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Dennis the Menace and Hagar the Horrible, 8/5/24

Ha ha, bagpipes, amiright folks? It’s, uh, it’s honestly pretty slim pickings in the comics today so that’s what I got. I was thinking recently (ok, fine, it was when I was watching the incredible Weird Al biopic Weird) that accordions get a bad rap, like for decades they were the butt of jokes and the epitome of dorky music when in fact accordion music can be really cool and interesting! Am I willing to go out on a limb and say the same about bagpipes? Maybe not, they are pretty screechy and annoying if not done right, but they can be good too sometimes, I dunno. Anyway, mostly I’m interested in geography here, with Hagar the Horrible accurately depicting the Scots as one of the primary victims of Viking depredation and inaccurately depicting the bagpipes as sonic weapons, and Dennis the Menace depicting the cute little historic downtown of Dennis’s suburb (?) where fun civic events like the Bagpipes Festival happen, or maybe that’s just Margaret’s uncle wandering around imposing his musical and sartorial tastes on everyone without their consent, who can say.

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Hagar the Horrible, 7/24/24

You might think this strip is about Eddie being a simple man who has never had the realities of sexual reproduction explained to him, but you have to remember that he lives in a world of enchantment where mermaids are real, so who’s to say if fairy dust and magic spells aren’t how babies are made in his universe? He’d better hope they are, anyway, because if he ever figures out how to get his dick into one of the aforementioned mermaids, he’s going to sire chimeric abominations the likes of which these simple Vikings have never seen.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/24/24

This strip got me to Google “can frogs survive in soapy water” but all the links are to threads on websites like frogforums dot net or the r/Amphibian subreddit with titles like “Froggy 911!! Help, please!! My two year old put dish soap into the frog tank!” and I got sad and couldn’t bring myself to click on them. So, uh, those three frogs are just fine, probably! Healthy and living their best lives!

Dustin, 7/24/24

Hey, have you guys heard that people used to make phone calls as their primary means of communication, but now in many situations find it easier and more convenient to text? Wild stuff.

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Hagar the Horrible, 7/21/24

One of the many smarter-than-me commenters on this site pointed out that it’s actually pretty grim that Hagar and Eddie are the only recurring characters in Hagar’s war band. One assumes that the others are all killed off and replaced over time — sometimes one by one, and sometimes all at once in the disastrous encounters that presumably lead to the occasional desert island strips. Anyway, today’s strip is a good reminder that whenever your new boss tells you that their workplace is “like a big family,” you are definitely walking into the most dysfunctional company you’ve ever seen, but at least these days it’s usually not going to literally kill you.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/21/24

A combination of neoliberal ideology and deep-rooted Calvinism has made the modern United States a place uniquely obsessed with constant productivity. In such environments, only “holy fools” — like, say, the weirdly ossified early 20th century fake hillbilly stereotypes in a syndicated legacy newspaper strip — are free to proclaim that maybe laziness is good, actually, and getting things done isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/21/24

Sorry to find two funny things in a strip about an abusive father who beat his son so badly he needed surgery, but two very funny things in this strip are (a) Buck being completely flummoxed as to why two best friends with a love of old-timey-style comedy, one of whom is tall and thin and the other short and round, would refer to themselves as “Shorty and the Beanpole,” and (b) Rex being like “We all need to do our part. My part is fixing up the broken meat; minds and feelings are completely foreign to me and frankly somebody else’s problem.”