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Hagar the Horrible, 1/16/11

At least one of you out there has, liked me, wondered about the relationship between Hagar and Helga and Lucky Eddie. Is he just Hagar’s shipmate and bosom companion? If so, why does he spend so much time with Hagar and Helga, even attending dinner with them? The answer might be implied in the degrading task he’s been assigned by Helga today: no doubt he’s their slave, presumably captured by Hagar during one of his raids on some peaceful, unsuspecting village somewhere along the shore of the Baltic or North Sea. Since only Hagar’s whim will ever be able to free him, and even then he won’t be a full-status member of the community, his “Lucky” nickname seems particularly cruel.

Panels from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 1/16/11

Ha ha, it’s funny because these poor hillbillies have poor insulation, no central heating, and few garments to keep them warm!

Pluggers, 1/16/11

You’re a plugger if you’re old enough to use archaic dialectical terms for everyday concepts, and also if you had to get married because you knocked your girlfriend up on the chesterfield in the den.

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Ziggy, 12/20/10

Today Ziggy has gone to see Santa for what’s at least the third year in a row, and we really have to start asking ourselves why he’s doing it. The easy answer is that he’s there for unspeakable reasons involving children, but if there were easy answers to anything involving Ziggy, the strip would have been purged from newspapers, and our collective pop-cultural consciousness, years ago. Here’s my theory: do you notice that the children in all these panels are particularly loathsome and cruel? I think Ziggy has sought out the worst children he can find — perhaps he’s managed to find out when Santa is going to visit the Home For Very Young Delinquents And Sass-Talkers — just to see them insult the jolly old elf. This is Ziggy’s way of pulling himself out of his bottomless pit of low self-esteem. “At least I’m better than these brats,” he thinks to himself. “At least I’m not calling poor Santa fat. I mean, I’m thinking it, but I’m not saying it aloud. That’s the difference between me and them. That counts for something, right?”

Herb and Jamaal, 12/20/10

Note that Herb is drinking out of his “Herb” coffee mug, while Jamaal is drinking out of a mug featuring the elaborate monogram logo of the soul food restaurant he and Herb co-own, which combines an H and a J. In other words, Jamaal is honoring their friendship and business partnership, while Herb thinks only of himself. This has much more troubling long-term implications for the duo than the personnel changes at the local high school.

Pluggers, 12/20/10

It sure is hard for pluggers to deny the same-sex attractions that shame them so, but somehow the compulsive eating helps them push it all deep down inside, where it can’t get out.

Update: Uh, as faithful reader Ned Ryerson pointed out, I made basically the inverse of this joke the first time this panel ran this year. In my defense, it’s actually a sign of good mental health that I don’t keep an infinite mental file of all the Pluggers panels I mock. I’m still working on the infinite mental file of Mary Worth strips with a team of trained psychiatrists.

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Pluggers, 12/11/10

One of the running jokes with which I routinely irritate my friends and family comes up every time anyone discusses their plans for their mortal remains after their death. I always claim that I intend to have my corpse taxidermied and arranged in a heroic pose — possibly holding a sword, definitely naked — and that whoever wants to inherit my vast fortune will be required to place me somewhere prominent in their home. Now, this is all good fun (or at least it will be until my will is unsealed), but it did make my mind go someplace particularly grim upon seeing a typical Pluggers man-animal in a storefront taxidermist. At least pluggers don’t simply feast on the rotting flesh of their dead fellows, as the bird-inhabitants of their sister strip Shoe do. I for one would like to see a “plugger cemetery” (glassed-in display case) if only in the hopes that the taxidermist’s art provides the various schlubby, ill-dressed dead pluggers with a modicum of dignity and dynamism that was wholly lacking from their lives.

Gasoline Alley, 12/11/10

You don’t have to be following the current typically dull Gasoline Alley plot to appreciate today’s strip, in which the loathsome Slim’s mother-in-law does her best to pretend that he simply doesn’t exist.

Gil Thorp, 12/11/10

Oh, also, in Gil Thorp Jamaar died for our sins.