Post Content

Mary Worth, 10/20/18

Most medical practitioners are, or should be, trained to understand the interpersonal dynamics of patients under their care, and recognize when someone may be there against their will, possibly as part of scenario of domestic violence. Usually people don’t just come out and say “It’s not my decision to be here!” but that’d be a pretty strong signal, in my opinion! Fortunately for Mary, our hapless shelter worker hasn’t been trained to notice these telltale signs. “What a nice old man,” she thinks about a person loudly proclaiming he’s been kidnapped. “I wonder how many puppies he’s going to leave with?”

Hagar the Horrible, 10/20/18

The central gimmick of Hagar the Horrible, of course, is that it reproduces the tropes of mid-20th century American middle-class life (which have been largely ossified into place in newspaper comics even though they don’t always reflect the reality of 2018) in a 9th or 10th-century Scandinavian setting, and one of those tropes is of men retreating to a bar to escape their wives. Anyway, today’s Hagar acknowledges that these bars are depressing places that monetize misery, which just sort of takes what I’ve always taken as the subtext and makes it explicit.

Post Content

Beetle Bailey, 10/13/18

Beetle Bailey’s Rocky, created in order to cash in on the “rock ‘n’ roll” music the kids loved so much in the ’50s, has over the years taken on a number of conflicting attributes that might be vaguely lumped together as “anti-establishment”: he’s been an anti-war protestor, a nihilist, a mutineer and assassin, a violent street tough, and an abstract impressionist, so sure, let’s make him a muckraking journalist as well, for some reason! Anyway, panel two is a good image for those of you who can only get off when thinking about an old man ashamed of his own incontinence, I guess.

Hagar the Horrible, 10/13/18

Long-distance Viking trade networks did result in cultural contacts between medieval Arabs and Scandinavians, so it’s plausible that a djinni could find itself in the The Horrible’s Norwegian shack. And djinn are canonically charismatic, so it makes sense that Helga would want to have sex with this Middle Eastern spirit being and condemn her ungrateful husband to an eternity trapped in a lamp. This all checks out!

Blondie and Marvin, 10/13/18

Say, are you a comfortable middle-aged suburbanite syndicated cartoonist looking for a venue where you can work out your irritation with, say, those showboating NBA players, or the poor? Well, good news!

Post Content

Crock, 10/10/18

Ha ha, yes, it’s funny because Crock appears to be suggesting that poor Barlow be fitted with a chicken liver, a ghastly parody of a medical procedure that would surely result in his death. But check out Orville in the final panel, who appears to be using dark magick to animate a severed hand to perform menial labor for him. Maybe he’s a man who could transform a chicken liver into an organ that could keep a human alive! Who could possibly set limits on the capabilities of this powerful wizard?

Hi and Lois, 10/10/18

Trixie is, of course, an eternal infant, trapped in comic-time amber for half a century and presumably doomed to stay there for a half century more, assuming newspaper comic strips are still around for that long (they will not). So it’s not a surprise that her fully adult mind has become all sick and twisted inside her forever soft baby skull. Yes, it’s good that her parents keep her confined behind closed doors; if she were allowed to escape, she would truly “mess up” the world with her terrible and well-earned wrath.

Hagar the Horrible, 10/10/18

I was going to make this one in my continuing series of jokes about “ha ha, Hagar recently converted to Christianity but doesn’t fully ‘get’ it,” but then I remembered … most of the history of Western civilization? Then I got real sad.

Spider-Man, 10/10/18

Oh no, Spidey and Iron Fist punched the helicopter they were dangling off of, damaging it enough to interfere with its ability to fly, probably leading to their fiery deaths! Who could’ve possibly predicted this outcome? Oh, literally anybody? OK!