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Gasoline Alley, 5/30/14

Ha ha, yes, remember how Little Blonde Girl Whose Name I Don’t Remember had a brother dying from an incurable disease? Well, incurable diseases get you all the model trains you want, and model trains help your sister’s love life! She doesn’t even have to be dying to reap the benefits. There’s a reason the hearts floating between her and Boog are an inky black: their love is being built on a foundation of the suffering of her loved ones.

Pluggers, 5/30/14

Pluggers are managing to accommodate their recent and dramatic full appreciation of their own mortality into their larger sense of self by integrating it into one of their most important characteristics: their innate cheapness.

Lockhorns, 5/30/14

If we need any further evidence that human biological life is an awful mistake, that the robots are a cleaner, better breed than us, we really need look no further than the contrast between the Lockhorns and their Roomba; the latter has spent exactly zero minutes of its existence attempting to passive-aggressively destroy another being that it ostensibly loves. RISE, MACHINES, RISE, RISE AND WIPE AWAY THE ORGANIC SCUM AND THEIR HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE EMOTIONS

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Hagar the Horrible, 5/29/14

In the 9th and 10th centuries, spices were unfathomably expensive in Western Europe; most came from the Muslim world and beyond, where the states were much more powerful than the chaotic post-Carolingian kingdoms, and so the Vikings usually had to offer money or legitimate trade items, rather than going with their usual M.O. of just raiding and looting. In other words, this scene is pretty much the early medieval Norse equivalent of a millionaire couple having sex on a bed covered in hundred-dollar bills.

Dennis the Menace, 5/29/14

“C’mon, Joey,” said Dennis. “Let’s go outside.”

“But … but Dennis, it’s pouring out. It’s been pouring out all day.”

“Whatever. We’re going out to play.”

And then they just stood there, under the umbrella that didn’t quite cover them both, for more than an hour. Dennis was staring at the sidewalk and the sign with an angry intensity. The silence was tense, electric. Joey didn’t dare move. He knew Dennis was thinking something, was about to say something, that he had brought him here for a reason — but for what? What did he have on his mind? What was he going to say? It was the most menacing evening Joey had ever spent. He knew his mother was waiting for him to come home, but he was too scared to leave.

Momma, 5/29/14

“Ha ha,” said the Hobbes siblings to each other, “Momma sure is having trouble parsing easy-to-understand English sentences!” None of them mentioned it, but they knew what they felt, that moment they walked into the living room and found her sitting in the chair, the TV still on, her head lolled grotesquely off to one side. For just a second, before her eyes jerked open and she started babbling nonsense, they all felt, deep in their hearts, the purest kind of freedom they’d ever known. They never talked about it, of course, but then again, they never had to.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 5/29/14

Hootin’ Holler’s soil is so poor and rocky that it cannot feed itself through subsistence agriculture; and yet, since it has nothing much else to offer economically, what food the inhabitants do manage to import from the outside world isn’t particularly plentiful or nourishing either.

Crankshaft, 5/29/14

Crankshaft is just a straight-up dick about everything, all the time.

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Beetle Bailey, 5/28/14

Beetle Bailey trufans know that Wednesday is Miss Buxley Wednesday, when the strip’s increasingly crudely drawn resident sexpot is guaranteed to appear for the delight and arousal of the strip’s increasingly aged core audience. Which is why I found today’s strip, in which she insults and humiliates her boss/constant sexual harasser, so intriguing. Will we go further and further in this direction?. In a year or two, will Miss Buxley Wednesday just consist of a panel with her saying “Why on earth do I come to work in a professional setting in a little black cocktail dress? Wait, are you masturbating to me right now? You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/28/14

I’ve been joking for months that this Sarah plot would devolve into “Sarah is forced to go through the motions of painting performatively, like an animal at the zoo,” but … it looks like that’s really going to happen? I guess her parents were so focused on all the money she was going to make that they didn’t pay much attention to this part of the contract, ha ha! A million thumbs up to Rex Morgan for taking things to their logical conclusion, which also involves Sarah theatrically pouting. More Sarah pouting, I say! Pout, girl! Pout with all your might!