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Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/26/20

Well, it looks like we’re taking a trip through Retconned Memory Lane, where Melissa Claridge, a recurring character who had appeared in the strip for decades, including as recently as 2012, has now been whittled down to a spectral presence who manifested herself exactly once, to browbeat Rex into forming a heterosexual pair-bond with the last woman with whom he had any sustained interaction, and then vanished into the ether. Next up, apparently: remember the beloved running bit where people just gave Rex and June free stuff for no good reason? Well it’s happening again!

Panels from Hagar the Horrible, 7/26/20

I genuinely love today’s Hagar throwaway panels, in which Hagar essentially orders Lucky Eddie to clamber down a sheer cliff face in order to get the two of them some beers. Eddie’s dubious facial expression really makes it for me.

Panels from Gasoline Alley, 7/26/20

“Also, a hedge fund bought the bankrupt company that owned The Gazette and a bunch of other daily papers in mid-sized cities, and the new executives immediately laid off half the reporters and paid themselves big bonuses, but it’s probably the Little Orphan Annie thing that you’re noticing, sure.”

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Mark Trail, 7/22/20

Let me tell you all a story from the misty prehistory of this blog. When I moved in Baltimore in the now-ancient fall of 2002, the local print newspaper, to which I subscribed, still had four glorious pages of comics, including all the soap opera strips that I had heard of but never actually encountered in the wild. In Mary Worth, I arrived right in the middle of a long dinner conversation between Mary, Jeff, and Smitty Smedlap, a former chef who hated new-fangled cooking and particularly didn’t care for fish (or, as he called it, “feesh”), showing open contempt for Mary’s beloved Bum Boat. In classic soap opera strip pacing fashion, Smedlap’s monologue went on uninterrupted for days and days and I was completely fascinated by it. He was clearly an asshole, but did the other characters think he was? Were they ever going to talk and break the tension? What was going on? By the end, when Mary replied to him passive-aggressively and decided he wasn’t her kind of people, I was hooked on the strip, and on the soaps as a form, which led directly to the advent of this very website just a couple years later.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I am absolutely furious that we jumped directly from yesterday’s invitation to today’s aftermath and didn’t get to see Jeremy Cartwright talking shit about homemade LoFo cuisine while Mark openly seethed and Cherry, as usual, pushed all her emotions deep down inside. How boorishly ungrateful was he? Did the man insult flapjacks? Mark Trail readers want to know, damn it.

Hagar the Horrible, 7/22/20

Have you ever wondered how exactly Vikings relieved themselves during the long journeys of exploration, raiding, and commerce they made in narrow, open longship? Or, perhaps more accurately, have you always kind of assumed that they just peed and pooped over the sides into the ocean, but wanted confirmation from a trained historian, or at least from a newspaper comic strip about Vikings? Well, today’s your lucky day, my friend.

Plugger, 7/22/20

To a plugger, the prospect of a moment of blessed unconsciousness, no matter how brief, carries more erotic charge than any sexual encounter possibly could.

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Panel from Slylock Fox, 7/12/20

Slylock isn’t panicking because he knows that, due to the square-cube law, you can’t simply make an animal bigger but keep its proportions and functions otherwise the same: its mass increases more quickly than its surface area, and the physics that allow its anatomy to work would simply fail in a much larger version of the creature. This poor monstrosity is no doubt dying in agony right now, its internal organs collapsing under their own weight! (If you’re wondering how Slylock being a human-sized fox fits in with all this, the answer is he’s actually normal fox sized and anything you see to the contrary is just Lord of the Rings-style forced perspective trickery.)

Dustin, 7/12/20

Dustin: come for the pointless intergenerational warfare, stay for an extremely unpleasant new euphemism for genitals!

Hagar the Horrible, 7/12/20

Another victory of the working class over the bosses who would divide them! War is a racket, kids!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/12/20

The greatest love story every written keeps getting more romantic, everybody