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Hagar the Horrible, 8/26/17

So apparently Lucky Eddie’s romance with a mermaid has advanced despite the fact that he sold her daughter to a zoo. Anyway, now they’re on a double date with Hagar and Helga, in a restaurant, and apparently even though mermaids can breathe air (do they need to breathe air? she doesn’t seem to have gills) their lower, fishy half needs to stay submerged. We’re learning so much about mermaid biology here! The thing that really concerns me, though, is that when I see a tank in a restaurant I assume whatever’s inside it is on the menu. I mean, Lucky Eddie seems very much in love, but Lucky Eddie also sold her daughter to a zoo, so!

Marvin, 8/26/17

I just spent longer than I’m comfortable talking about trying to figure out if “peeing averages” is a pun or a play on words of some sort, but I guess I’m just going to face the truth and brace myself for next week’s series of Very Special Marvins, which will focus on his serious bladder condition.

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Curtis, 8/27/17

One of the things I truly appreciate about Curtis is its eternal return to its timeless tropes, like how Curtis doesn’t want to go back to school, or, in this case, how Curtis is ritually humiliated every year as he tries on back-to-school pants. These recurring gags, pegged as they are to the academic calendar, emphasize the fact that Curtis is trapped in amber in eternal comic book time: if he was going into sixth grade in the first of those strips I linked to above, he ought to be starting his third year of grad school now! But no, he and his mother are still shopping for those same back-to-school jeans. And yet: the world has changed. Parents as likely to buy jeans for their kids on Amazon or at Wal-Mart as they are to go to a traditional department store. More and more, malls are empty wastelands. And yet some things stay constant: though the cast of characters staring at his underwear change, the sense of sexual panic that Curtis can barely understand is still overpowering, and will last, dreamlike, forever.

Spider-Man, 8/27/17

I am genuinely tickled by the idea that Spider-Man really thought he had a handle on things here, keeping all eight tentacles at bay, eight tentacles he could deal with, before being blindsided by the dectopus’s secret ninth and tenth appendages. I’m also genuinely tickled that Tyrannus is content to watch this whole battle play out on TV. Truly, Spider-Man has met the foe he deserves.

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Blondie, 8/28/17

I genuinely enjoyed today’s Blondie because it does a little switcheroo by playing on a couple different things we know about Dagwood. Like, we know Dagwood is bad at his job. Really bad! I feel like we don’t dwell on this enough. I know Mr. Dithers is supposed to be an impossible-to-please tyrant, but everything we see about Dagwood’s work life — the napping at his desk, the way he’s always surfing food porn during business hours, the offhand references to all the presentations he screws up — points to him being genuinely incompetent. Which is kind of interesting, considering he’s the protagonist of the strip! Anyway, it’s in character, and actually funny, to get two panels of mounting panic email because he completely failed to wrap up everything he was supposed to take care of before he left on vacation.

But then, in panel three, we abruptly shift gears, and realize those emails are about something else we know about Dagwood: that he is a limitless appetite, a nightmarish spatial anomaly who can take any amount of foodstuff down his infinite gullet. Just imagine Lou at the diner, the sloshing sea of subpar chili reaching his chin. “Who usually ate all this,” he asks, baffled. “Where is it coming from? Where does it usually go?” He can hardly breathe from the smell. “Where’s Dagwood? Why didn’t Dagwood tell us he was leaving? Why didn’t we make plans?”

Mary Worth, 8/28/17

“Poor Dawn! She’ll be devastated! This will work out great for me, a guy who definitely wants to sleep with her but doesn’t have much to offer beyond being ‘nicer’ than an actual adulterer!”

Slylock Fox, 8/28/17

Having eliminated all crime in the new animal-ruled world, Slylock is keeping himself entertained by just pointing out when his least favorite animals do things incorrectly.