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Hagar the Horrible, 5/4/23

I know it’s a little hypocritical, because I always complain about legacy comics being static and hidebound, but I also am always a little unsettled when a legacy comic introduces a new character out of nowhere. Still, I have high hopes for this new fellow in Hagar the Horrible, Honi’s Friend Who Wears A Beret And Waits For Food With His Fork And Knife At The Ready And His Tongue Hanging Out Like A Dipshit, and I look forward to his future adventures, assuming he’s not about to be disemboweled by Hagar.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/4/23

OK, I take back what I said yesterday: Rene doesn’t need emotional validation to recognize his own inherent good qualities. No, he knows himself quite well as the ultimate soulless scamming machine. He will stop at nothing to hone the skills necessary to pull off his grifts. If he must look deeply into the souls of men and help them set their lives right in the process, so be it, but that cannot be anything more than a means to an end, and that end is to make a few bucks off of people on a cruise who might want to be similarly transformed. I will no longer question his purity of purpose in this space. Too bad he’s probably going to prison for attempted murder now!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/4/23

What kind of elaborate and pricey bachelor party would a resident of Hootin’ Holler envision? Would it involve strippers? Did you read that sentence and then suddenly and involuntarily imagine what the Snuffy Smith version of a strip club would look like? Did the very thought of it make you want to lie down, not in a sexy way, but more in a desperately try to achieve a state of ego death that will allow you to stop imagining it way?

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/3/23

You know, the story of Rene is a true tragedy, and not just because he tried and failed to kill a late-middle-aged man, who then further humiliated him by risking his own life to save him from the sea. No, I’m talking about the fact that Rene does not love himself enough to see himself as anything other than a crook. He really did teach Sarah about art, before she got amnesia! He was a kind and supportive mentor to Galexia, his new-age grift partner! And it seems like whatever mumbo jumbo he came up with for his Augustus Mirakle persona helped Mud really move past some of his many, many personality problems. Truly, he has the power to help and to heal, if he’d only allow himself feel his own capacity for good.

Family Circus, 5/3/23

Jesus, look at how smug these two are at pulling off one of the dumbest wordplay act-outs the world’s ever seen. Thank God they usually despise each other so they don’t team up on bullshit like this more often. I hate it.

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Dustin, 5/1/23

A truly incredible thing to keep in mind about Dustin is that it’s a comic that debuted in January 2010, when, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, unemployment was higher than it had been at any time since the Great Depression, and its whole deal was that college grads who had to move home because they couldn’t find jobs were just lazy, entitled brats whose problems were entirely a product of their bad character. It’s really only today, with joblessness at historic lows, that the times have caught up with the strip’s premise, although now the economic big brains are loudly proclaiming that we need more unemployment in order to fight inflation, so maybe Dustin needs to start arguing that actually, by being unemployable, he’s helping in macroeconomic terms.

Hi and Lois, 5/1/23

In other generational warfare news, Hi is a white-collar suburban dad in a legacy comic strip so he feels like he should be a Boomer, but based on the age of his kids he’s probably in his mid-to-late 40s, and, you know what, usually us Gen Xers are just glad to be noticed, but I’m sorry, I will not sit here and be lectured to by Chip fucking Flagston of all people.

The Lockhorns, 5/1/23

You ever have an older relative that you remember always “taking a nap on the couch” during family functions when you were a kid, and you only realized later probably hated big gatherings in their house and self-medicated by getting drunk? Well, in unrelated news, Leroy has “run out of gas” during Loretta’s attempt to share a pleasant afternoon with him.

Dick Tracy, 5/1/23

This sounds like a great way for the Red Cross to destroy its role as a neutral aid organization and ensure that no government ever gave them access to POWs ever again! On the other hand, do we know for sure they didn’t do this for Axis POWs too? Maybe they were just opposed to the idea of holding prisoners of war in general.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/1/23

“This is Rex Morgan, M.D., for pete’s sake! Do you realize that something interesting briefly happened? Unacceptable!”