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Crock, 6/22/17

I like the black smoke rising in the background of the strip; it implies that Poulet’s defeat has had devastating consequences, but gives you room to fill in the blanks about their exact nature. Has some Algerian village been reduced to a smoldering ruin by insurgents because the inhabitants were too accommodating to the foreign occupiers who, when it came down to it, were unable to protect them? Was the Legion’s fort overrun by rebels and burned to the ground as a hated symbol of French authority? Are Crock and Poulet standing on the quay in Algiers or Oran, awaiting the boat that will evacuate them to the métropole, watching the city burn in an orgy of retaliatory violence as colonial rule collapses into a nightmarish power vacuum? “I wish life had a backspace key!” Poulet quips, referring to 130 years of brutal conquest and exploitation.

Mary Worth, 6/22/17

Haha, whoops, looks like I was wrong and it’s Esme who’s going to be tumbling into the wine-dark sea, never to be seen again. This happened because the ship lurched, so Katie didn’t even have to make a choice or feel morally responsible! Remember, kids, smoking is bad, and so is attempted adultery, and so is violating workplace regulations about sexual relationships with customers. If you do any of those things, you’ll drown, probably!

Family Circus, 6/22/17

Are you asking if Big Daddy Keane has noticed that the forward progression of time has ground to a halt, and that he’s doomed to live an eternity with his children never aging, never growing up and leaving the house, just hanging around and saying the darndest things, forever? Look at his face; I’m pretty sure he’s noticed.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/22/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because Lucky Eddy thought he was going to die in agony, so he pissed himself!

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Hagar the Horrible, 6/18/17

There’s a lot of backstory that has to go into making this gag work. First Hagar has to decide that his life is worthy of being commemorated in a long tale, and then, despite his canonical illiteracy, he has to choose to abandon the traditional orally transmitted poetry of his Viking ancestors in favor of a written biography. Then he has to strong-arm Lucky Eddy, who is himself illiterate, into learning letter-craft and then writing Hagar’s life story down. Then Hagar has to ask which parts of the book are bad for Helga to read, because, as his crude X indicates, he himself still refuses to learn the southern art of writing. Which Helga … has? There’s a lot going on here, is what I’m saying.

Mary Worth, 6/18/17

There is as ever a lot of inappropriate bold-lettering in Mary Worth, but I dearly hope that Esme’s all-bolded final speech balloon indicates that she’s shouting her dialogue at the top of her lungs down the deck. “I’M LEAVING THE INVITATION OPEN, DEREK! THE SEX INVITATION! YOU KNOW, FOR EXTRAMARITAL SEX! FOR WHEN YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND ABOUT CHEATING ON YOUR WIFE! CABIN 1122! COME BY ANY TIME! TO HAVE SEX WITH ME!”

Hi and Lois, 6/18/17

Guys, I’m … I’m starting to worry about Hi.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/18/17

[a few weeks later, Kelly sees a reference to “the LGBT community” and is moved to look up what the “B” stands for] hey, wait a minute

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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.