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Hagar the Horrible, 11/10/16

Well, it looks like someone at Hagar the Horrible likes to stoke my fascination with where the Hagarverse falls on the timeline of the Christianization of Scandinavia. Fun fact: the ritual slaughter of horses and eating of horsemeat was deeply ingrained into Germanic pagan ritual, so much so that the Vatican banned the practice in the 8th century as a means to promote Christianity; this is the origin of the modern-day Western taboo on eating horse. Anyway, Helga and the waiter look appalled by Hagar’s discovery, but Hagar himself is more quizzical than anything else. Maybe he’s cautiously feeling out the possibility that this restaurant is a secret hideout for crypto-pagans — and he’s interested in joining them in returning to the Old Ways, where you celebrated blót to gain fertility and good health, and then got to eat some tasty horse.

Shoe, 11/10/16

I love the weird, fossilized cultural nuggets and attitudes you can find embedded in the structural material used to build comic strip punchlines. How ancient is the use of “Wayne Newton” as a signifier for “very bad music,” do you think? Honestly, I would’ve gone with “Justin Bieber,” which is still a solid five years out of date but might tickle the irritation that the old people who read comic strips harbor for anything that’s happened in pop culture since they turned 45.

Meanwhile, I want a lot more information about these two condemned criminals, the Falcon and Guzzwanker. “Guzzwanker and the Falcon” has a better ring to it in my opinion, but maybe they aren’t a criminal duo but just happen to be scheduled for execution on the same day. Guzzwanker is a mild-mannered accountant who, if he hadn’t slipped up and left fingerprints on the murder weapon, nobody would’ve suspected of killing his parents to speed his inheritance. The Falcon, meanwhile, is a notorious international terrorist, and also an actual falcon.

Spider-Man, 11/10/16

“Maybe we’ll never get you convicted for murder, Starr … [one panel of dialogue that distracts you from how this sentence started] … and all four of us heard you confess to murder, so we will definitely get you convicted for it!” God, I hope that camera is still recording. The whole world needs concrete evidence of what dipshits these guys are! And, uh, evidence that Egghead is a murderer, I guess.

Mark Trail, 11/10/16

Ahhh yes, the helicopter explosion will be continuing indefinitely, just as I requested. That’s the stuff we need in these troubled times. That’s the stuff.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/4/16

So the Morgans seem determined to buy a bloated modern house instead of a fusty, antique-cluttered Victorian with bad romantic karma. But even soulless McMansions from the ’90s have a little character, as Sarah is discovering in the delightful little “hidden” “awesome” “kid-sized only” “playroom” under the stairs that someone less whimsical might call “storage space” or “a terrible accident waiting to happen.” Anyway, note the little “SECRET CLUBHOUSE FOR KIDS ONLY SIGN” already hanging up on the wall, indicating that the “little character” I mentioned in the previous sentence is the ghost of the six-year-old who died after getting trapped in there in 2004.

Shoe, 10/4/16

Haha, I absolutely love the emotional turn this strip takes in the final panel. It would’ve been easy to have our lady bird deliver the punchline with heavy-lidded, languid bitterness, and maybe that was her intention; instead, upon just thinking about her ex-husband, her eyes bug out with anger as she realizes, in a rush of emotion, that she isn’t past the awful end of that relationship, and probably never will be.

Pluggers, 10/4/16

Little-known fact: about ten years ago, I made a list of signs that will indicate that we live in a truly degraded age, and “Pluggers does a Viagra joke” was pretty close to the top! Anyway, pluggers gave up on sex years ago, and their main hope for a big romantic encounter is that their joints stop hurting for a few hours, at least enough so they can focus on what their date is saying.

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/2/16

Funky Winkerbean has been mired in an extremely tiresome plot where Cindy is jealous because her hunky actor fiance Mason has to kiss a younger non-Cindy lady as part of his hunky acting career. I’m intrigued by today’s panel, though: since the young lady is question is playing the character Jupiter Moon, I suppose that means that in this comic book scenario, Cindy is “Queen Morphine?” Shoutout to Funky Winkerbean for besting Mary Worth and going right past mere opioids and straight into real opiates for its next depressing storyline, is what I’m saying.

Crock, 10/2/16

In the mid-20th century, there were two near coups against the French government that were launched by military leaders based in Algeria, so this strip isn’t that far from reality! I’m kind enjoying my new imagined alternate history in which Vermin P. Crock is installed by the forces armées françaises as the first president-for-life of the Sixth Republic.

Shoe and Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/2/16

The Perfesser is terrified that he’s going to be condemned to bird hell; meanwhile, Grimm has learned to his horror that in the afterlife dogs are not restored to their healthy form, and if they die rabid they writhe in awful, violent madness eternally. It’s a bad day in the comics for dead animals!