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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!

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Family Circus, 11/27/17

It’s hard for me to really conceptualize how old and how far along on the path to adulthood the Keane Kids are supposed to be, partly because they have to be a little unrealistically precocious to do all the darndest-things-saying, partly because they’ve been around for longer than I’ve been alive — and also, let’s be real, partly because I’m not a parent and have a hard time keeping track of how kids at particular ages are supposed to act or look like! Like, I have a friend who has a six-month-old baby and she was talking with another mom about how much her son weighed and the other mom was like “Oooh, wow” so I knew it was unusual but in which direction??? Turns out he’s a big old baby, but the point is, sometimes I forget that Jeffy is, I guess, a toddler. Right? Like, he’s too young to school but he’s old enough to walk around and talk? Is that a toddler? I assume that there’s a stage you go through in toddlerhood where your sense of self really gels and asserting your identity becomes very important, which is why Jeffy is furious at being called Mo and also is wearing a shirt with his name on it, which he can’t read but probably he’s been assured it says “Jeffy.” Either that or Jeffy knows full well that the “Mo’s” are abandoned at the bus station, and the t-shirt is there to tell whoever collects him what his name is. Why aren’t any of the other kids wearing name t-shirts? Because Mommy knows where to start “eeny”-ing in order to “mo” on Jeffy. She’s not dumb. Not like Jeffy.

Hagar the Horrible, 11/27/17

The Alps were one of the few parts of Europe that were unscathed by Norse raids, and the League of the Three Forest Cantons that would eventually become the nucleus of the Swiss Confederacy wasn’t established until 1291, long after the Viking Age had ended. Still, shoutout to the artist here for accurately setting the scene with a Swiss flag fluttering above the parapets, with newspaper readers being free to imagine it in its accurate white-cross-on-red coloring. And further shoutout to the syndicate colorist, who instead created a green cross on a white background, which in California at least is universally recognized as the symbol of a medical marijuana dispensary. It explains a lot about the way comics get colored, anyway.

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Bizarro, 9/22/17

As a matter of policy, the Comics Curmudgeon stands foursquare behind Love, and specifically condemns ichthyophobia in all its forms.

Arctic Circle, 9/22/17

And here is your second newspaper comic mermaid sex joke of the day. Maybe there’s something in the water?

Hägar the Horrible, 9/22/17

Hägar and Helga take up residence between the whorehouse and the monastery. Expect to be seeing a lot of Brother Olaf, guys: that guy practices what he preaches.

Spider-Man, 9/22/17

“… I could not stand by and watch you become a murderer. But I’m totally down with watching you shrivel in agony to a desiccated corpse. Out of love! I’m also OK conspiring with Spider-Man to murder you. Um … love!”

Gasoline Alley, 9/22/17

Dick Tracy reads Gasoline Alley twice — once in the paper and once online. He’s just that tough!

— Uncle Lumpy