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Hagar the Horrible, 7/16/17

You know, somewhere among the many, many posts I’ve written about how Hagar the Horrible whitewashes the Vikings’ well-documented history as bloodthirsty murderers and thieves, you might start think that I’m missing the joke, which is that the whole point of Hagar’s pillaging strips is to contrast the general good nature of the characters with the actual historical carnage. I promise I’m not! I just think it’s funny to reverse it back to a more realistic configuration. I do sometimes wonder though if even the toilers down at Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC have forgotten about the strip’s central conceit, but I take installments like today as pretty strong evidence that they haven’t. “Ha ha, the people who live here sure care about their landscaping! Let’s hack them to death with our swords, steal all their stuff, enslave their children, and burn their castle to the ground.”

Spider-Man, 7/16/17

Whew, you guys, Spider-Man was saved from unmasking by a combination of his spidey-sense and the quick thinking of his antagonist’s mom. It’s cool to see our noble hero being totally unable to let this thing go. “Will this curious little scamp grow up to be a murderous supervillain? Probably! Will I have to kill him to keep the world safe? Almost certainly! Can’t wait!”

Heathcliff, 7/16/17

As we’ve discussed, the venerable Heathcliff is a secret hotbed of surreal whimsy these days. Sometimes, though, it’s just jokes about birds shitting on you.

Funky Winkerbean, 7/16/17

“And I paid this nice lady with the camera-phone to record it! Just pretend she’s not here. But, you know, make sure she can always see your face.”

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Spider-Man, 7/14/13

Oh, man, this whole “Spider-Man is tormented by an irritating child” business is going so much better than even I had hoped! I feel compelled to point out that this isn’t the first time that an ugly youth attempted to unmask the unconscious wall-crawler, though in that earlier instance he had come by his unconsciousness with a shred of dignity — yes, he had knocked himself out, like a moron, but at least it happened during super-combat. This time around, he’s just dozed off while claiming that he’s going to “rest his eyelids,” grandpa-style.

Hagar the Horrible, 7/14/13

I’m not sure which I find funnier: that Hagar thinks his weight-loss news deserves two panels of set-up, or that Eddie interprets Hagar’s metaphor as meaning that flesh and fat are falling off his body in huge bloody chunks. No, wait, the second one, I’m pretty sure it’s the second one.

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Gil Thorp, 7/10/13

Man, I can not take my eyes off Gil’s jorts in panel one! And I don’t mean that in a good way. Gil, you’re trying to sweet-talk a possibly senile, definitely violent old pro wrestler out of jail, maybe you should dress with a little bit of dignity.

Hi and Lois, 7/10/13

Man, who says print journalism is in trouble? The Generic Suburb Intelligencer-Tribune probably has about half the pages, a third of the staffers, and a quarter of the ad revenue it had when I started this blog in 2004, but that doesn’t mean it can’t find room to wedge in some wire service copy offering “news” about a scientific model of stellar evolution that’s been accepted for pretty much decades.

Spider-Man, 7/10/13

A little poking around on travel sites has flights from San Francisco to Central America lasting anywhere from 9 to 13 hours, and if Spider-Man were to be actively humiliated by a small child for the entire duration of this trip, I for one would not complain at all.