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Hagar the Horrible, 4/7/12

Hagar has spent so many years engaged in brutal warfare that he no longer understands how to behave in conventional social situations, and crowds trigger attacks of PTSD.

Shoe, 4/7/12

The Perfesser is either too lazy to open gifts or too jaded to feel the brief anticipatory joy one usually experiences while doing so, and now just demands to be told what they are before he bothers to remove the wrapping paper.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/7/12

The chickens of Hootin’ Holler, like their human counterparts, suffer from significant genetic abnormalities.

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Crankshaft, 3/6/12

Despite my (too many) years of reading Crankshaft, I’ve only just at this moment realized that Keesterman, the guy whose mailbox Crankshaft is constantly destroying due to his dangerous inability to operate a schoolbus, is also one of the guys who meets Crankshaft and some other old dudes at a sad chain diner where they drink coffee and pun sullenly and probably leave stingy tips. The endless mailbox-annihilation incidents might explain why Keesterman has finally snapped, looking in panel three like he’s going to react to Crankshaft’s mild ribbing with a punch to the face, something I dearly hope we get to see over the remainder of the week, from several different angles.

Hi and Lois, 3/6/12

We’ve seen some intermittent attempts to make Hi and Lois’ marriage interesting, but frankly I think there’s much more drama to be wrung from the lives of the Flagstons’ next-door neighbors. Check out Irma’s disgruntled look in the final panel: not only is her family mired in debt, but that means that she can’t even have a nice party without it devolving into recriminations and violence, which to her is the worst indignity.

Beetle Bailey, 3/6/12

There are occasional Beetle Baileys in which our heroes (?) are fighting something called the “Red Army,” and while it’s usually clear from context that these are training exercises, it would be fun to believe that today’s strip takes place in an alternate universe where the men of Camp Swampy have been deployed into combat against the Soviet Union, and that, as you’d expect, their division has been quickly defeated and its few survivors are now being rounded up. Given the creepy fact that we see no people attached to these massive gun barrels, it’s also possible that the Red Army is a band of out-of-control military death-bots, who are making short work of their hapless biological adversaries, not least thanks to the humans’ inability to function without technology that’s controlled by the cyber-enemy.

Hagar the Horrible, 3/6/12

Lucky Eddie has blatantly stolen this joke from Groucho Marx, but I’m not going to get too upset about it because in a minute he’s going to be mauled to death by bears for his crimes.

Marvin, 3/6/12

Yesterday I praised Marvin for grappling with interesting themes and avoiding scatological content. Naturally, today’s strip features the smug hell-infant boasting that he can just shit in his pants whenever he wants.

Herb and Jamaal, 3/6/12

If you’ve enjoyed this Herb and Jamaal strip about burping, why not enjoy the four paragraphs I somehow managed to write about it, back when it first ran in 2004?

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Hagar the Horrible, 2/24/12

It’s sad, but true: If you’re living on the windswept edge of a Norwegian fjord somewhere towards the tail end of the Viking age, a one-room hovel with a thatched roof surrounded by grass poking out of the nutrient-poor soil really does represent “do[ing] rather well for yourself.” At least you don’t live in a mud hut that melts every time it rains! At least you’re not a slave! Still, I’m a little put off by the sign, since Hagar is a known illiterate. But I guess it doesn’t really matter, since most everyone else around is illiterate too! Maybe he forced some terrified monk kidnapped from Lindisfarne to write it for him, just for the status of having writing on his property.

Six Chix, 2/24/12

Meanwhile, over in Six Chix, someone’s been murdered by a comically oversized shoe, apparently! I, uh, have no real way of dealing with this. Enjoy your weekend, everybody!