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Hagar the Horrible, 7/21/24

One of the many smarter-than-me commenters on this site pointed out that it’s actually pretty grim that Hagar and Eddie are the only recurring characters in Hagar’s war band. One assumes that the others are all killed off and replaced over time — sometimes one by one, and sometimes all at once in the disastrous encounters that presumably lead to the occasional desert island strips. Anyway, today’s strip is a good reminder that whenever your new boss tells you that their workplace is “like a big family,” you are definitely walking into the most dysfunctional company you’ve ever seen, but at least these days it’s usually not going to literally kill you.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/21/24

A combination of neoliberal ideology and deep-rooted Calvinism has made the modern United States a place uniquely obsessed with constant productivity. In such environments, only “holy fools” — like, say, the weirdly ossified early 20th century fake hillbilly stereotypes in a syndicated legacy newspaper strip — are free to proclaim that maybe laziness is good, actually, and getting things done isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 7/21/24

Sorry to find two funny things in a strip about an abusive father who beat his son so badly he needed surgery, but two very funny things in this strip are (a) Buck being completely flummoxed as to why two best friends with a love of old-timey-style comedy, one of whom is tall and thin and the other short and round, would refer to themselves as “Shorty and the Beanpole,” and (b) Rex being like “We all need to do our part. My part is fixing up the broken meat; minds and feelings are completely foreign to me and frankly somebody else’s problem.”

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Hagar the Horrible, 7/5/24

I know the joke here is that you think the buffet owner has “won” this coin toss because it means someone will be patronizing his restaurant, but in fact he has “lost” it because that patron is Hagar, whose rapacious appetite will result in an unprofitable transaction. But everyone’s expression in the second panel almost got me to Google “did Vikings ever engage in cannibalism” before I remembered that most webpages about Viking culture are either written by neo-pagans talking about how Vikings were very nice and kind of woke, actually, or by neo-fascists talking about how Vikings were very nice and extremely representative of the superiority of the Nordic bloodline, actually, so I decided to skip it.

Dustin, 7/5/24

Wow. They said it couldn’t be done. They said it was impossible. They said, “There will never be a Dustin strip that Josh laughs at unironically.” But today, they did it. And all it took was having the character I feel the most neutrally about insult the character I hate the most. This should be an inspiration to everyone. Your dreams can come true, if you work hard enough.

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Family Circus, 6/21/24

Lord, I am a simple man, and one of my favorite Family Circus bits is when Jeffy just says some of the dumbest shit imaginable. Today’s dumb shit is particularly fun for me because it’s actually two different kinds of dumb shit that are a little bit in tension with one another. Because on the one hand, do you think other animals have to buy clothes? Maybe you think they should, but they clearly don’t. And second, you know that the turtle isn’t in his shell, but, biologically speaking, he is his shell, right? It’s part of his body; there’s not some naked little shell-less turtle inside of it. Like, imagine a scenario where a turtle ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and his eyes were opened, and he realized that he’s naked. He’s going to have to make or buy clothes for himself! His shell doesn’t count! He’s going to have to pull his clothes over his shell, and how stupid is that going to look?

Hagar the Horrible, 6/21/24

Oh, my friend! That raise was never yours! In this economic arrangement Hagar, the owner of the boat, is capital, and you are labor. You receive the prevailing wage as your salary, and Hagar appropriates the surplus value generated by your efforts for his own uses. Don’t let misogyny blind you to the economic realities of your situation! Your choices are submission, entrepreneurship, or revolution!