wife’s office moved from an office building in Koreatown to our dining room table, so now we both make coffee here in the morning, and we have different tastes in coffee (I like a lighter roast!) so we actually have a little one-cup coffee maker and we each make our own. I bring this up because I’m fascinated by the fact that all of us in this world have our own way of doing little things like this, and that makes me look at this plugger’s situation with some curiosity. Do some people just make a big multi-cup pot of coffee in their house and everyone drinks it continuously until it runs out? How many coffee drinkers are in the average plugger household, anyway? How long does coffee last in a pot, really? How many times can you reheat coffee and have it still be drinkable? I guess my real question is: my first impression looking at this comic was that this plugger stumbled downstairs in his underwear, hungover, he has no idea what time it is, maybe it’s the middle of the afternoon, who even knows, and he’s like, “did I make this coffee yesterday? last night, when I was drunk? did my wife make it this morning? did my wife leave me yet? I’m gonna need some coffee to figure this out”, and I really want to believe that that’s a passably realistic interpretation, you know?

Hagar the Horrible, 12/7/20

You guys, I went to grad school with hopes of being an actual history professor because I used to have deep curiosity about historical questions. But today I read this and thought, “Huh, I wonder if Vikings actually had a taboo against cousin marriage” and I did a little Googling — like, very little Googling — like, just enough to find this explainer about Minnesota Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins’s wife and this Tumblr post from 2014 from someone claiming to be an archaeologist who said that Viking cousin marriage wouldn’t have necessarily been the norm but wouldn’t have been frowned upon by anyone either, and you know what? I decided that was good enough for me! Either my brain is atrophying or I’m maturing, or maybe those are the same thing.

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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.