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Gil Thorp, 7/16/16

In general, I have been very happy about our move to Los Angeles, but like many transplants, I do sort of miss the passing of the seasons. This surprised me because I hate both cold and hot and humid weather. You do sort of get a winter from December to February, which everyone else makes fun of because the temperature maybe gets down into the 50s, though keep in mind that most Southern California homes are very poorly insulated so if it’s in the 50s outside, it’s also in the 50s inside your house. But the rest of the year is kind of a sunny-and-70s-or-80s blur, with occasional weeks in the 90s that could happen at any time, with the upshot being that it’s actually kind of difficult to remember what time of year it is sometimes. To keep moored in reality, you come to depend on external signposts, and up to this year, Gil Thorp’s chronological rhythm was one of those for me. You got football in the fall, basketball in the winter, baseball in the spring, and some wacky “school’s out” plot or maybe golf in the summer. But it’s summer and this baseball plot is still happening. Even when the “Elmer gets deported” plot of spring ’08 dragged on into summer, there was an acknowledgement that the semester had ended. But now? Much as I would like to enjoy Barry Bader’s continuing hilarious insensitivity to his beloved classmate’s gruesome death, I can’t help but wonder why Gil is still at his desk on July 16th. Has the world gone completely mad? Is this the final step in becoming unmoored from the natural world, begun decades ago when industry began to displace agriculture as humanity’s dominant profession? Will the fall bonfire never come?

Hagar the Horrible, 7/16/16

I’m not sure which interpretation of this strip is more unsettling: that an executioner, overhearing strangers having a conversation in a pub, assumed that they were talking about executing people, or that this executioner’s work life and sexual desires have converged in horrifying ways.

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Beetle Bailey, 6/25/16

You can have your “Miss Buxley Wednesdays”; for my money, the best day in Beetle Bailey is “The Halftracks’ marriage is an awful hellpit of despair Saturdays.” I love the way she goes bug-eyed in panel one, as if thinking “we talked about this, we decided this years ago, why on earth would you bring this up now?” Then in panel two her face goes all hard with anger as he melodramatically bites his lower lip. Pure gold, I tell ya!

Hagar the Horrible, 6/25/16

Oh, man, this started off as my favorite kind of Hagar the Horrible, one about the Hagarverse’s Scandinavia’s transition from a pagan culture with more human-scaled gods to Christianity. How is Hagar supposed to show his affection for an omnipresent but invisible deity, one he can’t even visualize? But then it takes a dramatic turn. “No, Helga, you don’t understand! I was fucking God!”

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Crankshaft, 5/14/16

I sort of thought I was joking earlier this week but no, it turns out they really are killing off Rose! They’ve been doing this arts-y jumping back and forth over two weeks or so of strip time, and I suppose it’s possible this funeral scene is going to be a dumb fakeout, but it sure does seem like she’s dead (of cancer, natch). You have to almost admire the perversity of today’s strip, in which the grim punchline is put into the first panel and then the second panel is just a son staring at his hated mother, waiting for her to die.

Hagar the Horrible, 5/14/16

Meanwhile, Hagar the Horrible shows you how to land a really solid “ha ha, it’s funny because he’s old and dying” joke.

Family Circus, 5/14/16

As near as we can tell, most human societies have believed that the soul lives on after death in some form for all of history. What if, ironically, this only became reality once we mastered the art of photography? In the 19th century, processes beyond our ken began tying the ghostly echoes of our loved ones to the visual representations we produced. The more pictures we took, the stronger the undead entities became. And now that we store thousands and thousands of perfect digital images … in the cloud … the consequences will be too terrible to imagine.

Mary Worth, 5/14/16

People may doubt Ian and Toby as a couple, but I think it’s adorable how she always looks for a way to slip her wedding vows into daily conversation!