Archive: Hi and Lois

Post Content

Crock, 11/9/25

Now, obviously part of the whole deal of Crock is that it takes what’s objectively a pretty grim situation — a remote outpost of an army engaged in a grinding colonial war that we know with the hindsight of history that they’re going to lose — and uses it as a setting for a mostly light-hearted and zany series of comical vignettes. Still, sometimes the grim seeps through more than others, and you gotta admit that “angry troops attempt to lynch their commanding officer, only for him to trick them into falling to their deaths in turn, leaving him alone to wander the desert” is one of those times.

Hagar the Horrible, 11/9/25

Now, you may wonder why Hagar, who seems well aware that his years as a notorious pillager have created a very lucrative brand, doesn’t simply cut out the middleman: instead of letting the Duke of York profit by association and then stealing said profits, why doesn’t Hagar simply charge visitors to his own village, go on a highly paid speaking tour, and publish Horrible, and Profitable: What Today’s Leaders Can Learn From My Years Of Terror Around The North Sea Littoral, which will be bought by CEOs at airport bookstores everywhere and handed over to their assistants to summarize? But Hagar is savvy enough to understand that his brand wouldn’t survive any such attempt to “go legit,” so any profit he’d gain from such a move would be fleeting. Plus he can’t read, so the book thing probably hasn’t even occurred to him.

Mary Worth, 11/9/25

No offense to David Attenborough, but I’ve never really cared for birds. Like, I guess I don’t dislike them, and of course they’re beautiful to look at, but I’ve always found them off-putting up close — they just seem clearly further away from us, evolution-wise, than cats and dogs, and looking into their eyes they always feel kind of alien to me. The fact that they’re actually quite intelligent just adds to my unease. So, no shade on the many fine people who are bird lovers out there, but I’m just saying that for me personally, if a parrot I had encountered outside had figured out where I lived and begun rapping on the windows demanding to be let in, I would not be quite as enthusiastic about it as Toby is here.

Hi and Lois, 11/9/25

I really love Hi’s quick three-panel transition from triumph to anxiety to crushing depression. Honestly, the final panel with the “punchline” is completely unnecessary and even detracts from things a little bit.

Crankshaft, 11/9/25

The name of this painting is of course a Crankshaft-level bit of awful wordplay, which is why it’s great that he looks so horrified. “Oh god, I talk like this, don’t I? Why haven’t they murdered me in my sleep?”

Post Content

Hi and Lois, 11/8/25

In addition to being a coastal elitist who knows about academia, I contain multitudes and am also a Rust Belt native who was in a bowling league growing up, so let me explain something to you effete non-bowlers out there: it is extremely easy to throw a gutter ball, and if you were engaged in an earnest contest to see who could throw more gutter balls, that contest would simply end in a tie, because you and your opponent would each get the ball in the gutter at every opportunity (20 per game). I must assume that Dot and Ditto engaged in some sort of conceptually more complex competition, in which they each pledged to bowl to the best of their abilities as if they were attempting to knock down as many pins as possible, and yet still agreed that the “winner” at the end would be the one who had most frequently failed in the task. Under such conditions, could you ever know whether your opponent was operating in good faith? Dot’s facial expression shows that she has profound doubts about the results of this admittedly confusing competition.

Six Chix, 11/8/25

It’s a nice touch that they gave Pumpkin Boyfriend orange hands. He’s not just a guy with a pumpkin for a head, he’s all pumpkin, and it’s a good thing he didn’t go into that coffee shop or all the autumn-crazed maniacs in there would have torn him to pieces.

Post Content

Crankshaft, 10/27/25

“I mean, I get it! We’re all thinking it. We’re all thinking about the guy who dresses up in pizza boxes and how he’s mortal, and how he’s going to die someday, maybe right here in our restaurant. We’re all thinking about how we might have to pull these pizza boxes off his corpse and look at his face, for the first and last time. We all think about it all the time! But we don’t talk about it. You’ve got to learn not to talk about it.”

Hi and Lois, 10/27/25

“We also text each other about our husbands! Uh, all good stuff.”

Dustin, 10/27/25

“Anyway, long story short, I ruined my laptop.”