Post Content

I’m back, everybody! Huge thanks to all who contributed to the fundraiser, and huge thanks to Uncle Lumpy for his as always hilarious fill-in and fundraising work! I’ll be writing personal thank-yous to all contributors (and, of course, to Uncle Lumpy) this week. But now, on to comics! Say, did any beloved legacy strips take a sharp left turn into explicit vomit fetishism while I was gone?

Hagar the Horrible, 5/8/17

Ha ha! Well, I have to say the year 2017 is exactly as depraved and horrifying as we might’ve all hoped!

Six Chix, 5/8/17

Speaking of the dystopian future, these ladies look like primitive huntresses but I suppose based on their dialogue we’re supposed to imagine this incident as taking place after a worldwide collapse of the interconnected global civilization that made things like “online shopping” and “shopping” and “online” possible. The ladies look perky enough, but the bleak, utterly barren landscape is bad news. I’m not sure if the cataclysm was a climate-change-driven ecological collapse or a global war that scoured the Earth bare with atomic fire, but it’s clear that our heroines are just scavenging for whatever critters are left that haven’t themselves succumbed to starvation, and cannibalism is the logical next and final step.

Slylock Fox, 5/8/17

I was about to brag about the fact that I remembered this strip from when it first ran more than a decade ago, but I was horrified to discover that back then I couldn’t even remember the name of beloved rodent sidekick Max Mouse! For shame! Anyway, I’m still horrified by this story of a grandmother whose response to some low grade cookie theft on the part of her grandchildren is to literally call in the police to browbeat a confession out of them, but I will say that the larger comics images I have access to today definitely let me see how very smug the grandkid on the left is. Smug enough to make this brutal introduction to the police state good grandparenting? No. But you can begin to see the motivation, at least.

Post Content

Panels from Hagar the Horrible, 4/23/17

Hagar and his clan may have recently converted to Christianity, but that doesn’t meant they don’t occasionally dabble in a little paganistic future-scrying now and then.

Panels from Beetle Bailey, 4/23/17

File today’s Beetle Bailey dialogue under “phrases that no human being has ever actually said aloud and yet will haunt me for days.”

Panels from Blondie, 4/23/17

If there’s a sadder commentary on what passes for pleasure in this modern age, I don’t know what it is!

Post Content

Mark Trail, 4/3/17

Oh, man these guys are dastardly criminals indeed! Not only are they callous about Billy having tasted hot lead, but they’re also defeating government facial recognition software, through the power of scowling! Sadly, their faces are now stuck that way. Their kidnapee is correct to just sort of stand around sadly in the background waiting for them to decide what to do with her even though nobody’s really paying attention to her. They’re stone cold loco!

Gil Thorp, 4/3/17

Whoops, it looks like basketball season and the tale of Aaron Aargard the Opioid Orphan have been wrapped up without us even finding out if the basketball teams went to the playdowns? Now we’re abruptly starting baseball season, which will apparently involve journalism shenanigans of some kind. Unless Dafne’s FOIA request was part of an investigation into whether a well-respected local jurist is keeping a bunch of hungry teens prisoner in her basement.

Crankshaft, 4/3/17

Lillian is about to find out that the only literary pursuit less lucrative than running a used bookstore in your garage is actually writing a book.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/3/17

I assume that, like many developing nations in Africa and Latin America, Hootin’ Holler routinely gets shipments of clothes donated by various charities. Apparently they just got a big box of sassy teal empowerment shirts from the late ’80s or early ’90s, along with a bunch of “BUFFALO BILLS SUPERBOWL XXVI CHAMPIONS” hoodies.

Hagar the Horrible, 4/3/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because Hagar and Lucky Eddie are going to be executed, for their many crimes!