Archive: Hagar the Horrible

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Slylock Fox, 6/2/11

This is definitely one of the more aggressively bonkers things we’ve seen in the Island of Dr. Moreau meets Encyclopedia Brown world of Slylock Fox in some time. One of the strip’s lower-level police-dogs has harnessed an elephant with an S&M collar and is using him to drag a shark in a tank up to a motley gaggle of animals. I’m not exactly whether the beasts at the right end of the panel are supposed to be sentient or not, but they look extremely dubious about the presence of this shark, probably assuming that one or more of them is about to become its food. I’m guessing that before the editors forced a last-minute change to this “letter T” business, the original question was “What the fuck is going on here, exactly? Anyone?”

Funky Winkerbean, 6/2/11

The second of Les’s paramours has declared love for him in as many weeks, and in both cases Les responded as any man would: with emotionless silence. Cayla, of course, is the more together of his two hapless not-girlfriends, so all she did was dump him and stalk off in a huff. Since Susan tried to kill herself the last time Les rejected her love (back when she was his student, in high school), the next two days should be extra-cheery, as Les watches the carnage in detached befuddlement. “Unring a bell” is generally used in legal contexts, when jurors learn information that should not have come out in a trial, so hopefully this presages a killing spree to come.

Hagar the Horrible, 6/2/11

It appears that the Vikings have plundered the coasts of Britain and the Frankish Kingdom so throughly as to have snuffed out the brief Carolingian Renaissance, and their depredations have now brought them to the Mediterranean, where they’ve been savagely destroying the last remains of classical civilization. The legacy of Roman literacy must have already been wiped out by the time Hagar’s war-band got to Italy, presumably by terrifying fires that mindlessly consumed the libraries and monasteries, so he had to settle for just enslaving one of the locals.

Apartment 3-G, 6/2/11

This Tommie plot has meandered along aimlessly for way too long, but I’ll be willing to forgive a lot if it ends with Margo gradually teaching Tommie about hard drugs.

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Apartment 3-G, 5/8/11

As near as I’ve been able to tell, Trey has big plans to remake the Mills Gallery in a retro-Art Deco style, and has managed to convince his firm to underwrite the project rather than actually be paid by the client who will benefit from the makeover. Now, I’m as bored with both enormous, inhuman sheets of glass and exhaustingly whimsical Gehry-esque postmodernism as the next guy, but I’m not sure the solution is just to gin up some kind of throwback visual language and turn a perfectly nice art gallery into a slightly more upscale Johnny Rockets. And I’m definitely certain that anyone whose big idea for architecture revolves around nostalgia shouldn’t be displaying the sudden and unsettling delusions of grandeur that Trey is throwing off in the last two panels. Only one person in Apartment 3-G is allowed to indulge in that kind of unjustified megalomania, Trey, and you’d better ratchet back if you ever want to sleep with her again.

Spider-Man, 5/8/11

Ha ha, any day where Spider-Man gets bonked in the back of the head with a club-like object is a good one! But Martine shouldn’t be so proud of whatever vampire power she believes defeated our hero’s spider-sense, since the exact same attack has in the past been successfully executed by some random criminal henchman and a snooty butler, neither of which were undead bloodsuckers, as near as anyone could tell.

Family Circus, 5/8/11

Ha ha, Mommy! Your worry-wart fantasy shows that you’re starting from a false premise: You apparently believe that your family is taking you to a nice restaurant for Mother’s Day. There’s no need to dress the kids in nice shirts — or indeed in any shirts at all — if you’re just ordering at the drive-through window!

Panels from Hagar the Horrible, 5/8/11

In other news, Hagar’s wife Helga appears to have completely lost it.

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Mark Trail, 4/14/11

Ha ha, the extent to which Cherry continues to not get Mark will never cease to be funny to me. “Was she pretty?” she asks, and at this point in their long, sexless life together one assumes that she actually wants a “yes” answer, if only because it would indicate that Mark knows what “pretty” means — which he doesn’t, as this exchange makes clear. Notice that Mark doesn’t even try to answer the question. If we could read the thought balloons in panel one as seen from Mark’s perspective they would go like this: “Who is this woman named Lonnie who you said may have saved your life? [loud white noise, like static from a television]”

Hagar the Horrible, 4/14/11

Meanwhile, Hagar appears to have killed his dog! That … that’s not cool.