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Hagar the Horrible, 10/2/19

Usually Hagar and his men are depicted sailing off to raid distant lands like France and Italy, where the society and the economy is more segmented and greater riches are to be found in the fortified estates of kings and dukes. But let’s not forget that in the anarchic Norse states, the kings held only tenuous control over the various Viking bands, who also engaged in quick smash-and-grab raids against local jarls who couldn’t muster adequate forces to defend themselves. In the less unequal Nordic cultures, those petty nobles might be of essentially the class as the Viking raiders just a step or two below them in the hierarchy, and they may have known each other from childhood. But that won’t protect them from the extractive, predatory violence that allows chieftains like Hagar to keep control of their power base, and they’ll be forced to muster counter-raids if they want to maintain their own position.

Judge Parker, 10/2/19

Hey, remember when Sophie’s main interest was how a global hegemon could deploy a secretive force of missile-carrying drones to impose its will on the world without having to incur the domestic financial and political costs that would normally arise from open-ended wars? It’s probably for the best that she’s now become obsessed with disrupting the B&B sector or whatever.

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Funky Winkerbean, 10/1/19

Welp, it’s looking more and more like Bull really did do a suicide by cliff, or maybe he just has dementia and it was an accident, and we’ll never know one way or another! There are a couple things we know for certain, though: he certainly died in agony trapped in the twisted metal of his car, and Linda really should’ve hidden those keys better, if she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life obsessing over this. Funky Winkerbean, everybody!

Six Chix, 10/1/19

There’s a lot I don’t understand about today’s Six Chix. Like, I’m not a tea guy, but I’ve drunk enough to know that it’s perfectly possible to do so without experiencing happiness, especially if you’re a board-certified grouch. Meanwhile, the lady in this strip seems to be way into this dude’s negativity, like it’s their weird version of S&M. “Yes, Harold, deny yourself pleasure, wallow in crankiness, my goodness.” Also, is having a tiny little plate for a single fried egg really a thing? Those are the high points, those are three things I don’t really understand about today’s Six Chix, but I think it’s a good jumping off place for discussion.

Crankshaft, 10/1/19

Man, if you had asked me what awful conspiracy theory bullshit Crankshaft would’ve gotten into, I definitely would’ve guessed QAnon, but the anti-vaxx stuff tracks as well, honestly.

Blondie, 10/1/19

There are obviously any number of ways this strip indicates a near-total ignorance of how Uber, a ridesharing service that’s been around for close a decade, works in practice, but I think an underrated one is the guy saying “Here’s the Bumsteads’ estate, sir!” as he pulls up.

Zits, 10/1/19

ME: Ugh, I hate how in so much of pop culture, but especially comic strips, people who are parents of teens and little kids are matched up with Baby Boomer cultural signifiers like Woodstock and disco, even though that’s completely wrong here in the year 2019. This is one of my pet peeves! Please be more accurate, comics!

THE COMIC STRIP ZITS: Fine, we’ll do a strip about Walt, the dad in Zits, and we’ll have him discussing recognizable cultural touchstones from your youth, and also the joke will be that this demonstrates that he’s incredibly old, like literally a dinosaur.

ME: Noooooo … not like this. Not like this.

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Mary Worth, 9/30/19

Oh, good, now that Dawn’s romantic situation is more or less settled for the moment, we can move on and focus on Wilbur’s romantic situation, because, presumably, we’re all dead and in some very specifically tailored hell where we can’t stop reading about the sex lives of the various dopey members of the Weston clan. You’ll of course recall that Wilbur and the lovely, well-heeled but unlucky in love widow Estelle connected via dating app a few months ago. Naturally Wilbur reacted to this turn of good fortune by peacing out to Mozambique without figuring out the terms of their relationship. “It’s all good,” Wilbur thought as he got on that jet. “Obviously women can’t live without me, so creating this ambiguity will just send her into a Wilbur-love frenzy and she’ll be wrapped around my finger by the time I get back. Definitely my absence won’t lead to her getting involved with somebody else, sending me into an extremely hilarious emotional tailspin, which is exactly what happened in my last relationship.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/30/19

I have to admit to being utterly charmed by how gobsmacked Snuffy is by this development. “Checkers? Checkers that you can eat? And the eating creates a new incentive within the context of the game rules? This. Changes. Everything.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/30/19

Oh, I’m sorry, do you think the plots in Rex Morgan, M.D., are “slow moving” and “dull”? Well, we’re going to physically immobilize our characters one by one, until you beg for the level of excitement we’ve been dishing out up to this point. You’ll beg, do you hear us?