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Hagar the Horrible, 5/4/18

I really have to question Hagar’s theatrical eye-roll in the final panel here. Lucky Eddie is often depicted in this strip as too soft to be a Viking warrior, but today, in failing to grasp a metaphor, he seems to understand a deeper truth: the places where we are most needy and open to love are also the spots where we’re the most vulnerable. He also knows that the heart and lungs are protected by the ribcage and sternum, but the belly is exposed to attack. Look for the trail of agonized gut-shot foot soldiers writing in agony as Hagar’s band makes its way inland looking for monasteries to plunder!

Gil Thorp, 5/4/18

Ahhh, the Milford Trumpet, the school newspaper you might remember from Gil Thorp plotlines like the one where a reporter suppressed the information that one of his athlete pals had a dangerous heart condition, and also the one where it seemed like an athlete had beat up his girlfriend but then it turned out he hadn’t, and then probably some others that I can’t remember at the moment. Anyhoo, it seems that the Trumpet staff assumes that, like me, most of the student body at Milford has forgotten that Barry Bader still goes there, so they’re commissioning a hard-hitting investigative piece: “Barry Bader: Does He Still Go Here, And Is He Still An Asshole?”

Mary Worth, 5/4/18

I think we can be … reasonably sure Wilbur hasn’t hurled himself off a cliff in a paroxysm of drunken despair, right? Right? Surely Mary would look just as overwhelmed as she does in panel two upon discovering, say, Wilbur loudly singing country music tunes into a grassy puddle of his own sick. PLEASE DO NOT KILL WILBUR, MARY WORTH CREATIVE TEAM, I ENJOY HIS SUFFERING TOO MUCH

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/9/18

Boy, our POV sure is lingering kind of ominously on that paper cup of water in the last panel, and you know what would be extremely funny, to me? If, after we spent all this time learning that Justin’s reluctance to seek medical attention for what was obviously a serious health problem had its origins in his mother’s own irrational fears, Rex hands Justin that water and he drinks it and then the water just leaks out everywhere because the terrible, substandard surgery performed on him at the bottom-tier hospital where Rex has admitting privileges has left the poor boy’s digestive tract full of holes. “My mother … was right!” Justin would gasp out, right before he dies from all his organs becoming unmoored from the places where they’re supposed to be.

Hagar the Horrible, 4/9/18

I believe I’ve shared on this blog before the fact that in sixth grade I accidentally spilled a pot of boiling Lipton’s Giggle Noodle Soup onto my foot. This was an extremely silly-sounding injury that earned me the derisive nickname “Noodlefoot” for the remainder of the school year, but it was also an extremely painful second-degree burn that I had to keep dressed in a bandage for months! I still have visible scars, more than thirty years later! My point is that while Hagar and Lucky Eddie are yucking it up there on the battlements of whatever castle they’ve managed to seize by brutal force to use as a temporary base for yet another plundering expedition, the men below are screaming in pain as their flesh sizzles and sloughs from their bones.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/9/18

Ha ha, it’s funny because, even in moments of quotidian happiness, Cindy is obsessed with with her age and the decline of her good looks! Cindy, you might recall, was the pretty cheerleader character from the high-school-days origins of Funky Winkerbean, and the strip has never stopped punishing her for it, having her fired from her newscasting job for getting old, after which she didn’t file the obvious lawsuit, but instead started both working and sleeping with young people so she would always be reminded of her encroaching cronedom. The Funkyverse is all about generalized anxiety over mortality, of course, but you have to love the way Cindy’s been saddled with a particularly gendered version of this where she’s constantly convinced that she’ll be unattractive and unloveable any day now, and by “have to love” I mean “you don’t have to love it at all, feel free to get pretty upset about it, actually.”

Mark Trail, 4/9/18

I’m pretty sure that Marlin and Jim drove up in that jeep, so, unlike what happened with a couple of boats we could mention, this is one hilariously awesome vehicle wreck that won’t go on Woods and Wildlife’s tab!

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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!