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I’m back, everybody! Huge thanks to all who contributed to the fundraiser, and huge thanks to Uncle Lumpy for his as always hilarious fill-in and fundraising work! I’ll be writing personal thank-yous to all contributors (and, of course, to Uncle Lumpy) this week. But now, on to comics! Say, did any beloved legacy strips take a sharp left turn into explicit vomit fetishism while I was gone?

Hagar the Horrible, 5/8/17

Ha ha! Well, I have to say the year 2017 is exactly as depraved and horrifying as we might’ve all hoped!

Six Chix, 5/8/17

Speaking of the dystopian future, these ladies look like primitive huntresses but I suppose based on their dialogue we’re supposed to imagine this incident as taking place after a worldwide collapse of the interconnected global civilization that made things like “online shopping” and “shopping” and “online” possible. The ladies look perky enough, but the bleak, utterly barren landscape is bad news. I’m not sure if the cataclysm was a climate-change-driven ecological collapse or a global war that scoured the Earth bare with atomic fire, but it’s clear that our heroines are just scavenging for whatever critters are left that haven’t themselves succumbed to starvation, and cannibalism is the logical next and final step.

Slylock Fox, 5/8/17

I was about to brag about the fact that I remembered this strip from when it first ran more than a decade ago, but I was horrified to discover that back then I couldn’t even remember the name of beloved rodent sidekick Max Mouse! For shame! Anyway, I’m still horrified by this story of a grandmother whose response to some low grade cookie theft on the part of her grandchildren is to literally call in the police to browbeat a confession out of them, but I will say that the larger comics images I have access to today definitely let me see how very smug the grandkid on the left is. Smug enough to make this brutal introduction to the police state good grandparenting? No. But you can begin to see the motivation, at least.

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No Star Wars puns from me this May the Fourth — isn’t that worth a couple bucks? I thought so!

Pluggers, 5/4/17

Not sure what they’re going for here: “Pluggers want all of technology’s benefits with none of the intellectual investment?” “Pluggers parade their ignorance as a point of pride?” “Pluggers are lazy hypocrites?” “Pluggers’ wives are somehow not pluggers?”

Wait, they’re at a bookstore? Ha, ha what a couple of pluggers!

Blondie, 5/4/17

Ha, ha tech and teh olds LMAO.

Beetle Bailey, 5/4/17

Ha, ha tech and teh olds LMAO.

Six Chix, 5/4/17

Six Chix rotates through a roster of six woman author/artists on weekdays, and separately on Sundays — sort of like girls’ softball in Gil Thorp. Here’s the current lineup, highlighting a couple of recent changes:

The rotation gimmick is really clever: at its best, it lets each Chik contribute fresh work without the pressure of daily deadlines. But at its worst, it lets the strip become an afterthought, with dashed-off artwork supporting a weak concept. A lot of recent strips boil down to “look at this thing I don’t like!”, punctuated by a knowing glance between the characters or at the audience.

Maybe before publishing one of these, the Chix should apply a variant of the Bechdel Test: if two woman characters are talking, and it’s not about men, is it about anything else?

Hm, I seem to be posting a lot of Pluggers this week. It can’t possibly mean anything, though.

–Uncle Lumpy

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Six Chix, 5/1/17

The fairies prepare to feast on the bodies of their mortal sisters. Their eyes gleam with hunger, though they hide their savage teeth. They number six in all: could this brood be the Chix themselves? Pray we never learn, nor how the cheese got pink.

Mary Worth, 5/1/17

Pluggers, 5/1/17

“Our marriage is an abomination, I’m having an affair with the rhinoceros, and get the hell out of my bathroom.”

Pluggers are hard of hearing and delusional.

Sally Forth, 5/1/17

I’m going to spend mine reading Sally Forth. Make some room on that couch.

–Uncle Lumpy