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Hagar the Horrible, 11/28/12

Is “boiling in oil” one of those phrases that only survives in occasional use because it rhymes? I mean, if you’ve heated up some form of oil to the boiling point, and put any variety of organic matter into it, you’d call what you’re really doing “frying,” right? Even if that organic matter is, you know, a dismembered human corpse. Ha ha, these knights are threatening Hagar and his men with a gruesome fate out of the most violent and depraved slasher flick, right here on the funny pages, in front of the children! Yet neither I nor anyone else can take the threat particularly seriously. Look, the colorists have even given everyone wooden swords. Nobody’s getting hurt in this battle!

Beetle Bailey, 11/28/12

And yet I find this Beetle Bailey grim beyond description, despite Beetle’s shaky reassurance that his mangled body will be restored to health tomorrow by narrative artifice. Still, imagine Miss Buxley gasping out “Oh, Beetle! You’re all broken!” in an exaggeratedly childlike Marilyn Monroe-type voice and try to tell me you don’t get the creeps. David Lynch directs!

Dennis the Menace, 11/28/12

Dennis is using an awesome book about bad-ass pirates to illustrate safety lessons for his younger friend. Menace levels: Undetectable by even the most powerful instruments.

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Hagar the Horrible, 10/15/12

“Maybe I shouldn’t have spent the night before I led my men into a brutal, hand-to-hand combat, during which they must either kill or be killed, filling their heads with tales of damned souls, wandering the earth as dim spectres, mere shadows of their former selves. Which thought do you think is more likely to jump into their heads unbidden it the midst of this violent melee: that they themselves will be felled in battle and their shade will live on, with the wounds and terror they feel now continuing for eternity? Or that, for the rest of their lives, every time they feel a prickling on the back of their neck or an unseasonably icy wind across their face, they’ll suspect that it’s the vengeful spirit of a man they cut down, haunting them until they succumb to madness and terror?”

Hi and Lois, 10/15/12

Ha, and if Hi’s face is any indication, he sure has earned the right to use the word “boring”! If Hi’s face is any indication, today was the day when his capacity to feel joy or pain or anything at all really was finally snuffed out by the intense ennui of mindless, soulless corporate dronery. Get used to that face, kids, it’s the only one he can make now!

Slylock Fox, 10/15/12

In order for the Slylockian world anthropomorphic animals to exist, there must be some kind of apocalyptic event in our future and their past, during which the lower beasts achieved sentience and most of the human population was wiped out, presumably violently. Normally I don’t take this personally, but something about today’s strip, in which we learn that these horror-monsters are riding our subway to our Brooklyn, makes me angry. You didn’t build that, hippo-thing! Neither did you, shirt-wearing cat! The thought of the Museum of Natural History, presumably now retooled and dedicated to the animals’ triumph over the now exterminated human race, particularly sickens me.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/15/12

Oh my goodness, I sure hope that “the party business” is the euphemism for prostitution that the writer of Rex Morgan and King Features Syndicate agreed on after several tortuous weeks of negotiations! Junior knows, and so does that cheery looking couple sitting on the bench. “That Junior, he runs the best brothel in San Diego County, doesn’t he, Martha?” “You can say that again, dear!”

B.C., 10/15/12

Hey! I just flew Southwest yesterday, and as usual the flight and service were excellent, and not once did anyone attempt to feed me something that they barfed and/or shat out (sorry, I’ve already grossed myself out enough just thinking about this, not going to look up how gizzards actually work, I’m afraid there’ll be pictures).

Spider-Man, 10/15/12

You know, the modern, Internet-savvy newsroom is a high-pressure, 24/7 operation, so it’s nice to see that J. Jonah Jameson still takes time to humiliate his employees with elaborate, improvised, and extremely sarcastic little skits.

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Hagar the Horrible, 10/7/12

At last, a definitive answer to the question I’ve been musing on for years: Are Hagar and his entourage Christians or pagans? Hagar, at least, appears to still worship the gods of the old Norse pantheon, as is perhaps befitting for the bloodthirsty leader of a violent war band. Given the lack of intra-Norse civil strife and the friendly relations between Hagar and Brother Olaf, we’ll just have to assume that the action of the strip takes place during one of the more peaceful lulls in Norway’s transition to Christianity, which generally involved one side gaining dominance and attempting to violently suppress the other. Indeed, today’s strip shows how hearts and minds can be changed without use of force, as Hagar begins to question his allegiance to deities that were explicitly believed by their worshippers to not be all-powerful or all-knowing.

Herb and Jamaal, 10/7/12

So I read this strip and thought “Haha, at last, I get to see the moment when Herb and Jamaal goes completely nuts,” but then … it turns out this quote is in fact floating all over the Internet as attributed to Desmond Tutu? There’s never any explanation of the context in which he said it, though, which sets my “let’s attach a quote we like to a random famous person” alarm bells going off. Still, the good Archbishop is a cyclist, so who knows! Anyone who can confirm or deny this quote gets a shiny Internet quarter.

Edited to clarify: The “give a man a fish…” phrase is as old as the hills and clearly not originated by Tutu. I’m specifically wondering if he was the one who turned it into a joke about bicycling.