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Hagar the Horrible, 10/15/12

“Maybe I shouldn’t have spent the night before I led my men into a brutal, hand-to-hand combat, during which they must either kill or be killed, filling their heads with tales of damned souls, wandering the earth as dim spectres, mere shadows of their former selves. Which thought do you think is more likely to jump into their heads unbidden it the midst of this violent melee: that they themselves will be felled in battle and their shade will live on, with the wounds and terror they feel now continuing for eternity? Or that, for the rest of their lives, every time they feel a prickling on the back of their neck or an unseasonably icy wind across their face, they’ll suspect that it’s the vengeful spirit of a man they cut down, haunting them until they succumb to madness and terror?”

Hi and Lois, 10/15/12

Ha, and if Hi’s face is any indication, he sure has earned the right to use the word “boring”! If Hi’s face is any indication, today was the day when his capacity to feel joy or pain or anything at all really was finally snuffed out by the intense ennui of mindless, soulless corporate dronery. Get used to that face, kids, it’s the only one he can make now!

Slylock Fox, 10/15/12

In order for the Slylockian world anthropomorphic animals to exist, there must be some kind of apocalyptic event in our future and their past, during which the lower beasts achieved sentience and most of the human population was wiped out, presumably violently. Normally I don’t take this personally, but something about today’s strip, in which we learn that these horror-monsters are riding our subway to our Brooklyn, makes me angry. You didn’t build that, hippo-thing! Neither did you, shirt-wearing cat! The thought of the Museum of Natural History, presumably now retooled and dedicated to the animals’ triumph over the now exterminated human race, particularly sickens me.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/15/12

Oh my goodness, I sure hope that “the party business” is the euphemism for prostitution that the writer of Rex Morgan and King Features Syndicate agreed on after several tortuous weeks of negotiations! Junior knows, and so does that cheery looking couple sitting on the bench. “That Junior, he runs the best brothel in San Diego County, doesn’t he, Martha?” “You can say that again, dear!”

B.C., 10/15/12

Hey! I just flew Southwest yesterday, and as usual the flight and service were excellent, and not once did anyone attempt to feed me something that they barfed and/or shat out (sorry, I’ve already grossed myself out enough just thinking about this, not going to look up how gizzards actually work, I’m afraid there’ll be pictures).

Spider-Man, 10/15/12

You know, the modern, Internet-savvy newsroom is a high-pressure, 24/7 operation, so it’s nice to see that J. Jonah Jameson still takes time to humiliate his employees with elaborate, improvised, and extremely sarcastic little skits.

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Mary Worth, 10/14/12

Jim Romenesko’s media blog has already covered the unusually flush finances of Woods and Wildlife magazine, but has been neglecting the turmoil on the feature pages of the Santa Royale Gazette-Whatever. Wilbur Weston is fully focused on his new survivors column, “I Shouldn’t Be ALive,” leaving Mary to keep noodling along with “Ask Wendy.” Absent any editorial supervision, she has quite clearly gone completely insane. Having long ago forgotten that the “Ask” in the name indicates that she’s supposed to be responding to reader letters, she now just unloads her philosophy on her readers in long, stream-of-consciousness rants. “None of us can solve the problem of evil! The ever-changing nature of the universe and the self has bedeviled humanity since the age of Heraclitus! Only through immediate action, directed by my iron will, can life have any meaning! OBEY ME, READERS! OBEY WENDY! OBEY!”

Blondie, 10/14/12

Over the course of most of this comic, I found it charming that Dagwood was imagining that he had a hooting, rowdy audience for the latest instance of his thrice-daily sandwich-building ritual. But when I realized it was actually Elmo providing the audience reactions, it suddenly got a lot more pathetic.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 10/14/12

Oh, nothing much in today’s Slylock Fox, just Reeky Rat and his punk friends sneaking a extremely filthy double entendre of a band name into comics pages across America.

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Beetle Bailey, 9/22/12

I know it doesn’t pay to overthink Beetle Bailey (though I do, constantly; “Overthinking Beetle Bailey” will be the name of my autobiography), but one sign that your strip isn’t very good is that there’s really no coherent background that could explain the action we see in the first panel. Have the men of Camp Swampy been sent on a Bigfoot hunt by meddling government scientists who have somehow got the ear of top Pentagon brass? General Halftrack may not have a PhD in cryptozoology, but he still feels that he knows how likely it is that various sites might have Bigfoot infestations!

The easiest explanation is, as ever, total madness, which is to say that the most likely thing is that Halftrack is barking incoherent complaints into a bar of soap to nobody and is about to be waylaid by the weird, underimagined hallucination we see in panel two. But that’s undermined by the fact that the flat black rectangle he’s pressing to his face is a shockingly accurate depiction of a 2012-era smartphone. I mean, usually in Beetle Bailey you’d expect him to be talking into something with a huge antenna or maybe a curly phone cord trailing off to nowhere at the bottom of the panel. The presence of a recognizable piece of modern technology in this strip ought to shake you to your very core. On the other hand, it’s possible that the cellphone industry’s industrial designers have finally created objects so simple and minimalist that even Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC can draw them.

Slylock Fox, 9/22/12

That’s right, kids, don’t worry about the horrifying, violent fights between your parents, the ones that always attract the attention of the police, the ones that are literally tearing your house apart. Just focus on the Six Differences. Find the Six Differences and it’ll be OK.