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As foretold in prophecy, Unity Day 2018 is finally here! How are our most important cultural commenters, newspaper comic strips, dealing with the scourge of bullying? Honestly, not great!

Six Chix, 10/24/18

Speaking as someone who was a tremendous nerd as a child and also someone who loves etymology, I can assure you that there are few things more likely to earn a swift punch in the mouth than attempting to parry bullying by delving into some word origins. Also if you’re wondering how exactly bully came to change meanings in this way, it turns out that “a connecting sense between ‘lover’ and ‘ruffian’ might be ‘protector of a prostitute,’ which was one sense of bully (though it is not specifically attested until 1706).” So if our young victim here wanted to show off her bookish nature but avoid violent retribution, she might want to point out that by calling her tormenter a bully she’s also calling him a pimp, though this might not have the sting that she originally intended to deliver via etymological factoids and might instead just puff up the lad’s self-image.

Hagar the Horrible, 10/24/18

Anyway, we all know there’s only one kind of knowledge that bullies respect: knowledge about how to impose your will on others with violence.

Dennis the Menace, 10/24/18

Speaking of which, what’s the “Unity” of “Unity Day” stand for, anyway? Well, as today’s Dennis the Menace demonstrates, it means that smaller, weaker children should “unify” with one another and face down their lone larger tormenter, uniting into an angry mob that can tear their bullies limb from limb in an act of horrific orgiastic revenge.

Mary Worth, 10/24/18

Mary Worth, meanwhile, cuts through the feel-good bullshit to get at the real truth. You see, the whole point of this storyline is that if you bully a sad old man grieving his dead dog long enough, he’ll eventually relent and adopt another dog. And isn’t that a good thing? Why are you against bullying? Do you want sad, abused dogs to languish in shelters, forever?

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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.

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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!