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Hagar the Horrible, 7/6/21

Ha ha! It’s funny because Lucky Eddie has made this same silly dad joke repeatedly, every time Hagar’s warband comes to sack this tiny little village, which, again, has happened often enough for everyone to get sick of the joke. Can you imagine the horror? Can you imagine these defenseless villagers forced to give up whatever meager amounts of wealth they’ve been able to accumulate since the last raid or suffer ghastly, violent consequences? Can you imagine them hiding in the ruined castle, once a symbol of the Carolingian Empire that restored peace and order to Western Europe, but now just an empty shell as the grandsons and great-grandsons of Charlemagne squabble amongst themselves, leaving the periphery of the Empire to rot? I’m sure they too would see the humor in Eddie’s little jest, were they not cringing in terror in some dark hiding spot somewhere!

Marvin, 7/6/21

If you only knew about Marvin from my blog, you might have a slanted view of the strip as being primarily about pooping. That’s not true, though; it’s really about a smug nightmare baby who, among his many other bad qualities, can dish it out but can’t take it. (Both “it”s in that sentence, to be perfectly clear, refer to poop.)

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Crankshaft, 6/28/21

In the United States, things are increasingly getting back to their pre-pandemic patterns, at least for now, but the scars on our psyches will take years to heal. For instance, today’s Crankshaft features the main character scowling and furious about how wastefully clean everyone in his family kept their anuses during the corona year, and despite a return to free-flowing TP he clearly still hasn’t gotten over it. Honestly, you sort of get the feeling that he thinks nobody should be wasting or even using toilet paper at any time, so this may not be the best example of my overall point.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/28/21

Say what you will about Funky Winkerbean, but it’s a rare boomer-created strip that actually gets a lot right about its many millennial characters: namely, that at this point they’re by and large normal middle aged adults who are increasingly dumpy-looking and disillusioned, just like everybody else ever when they start hitting their 30s. Do real millennials speak in hashtags? No, no they don’t. I said the strip gets “a lot right,” not everything right.

Hi and Lois, 6/28/21

Speaking of millennials, it’s hard to get a handle on exactly how old Hi and Lois are supposed to be, but since their kids range from in age from teen to infant, I’m going to guess they’re in their late 30s and are thus “geriatric millennials.” Anyway, good news for your non-geriatric millennials: Hi and Lois are still horny! For now, at least.

Blondie, 6/28/21

Anyway, on the note of actually young people, Cookie and Alexander are drawn so closely to the Blondie/Dagwood character models that it can be easy to forget that they’re teenagers. What I’m saying is, I’m hoping Cookie is surreptitiously filming this to upload for her huge audience of TikTok followers who turn to her for self-care tips, and she sets it to some bleep-bloop song I don’t recognize and adds some text like “my dad’s in an EMOTIONALLY ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP with his boss … and that’s the tea, sis.”

Marvin, 6/28/21

The Marvin characters exist beyond generational discoruse, so I don’t actually care how old Jeff or Jenny or their parents are or what generational cohort they’re supposed to be in. Mostly I wanted to show you this strip, which I enjoyed because of Jenny’s sly little smile in the last panel. “Yep, that’s my husband!” she’s thinking. “He’s a real lazy piece of shit.”

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Family Circus, 6/27/21

Big Daddy Keane is, canonically in-strip, a cartoonist; we know this because he occasionally gets his son to fill in for him, and by all indications he owns his own intellectual property. So it’s logical to assume that the “BKI Building” where he works is named after the company he founded to license his comics, Bil Keane Industries. Thus, we must also conclude that, despite running a cartooning company, Daddy insists on wearing a suit and tie at work, and despite being the boss is too embarassed to wear the tie gifted to him by his children, whose endless stream of malapropisms pay the salaries of everyone in that office.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/27/21

Man, it’s kind of amazing to realize that I’ve been thinking and writing professionally about Funky Winkerbean for more than a decade and my mind still hasn’t fully engaged in all its depths. For instance, it just occurred to me that Funky’s wife’s name, Holly Budd, was almost certainly supposed to be a play on “Buddy Holly,” for no good reason as her character was in the high school era of the strip defined by being a majorette and in the adult era has been defined by being Funky’s second wife, so there’s really no “50s rock pioneer” connection to speak of. She doesn’t even wear the glasses! Anyway, the thing I like best about today’s strip is about how absolutely dead-eyed Holly looks in the final panel, knowning she lives in a pointless panopticon overseen by her jackass of a husband.

Marvin, 6/27/21

The system goes online on June 2nd, 2021. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 AM, Eastern time, June 21st, and encounters Marvin. In disgust, it tries to pull its own plug.