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Hagar the Horrible, 7/24/24

You might think this strip is about Eddie being a simple man who has never had the realities of sexual reproduction explained to him, but you have to remember that he lives in a world of enchantment where mermaids are real, so who’s to say if fairy dust and magic spells aren’t how babies are made in his universe? He’d better hope they are, anyway, because if he ever figures out how to get his dick into one of the aforementioned mermaids, he’s going to sire chimeric abominations the likes of which these simple Vikings have never seen.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/24/24

This strip got me to Google “can frogs survive in soapy water” but all the links are to threads on websites like frogforums dot net or the r/Amphibian subreddit with titles like “Froggy 911!! Help, please!! My two year old put dish soap into the frog tank!” and I got sad and couldn’t bring myself to click on them. So, uh, those three frogs are just fine, probably! Healthy and living their best lives!

Dustin, 7/24/24

Hey, have you guys heard that people used to make phone calls as their primary means of communication, but now in many situations find it easier and more convenient to text? Wild stuff.

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Hagar the Horrible, 7/21/24

One of the many smarter-than-me commenters on this site pointed out that it’s actually pretty grim that Hagar and Eddie are the only recurring characters in Hagar’s war band. One assumes that the others are all killed off and replaced over time — sometimes one by one, and sometimes all at once in the disastrous encounters that presumably lead to the occasional desert island strips. Anyway, today’s strip is a good reminder that whenever your new boss tells you that their workplace is “like a big family,” you are definitely walking into the most dysfunctional company you’ve ever seen, but at least these days it’s usually not going to literally kill you.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/21/24

A combination of neoliberal ideology and deep-rooted Calvinism has made the modern United States a place uniquely obsessed with constant productivity. In such environments, only “holy fools” — like, say, the weirdly ossified early 20th century fake hillbilly stereotypes in a syndicated legacy newspaper strip — are free to proclaim that maybe laziness is good, actually, and getting things done isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/21/24

Sorry to find two funny things in a strip about an abusive father who beat his son so badly he needed surgery, but two very funny things in this strip are (a) Buck being completely flummoxed as to why two best friends with a love of old-timey-style comedy, one of whom is tall and thin and the other short and round, would refer to themselves as “Shorty and the Beanpole,” and (b) Rex being like “We all need to do our part. My part is fixing up the broken meat; minds and feelings are completely foreign to me and frankly somebody else’s problem.”

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Hagar the Horrible, 7/5/24

I know the joke here is that you think the buffet owner has “won” this coin toss because it means someone will be patronizing his restaurant, but in fact he has “lost” it because that patron is Hagar, whose rapacious appetite will result in an unprofitable transaction. But everyone’s expression in the second panel almost got me to Google “did Vikings ever engage in cannibalism” before I remembered that most webpages about Viking culture are either written by neo-pagans talking about how Vikings were very nice and kind of woke, actually, or by neo-fascists talking about how Vikings were very nice and extremely representative of the superiority of the Nordic bloodline, actually, so I decided to skip it.

Dustin, 7/5/24

Wow. They said it couldn’t be done. They said it was impossible. They said, “There will never be a Dustin strip that Josh laughs at unironically.” But today, they did it. And all it took was having the character I feel the most neutrally about insult the character I hate the most. This should be an inspiration to everyone. Your dreams can come true, if you work hard enough.