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Hagar the Horrible, 10/9/16

“Yes, Hagar, I found this mermaid tangled in a fisherman’s net, and yes, she promised me any price to free her. And so I took what was my due: her daughter, who I’m going to bring to the zoo to sell to the zookeeper. Don’t judge! I’m tired of the dangerous world of being a Viking. Do you know how many gold pieces I can make from selling her? Enough to never live in hunger or fear again! She said I could have anything if I freed her! Anything! I kept my end of the bargain!”

Judge Parker, 10/9/16

Years ago, I went on a date with a woman who picked the movie we would see: My Best Friend’s Wedding. The plot, if you’ve never seen it, involves Julia Roberts realizing she’s in love with her best friend, Dermot Mulroney, right as he’s about to marry Cameron Diaz, and she decides to sabotage their relationship. The date was unsuccessful, in part, because of our wildly differing reactions to the movie. She wanted Julia Roberts’ character to be more sympathetic, when in fact she becomes less so over the course of the movie. I, on the other hand, had fallen in love with the movie at a particular turning point, when everything I knew about conventional movie narratives taught me that Julia Roberts was about to confess the truth of her evil plotting to Dermot Mulroney and they would start growing closer; instead, she decides to double down on the madness. I thought about my dad describing to me the first time he saw the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining; towards the climax of that movie, Scatman Crothers arrives at the Overlook Hotel to rescue the protagonist, only to be immediately murdered by Jack Nicholson. This doesn’t happen in the book, and my dad, who had read the book before seeing the movie, told me that when he saw this he thought, “Oh my God — anything could happen now.” That’s what I thought during My Best Friend’s Wedding (it’s the scene where Julia Roberts starts telling people Rupert Everett is her fiancé), and it’s a narrative high I’ve been chasing, and aspiring to in my own writing, ever since.

Anyway, there’s been a distinct shift in narrative tone in Judge Parker since Ces Marciuliano took over writing duties a few weeks ago, but I hadn’t experienced that feeling until now, looking at the next to last panel, when those shipping containers — containers Neddy browbeat her engineer/lover-to-be into using as the building blocks of her factory, then browbeat some poor sap into selling her below cost — collapsing in an awful ballet of twisted metal and, I hope, shattered bodies. Anything can happen now, you guys. Anything can happen.

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Hagar the Horrible, 9/26/16

I’ve slowly come to believe that the episodes of Viking life we see in Hagar the Horrible aren’t disconnected vignettes in some timeless comic-strip eternal now, but actually a coherent story told out of sequence, if only we can piece it together. Today, I think, comes somewhere close to the end. Usually it’s Hagar and Eddie and their band who are raiding castles, as you would expect from a mobile band sustained by plunder. But now they find themselves in the position of defending a castle. Presumably they managed to capture a stronghold, somewhere in the temperate south, and after butchering everyone inside decided to trade their thatched fjord-side huts for the chance to live like Frankish barons. And what did they get for it? Just the responsibility of fighting off the next band of Norsemen who came sailing up the river in their longships. The men have gone all soft, expecting the comfort of prepared food instead of just scarfing down whatever could be hunted or gathered. Was it worth it? Was this really victory?

Dick Tracy, 9/26/16

Ooh, looks like Dick Tracy is going to do an Aliens Are A Metaphor For Those We Deem As “Others” plotline, beloved in scifi and scifi-ish franchises everywhere! Haha, who could’ve guessed that when Dick Tracy did a plot where the government set up internment camps, Dick would be against them.

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Hagar the Horrible, 9/19/16

Just to prove to you the lengths I go to in order to make my silly jokes about comics on my blog, here are some fun facts I learned while researching today’s Hagar the Horrible:

• The common origin story of coffee cultivation — that an Ethiopian shepherd noticed goats getting jumpy when they ate certain berries — is probably a myth. The first written record of coffee being drunk comes from Yemen in the 1400s, which explains why there’s no coffee for Eddie to drink, five centuries earlier and thousands of miles to the north.
• Anxiety and worry are the end products of parallel linguistic evolution: both ultimately descend from words (in Latin and proto-German, respectively) that mean “to strangle.”

Anyway! I don’t know if those facts add up to much, except that maybe Eddie — who Hagar has already turned his back on in that final panel — has felt phantom hands around his throat for a long time, and it has nothing to do with caffeine withdrawal.

Gasoline Alley, 9/19/16

I’ve been reading the non-adventures of the chumps in Gasoline Alley for more than a decade and while I’m vaguely aware that they’re all part of a huge, sprawling family, I still couldn’t tell you how any of them are related to any of the other ones. Beardy Dude and Ranger Gal are thus connected by a tenuous web of kinship, though that didn’t come up when he guided her forest birth; it’s sort of coming out now, not that I can really follow what the hell’s going on in panel two. Are they visualizing … each other, but younger? Each visualizing his younger self? Why does the kid in the rightmost thought balloon have three legs? Why does he have three legs? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY DOES HE HAVE THREE LEGS

Slylock Fox, 9/19/16

I just want to point out that Slylock is a compulsive ratiocinator. Like, he does it to solve crimes when he doesn’t even need to. “So, I saw the whole thing go down with my own eyes, all you need to do is take down the information. The ape parked his car in the deale–” “IT’S THE ONE WITH THE LICENSE PLATES!!! Right? Right? I said it before you said it! IN YOUR FACE, RABBIT!”

Marvin, 9/19/16

Guys, it’s Monday, so I just want to leave you with an uplifting image: an infant with a thousand-mile stare, openly worrying that someday — maybe someday soon — he’ll become unmoored from any conventional system of morality and perpetrate unspeakable horrors. Let’s all have a super week!