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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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Mary Worth, 3/29/17

UHHHHHHHHH, what’s this, Mary Worth, you spent days feeding us amped-up mania about the GLORY AND PAGEANTRY OF THE CRUISE INDUSTRY, only to present some lame “I can’t quit smoking” storyline” as the payoff? “Make a list of pros and cons, dear,” Mary will say, swaying unsteadily after six drinks at the Endless Margarita Buffet. “On the pro side, a cigarette offers a fleeting moment of pleasure; on the con, you’ll die and your wife will leave you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go discretely vomit.”

Slylock Fox, 3/29/17

The animals have mostly wiped humanity off the surface of the earth and seized our cars, our tents, even the clothes we used to wear. But as the answer to question number two reveals, they haven’t taken over our dreams. These pigs may be more advanced than their brutish ancestors and prefer a dry tent to a muddy sty; but their limited worldview makes them believe the water on earth is all they’ll ever had. The exterminated human civilization dreamed of flying into space and mining the comets for their precious water, something beyond the swine’s mental horizons. While the pigs may have learned to wear pants, metaphorically they still live in the mud.

Dennis the Menace, 3/29/17

Wow, literally yesterday Dennis was baffled by his parents’ low-grade flirting and today he’s like, “Yep, it’s spring, you can tell because everyone wants to fuck.”

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Crock, 3/20/17

You might think this is just a typical cartoon where a lonely desert-dwelling child’s only friend is a freakish buzzard. But, not so! Check out Little Otis’s blank, pupil-less stare in the second panel. That buzzard isn’t his friend at all; it’s hypnotizing him. Imagine “How should I introduce you to my mom, Wadsworth?” spoken in an eerie monotone. The only introducing that’s going to happen will come once Otis, under Wadsworth’s mesmerizing gaze, murders his parents and “introduces” the foul carrion eater to their delicious corpses.

Slylock Fox, 3/20/17

Hey, sinister grinning bear (?) lumberjacks: instead of stealing this poor beaver’s trees, have you considered recruiting him, for a good-paying job in the lumberjack industry that apparently still exists in this animal-ruled world? Honestly, how is it that in the animal economy there’s a single lumber company that isn’t entirely beaver-staffed?

Family Circus, 3/20/17

It’s bad, in the sense that it’s supposed to be “on fleek” (and I’m 100% sure the Family Circus isn’t clever enough to intend this to be an error either on Billy’s or Big Daddy Keane’s part), and also in the sense that the Family Circus shouldn’t be doing jokes about the phrase “on fleek.” Just bad all around. Bad bad bad.

Spider-Man, 3/20/17

Given that Rocket Raccoon isn’t well known on the version of Earth that has the misfortune to be depicted in Newspaper Spider-Man, I love that the lower word balloon in the second panel ends in an exclamation point. You’d think that the cop would say “Spider-Man — and a raccoon???? [comical BOI-OI-OING sound effect],” but nope, he’s just accepting this as yet another one of life’s passing mysteries.