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Hi and Lois, 11/10/18

Wait, but … Beetle Bailey and the Flagstons exist in the same universe! Beetle is Lois’s brother! The kids know him! Have they become suddenly and horrifyingly aware of their own status as cartoon characters? Will they attempt to escape, breaching the walls between dimensions and invading our own reality? God help us all!

Hagar the Horrible, 11/10/18

“Also, I’m a member of a murderous Viking warband. We fight people all the time, as we try to steal their precious belongings to bring back to Norway! But, as mentioned, I also hate myself. Is this … is this the kind of thing girls like? Talking about being a murderer with self-loathing? Does this make me ‘complicated?’”

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Six Chix, 11/9/18

Normally, as you know, I do not come to praise the art in Six Chix. But I actually sort of like the depiction of the facial expression on the right here? Like it’s not what you’d call … technically skilled but I do think the crinkly smile captures the emotion that they’re trying to sell us. “Ha ha, yeah, I do sometimes do that! Ya gotta love life’s little foibles!”

Hagar the Horrible, 11/9/18

Actually, I think the pedant Hagar is hitting on/scamming out of liquor is a better example of the same thing. I love how he’s chinless in a way that if drawn realistically would be grotesque but here is kinda cute, and the way you draw a crooked frown on him is just by giving him a crooked upper lip dangling over the space where his lower jaw should be.

Spider-Man, 11/9/18

There’s a lot going on here, sartorially. Like, I know it’s kind of a trope for this strip by this point, but how comfortable can Peter’s spider-suit (the proportional suit … of a spider) really be? Would he really leave it on while lounging casually around the house, making phone calls? And then there’s MJ, who, if I’m following the sequence here correctly, was sound asleep in her hotel room in her sexy underwear, butt protruding gently towards the TV, when Peter called. But let’s not let this distract us from the important thing, which is that Peter called MJ to fess up that he accidentally destroyed the theater/their livelihood, and then she tells him she heard about it “collapsing” without mentioning his involvement, so he immediately changes the subject.

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Spider-Man, 10/30/18

The whole thing about Spider-Man is that, as a character, he’s supposed to be not some untouchable superhuman, but an ordinary guy with some extraordinary ability and also a lot of foibles — relatable, in other words. And sometimes it works! Like, in panel one, I definitely relate to chatting with someone that you’re trying to make friends with and then you accidentally blurt out some phrase like “you’ve got a lot on the ball!”, which is sort of like idiomatic English but in fact very much isn’t a thing anyone actually says. I’d be kicking myself over it for it for weeks, though; Spidey, on the other hand, thinks this is going great and is ready to confidently progress to the makeouts, which I don’t relate to at all.

Hagar the Horrible, 10/30/18

Ha ha, even after breaking up with an obvious creep, this woman can never escape him, because he’s managed to worm his way into her very mind and take away her ability to control her own body! Ahh, the funny pages, a pleasant place for innocent laffs that don’t as a rule center on nightmarish body horror.