Post Content

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.

Post Content

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.

Post Content

Crankshaft, 9/18/12

One of my favorite things about Crankshaft (sorry, don’t have time to figure out all the levels of irony involved in my spontaneous decision to apply the word “favorite” to Crankshaft there) is that even when its characters are just bandying dumb puns back and forth, their facial expressions make it look like they’re the last survivors of a genocidal assault that took their entire families. Normally this is just a result of the vague sense of anxiety and unease that pervades the Funkyverse, but in this case Jeff is probably worried, with some justification, that his wife’s mind is going, and she’ll soon be an irritated, malaprop-spouting shell of her former self, just like her father.

Hagar the Horrible, 9/18/12

We often see the same situations over and over again in Hagar the Horrible, and as I’ve said before, I’ve come to believe that this is because events in the strip are playing out in a nonlinear narrative. Thus, every castle raid shown is really just a different moment in a single castle raid, every strip that features Hagar and Eddie in the dungeon is a different moment in the same stretch of imprisonment, etc. “Hagar and Eddie on a desert island” is another repeating trope, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the rest of the crew of Hagar’s ship similarly marooned with them. Still, I’m going to assume that this is again the same shipwreck, and what we’re seeing here is the early days of their time as castaways, before the turn to cannibalism.

Archie, 9/18/12

The silent, expressionless way Archie’s mom is staring at her son is pretty harrowing. Don’t complain about static cling, Arch; you’re lucky she can operate the dryer at all, as she appears to have taken many, many quaaludes.

Family Circus, 9/18/12

“Either that or the house is on fire, and the two of us will soon sizzle and cook like bacon in a pan. We’ll just have to wait and see! Have I mentioned that my home life is so oppressive that I don’t care whether I live or die?”

Funky Winkerbean, 9/18/12

“And then, once the paralytic drugs we’ve laced the wedding cake with kick in, we’ll laminate everybody and hang them on walls all over the house! We’ll never be lonely again!”

Mary Worth, 9/18/12

“Take you, for instance! You’re terribly crippled emotionally. I can tell by the way you dress. Which, admittedly, is visible. All too visible, frankly.”

Mark Trail, 9/18/12

HA HA RUSTY YES CRY BITTER, FLESH-COLORED TEARS