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Hagar the Horrible, 2/27/18

The central conceit of Hagar the Horrible is that it takes the classic American sitcom husband-wife dynamic and transposes it onto a family living in Viking-age Norway. So the conflicts between Hagar and Helga all revolve around the sort of things that would be at home in America in 1975: he spends too much time at the bar, he doesn’t like her mother, he’s a slob, etc. But tellingly, what they don’t fight about is his role as the leader of a band of opportunistic raiders and thieves, who leave a trail of corpses across Europe in their quest for plunder. Look at her little smile as he heads to the door to cleave the salesman’s skull with a single blow of his axe, then put him out of his misery by stabbing him in the throat. She doesn’t like it when he leaves chicken bones on the floor, but she’s never minded all the killing.

Gil Thorp, 2/27/18

So Marty Moon has reacted to his admonishment at the hands of teens by choosing to … hyper-pronounce Jorge Padilla’s name, as in this classic SNL sketch, and take advantage of getting to actually say a Latino’s name on the air by slipping in sponsored content for a local Mexican restaurant. I’m not sure what’s funnier: that he’s doing this to antagonize his young woke adversaries, or because he thinks he’s being respectful.

Mark Trail, 2/27/18

“Anybody break a neck or get permanently paralyzed? Any compound fractures, with femurs protruding horrifically from flesh? Tissues sliced so deep that the scarring will be permanent? Massive blood loss? Traumatic brain injury? C’mon, throw us a bone here, sheriff.”

Pluggers, 2/27/18

You can tell this is a “classic” Pluggers because the kid still knows what a radio is.

Six Chix, 2/27/18

What if an old person … had a mom??? You crazy for this one, Six Chix!

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Funky Winkerbean, 2/18/18

I assume that, like just about any working artist, Mopey Pete has a website with his email address on it. Soooo, the Chiseler … knows that email is private, right? That just because an email uses the infrastructure of the internet to deliver its message doesn’t mean that sending an email is the equivalent of posting it on Twitter or whatever? Does the Chiseler think that “the Internet” is just, like, a guy you whisper things to and he passes them along or makes them public, at his whim?

Hagar the Horrible, 2/18/18

I genuinely appreciate that this strip has graphically illustrated the violence that Hagar’s men have visited upon these local magnates in their insatiable lust for plunder. The dude in the cravat lost an eye. An eye! Look how satisfied Hagar is at having half-blinded him — with an arrow or a knife or maybe his thumb — earlier this week!

Mark Trail, 2/18/18

It’s nice to see that, after decades of living in a rough-hewn forest cabin, Cherry has finally decided to do a little decorating beyond just nailing rugs to the wall at weird angles. On an unrelated note, did you know if you were paid to draw the view from — just as an example — a hotel balcony on Harbour Island in the Bahamas, the amount of money it took you to pay for that hotel, as well as to procure transportation to and from that hotel, would be considered a business expense for tax purposes? Just putting that out there!

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Mary Worth, 1/12/18

Aww, isn’t this nice? Father and daughter are really relating to each other as adults and supporting each other emotionally! Say, also, unless I missed something, Dawn has neglected to mention to her dad that she made out with a married dude at her summer job, just like Wilbur never brought up the fact that he was grifted by a statuesque beauty in Colombia right before he came home. Just a happy father-daughter pair keeping deep secrets from one another and chowing down on some muffins, in other words!

Hagar the Horrible, 1/12/18

I have several questions about what’s going on here. The first is about the tattoo on this bar lady’s hand. That definitely looks like a prison tattoo font. Did she get that tattoo in prison? Was she in the least bad-ass prison ever, where that would be considered a cool prison tattoo? Did the fact that the tattoo is on the palm of her hand, a very sensitive part of the body and therefore an extremely painful one to get a tattoo on, make it seem slightly more bad-ass?

Perhaps more relevant: how exactly did Lucky Eddy come by his extremely non-specific knowledge of this lady’s tattooed status? Hagar’s smirk implies that he was the one who set up this little farce, but I’m not sure that really works with his canonical illiteracy.

Mark Trail, 1/12/18

One giraffe in Lost Forest is a bizarre, inexplicable freak of nature. But two? Two means that the forest land should be opened to responsible hunting by outdoorspersons who want to harvest delicious giraffe meat and keep local populations in check and avoid the tragedies of “nuisance giraffes.” This will be a profitable year for Doc’s side business selling individual pancakes off his cabin’s front porch!