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Ziggy, 6/7/11

One of the most shameful moments in the life of any social reject comes when they’re offered the chance to join in on the mockery of someone even lower on the ladder than they are. You might imagine yourself a noble defender of nerd solidarity, but too often, after years of feeling the brunt of teasing and cruelty, the opportunity to step to the other side of the social predator/prey line and feel cool, if only for an instant, is too tempting to resist. If you have shred of humanity, you’re haunted by it later — certainly I am, for the few times I briefly switched teams in my dorky adolescence — but I imagine it’s a pretty universal phenomenon.

I bring this up because Ziggy, who is usually the butt of cruel jibes from his various pets, seems to be enjoying the fact that his vicious parrot is mocking the dog, for once. Ziggy, they’ll never accept you. Try to maintain a little dignity!

Hagar the Horrible, 6/7/11

Hagar the Horrible is one of the most violent strips on the comics page, but I’m pretty sure it’s never depicted an actual corpse before. It’s possible that the poor nameless viking’s awful staring eye isn’t frozen open in death, but merely indicative of the shock he’s entered as a result of his massive and almost certainly fatal wounds, but either way this seems especially grim.

Funky Winkerbean, 6/7/11

This is happiest we’ve seen Funky in years. Naturally, it’s because multiple people that he ostensibly cares about are in painful emotional turmoil.

Marmaduke, 6/7/11

Marmaduke was the hero of the game, presumably because he ate all the children on the other team.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/6/11

A recent trip to the mall left me idly contemplating the ways of modern capitalism. Did you know, young whippersnappers, that the corridors of indoor shopping malls used to stretch unbroken from the Foot Locker on the east to the Ann Taylor on the west, with plenty of room to walk and no kiosk in between hawking kibbutz-manufactured facial cream or calendars with cute cats on them or the same cell phones you could buy in two or more of the actual stores in the mall? You see, most shopping malls are owned by publicly traded corporations these days, and investors aren’t just satisfied with retail that makes more than it spends: it has to show an improved profit year after year, which for most older shopping malls means trying to extract more revenue from the same square footage, which in turn means that the broad indoor boulevards where old people used to power-walk are now cluttered with as many little store-shanties as management can cram in there.

In its own way, the mighty pharmaceutical industry is in the same boat. With most Americans now doped up on between two and six prescription medications at any given time, the drug companies need to cast an ever-broader net to find more customers for their wares. And if that means that pharmaceutical reps need to travel to isolated communities where you can still get burned at the stake for selling cures that aren’t root-based poultices, and then seduce lumpy-faced inbred nurses as if they were the villains of a Flannery O’Connor story, then so be it. The demands of the capital markets are remorseless.

Mark Trail, 6/6/11

“You have to return to your loved ones once every six months or so, and make a few days’ worth of awkward small talk! That’s what I do! Don’t worry, you don’t have a wife, so you won’t have to touch lips with anybody.”

Crankshaft, 6/6/11

Ha ha, it’s funny because everyone hates the bus drivers and wants them to quit! Some people are trying to make sure they quit, by threatening violence against them. That … that’s the punchline?

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Mark Trail, 6/5/11

It’s not often that Mark Trail sends me on an etymological adventure, but now the hunt is on! I was very suspicious that the loon was the ultimate origin of the word “loony,” and sure enough, a quick trip to the dictionary shows that it’s actually a 19th century slang abbreviation for “lunatic,” which, as the spelling implies, is derived from the Latin luna, or moon, since it was once believed that the phases of the moon affected mental states. I had assumed that “loon” as a synonym for crazy person shared the same derivation, but that seems murkier; the dictionary says it is in fact derived from the name of the bird (though “perhaps influenced by loony”), but has the bird’s name’s etymology somewhat different from the one Mark offers, deriving it from an Old Norse word for diver. Anyway, you might not enjoy sleuthing after word origins as much as I do, but surely this trip through the English language’s past has distracted you from that white-headed loon’s terrifying searing red eye blazing out at you soullessly from the final panel of this strip.

Crock, 6/5/11

Oh, look, Crock is celebrating the anniversary of D-Day! Isn’t that nice! Apparently the French Legionnaires of Crock are actually Vichy collaborators fighting for the Nazis? And they’re stationed in some desert section of Northern France? Eh, sure, why not, makes as much sense as anything else.

Dennis the Menace, 6/5/11

If Dennis is trying to up his menacing quotient, I’d say that staring at the Wilsons’ house through a fence for hours in eerie silence is doing a pretty good job of it!