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Hagar the Horrible, 2/27/17

Oh, man, it looks like the ongoing Hagar the Horrible exploration of the Norse transition from paganism to Christianity just got simultaneously more philosophical and more real. Because when you stop believing in a pantheon of fallible deities who fight amongst themselves and start worshipping an all-knowing, all-powerful, omnibenevolent creator God, you quickly run into the problem of theodicy: why do bad things happen to good people? How can a God capable of perfect action be displeased with, or even hostile towards, His own creations? We can see that some of the vikings are having an easier time reconciling these contradictions than others.

Hi and Lois 2/27/17

At the other end of the Walker-Browne Cinematic Universe’s timeline, our heroes are grappling with a decidedly more modern problem: an economic system that crushes the lives of its laborers so thoroughly that all they can do in their off time is more work. Any God is invisible to them behind so many layers of capitalist apparatus.

Mark Trail, 2/27/17

Look, Cherry, Mark was just thinking about wolves last week, OK??? He just … is it wrong for a guy to sit around spending his spare time thinking about wolves? And for one species of howling canid to prompt a pop-culture reference to another, closely related species????? Jeez, leave Mark alone, Cherry! (Real talk: Mark seems to be having some problems, and he better get his headspace in order before he becomes “Dirty”‘s prey.)

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 2/27/17

Ha ha, it’s funny because … Loweezy is losing weight because she’s clinically depressed? That … that’s not funny at all, actually.

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Spider-Man, 2/11/17

Oh, goodie, you guys: the current Spider-Man plot has advanced to the point where we at last are getting to enjoy some super-powered combat! By which I mean yesterday Ronan, the Accuser, smacked Spidey and Rocket around a little and now everyone’s just standing there jabbering at each other. Anyway, today we learn that our web-headed hero has a distinctive odor, at least to Rocket’s fine-tuned snout! What do you think Spider-Man smells like? Probably some combination of “I invented this high-performance, tight-fitting superhero costume but didn’t really think about making it machine washable and I don’t really get around to hand-washing it very often and also usually I wad it up into a little case immediately after engaging in strenuous superheroics” and failure, right?

Hi and Lois, 2/11/17

Sorry, Ditto! Your dad’s gonna be eating all the ice cream, lying on the couch for months on end, staying home from work on long-term disability because he tried to lift that enormously heavy generator by himself without bending his knees.

Mary Worth, 2/11/17

That vigorously spewing fountain thrusting upwards in the background as Zak and Iris press their bodies close for the last time? It represents their tears, y’all. Their tears. Get your minds out of the gutter.

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Dennis the Menace, 2/8/17

My friend Ruth Graham recently wrote a fascinating story about the fact that huge swaths of Americans reached adulthood thinking that Eli Whitney was black. She goes into some of the reasons why. For one thing, the cotton gin helped make cotton a more lucrative crop, which increased demand for slave labor in the American south, and so it’s an invention often discussed in schools during Black History Month, around the same time that other actual black inventors are also introduced. The irony that a black person might’ve set the chain of events that ramped up cotton cultivation in motion seems to make the idea hard to resist (in many versions of the story, this alternate history black Eli Whitney gets screwed out of the profits from his invention, natch). I think this Dennis the Menace illustrates the process by which these kinds of mistakes can be made, since a lot of the way we’re taught history in elementary and high school involves rote memorization of isolated bits of data, leaving our minds free to fill in the substantial blanks around them.

In other news, one of Dennis’s neighbors is a big drunk! But, you know, not a day drunk. That’s how you know he’s not talking about Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson’s retired and can drink whenever he wants!

Hi and Lois, 2/8/17

It’s Trixie’s thought balloon that really makes clear the profound strangeness here: Lois, mother of a teenager and thus presumably on at least the verge of middle age, is expected in this suburban gender-normative milieu to worry about wrinkles, so we accept her use of “4 Ever Young” face cream without much thought. But Trixie’s burning desire to advance past infancy — a desire that we know can never be fulfilled — really hammers home the Flagstons’ nightmarish endless-now existence. Just as Trixie eagerly anticipates milestones she’ll never reach — walking, speech, autonomy — so too does Lois experience eternal youth that she cannot enjoy, instead living in constant terror of the crow’s feet that never quite appear at the corners of her eyes.