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Hagar the Horrible, 5/4/18

I really have to question Hagar’s theatrical eye-roll in the final panel here. Lucky Eddie is often depicted in this strip as too soft to be a Viking warrior, but today, in failing to grasp a metaphor, he seems to understand a deeper truth: the places where we are most needy and open to love are also the spots where we’re the most vulnerable. He also knows that the heart and lungs are protected by the ribcage and sternum, but the belly is exposed to attack. Look for the trail of agonized gut-shot foot soldiers writing in agony as Hagar’s band makes its way inland looking for monasteries to plunder!

Gil Thorp, 5/4/18

Ahhh, the Milford Trumpet, the school newspaper you might remember from Gil Thorp plotlines like the one where a reporter suppressed the information that one of his athlete pals had a dangerous heart condition, and also the one where it seemed like an athlete had beat up his girlfriend but then it turned out he hadn’t, and then probably some others that I can’t remember at the moment. Anyhoo, it seems that the Trumpet staff assumes that, like me, most of the student body at Milford has forgotten that Barry Bader still goes there, so they’re commissioning a hard-hitting investigative piece: “Barry Bader: Does He Still Go Here, And Is He Still An Asshole?”

Mary Worth, 5/4/18

I think we can be … reasonably sure Wilbur hasn’t hurled himself off a cliff in a paroxysm of drunken despair, right? Right? Surely Mary would look just as overwhelmed as she does in panel two upon discovering, say, Wilbur loudly singing country music tunes into a grassy puddle of his own sick. PLEASE DO NOT KILL WILBUR, MARY WORTH CREATIVE TEAM, I ENJOY HIS SUFFERING TOO MUCH

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Funky Winkerbean, 5/3/18

Hey, you know how Funky Winkerbean is extremely up its own asshole about comics? Like, it’s a comic and one of its main locales is a comic book shop and many of its characters are either comics obsessives or comics obsessives who managed to snag actual jobs in the comics industry? And now those guys (who, to reiterate, are themselves characters in a comic strip) are being given the opportunity to create their own fresh new comics characters? Well, get this: what if this comic-within-the-comic had its origins in [pause for dramatic music sting] A COMIC BOOK SHOP????? Really makes you think, huh?

Mark Trail, 5/3/18

So for some reason Mark has spent the last several days recounting to his family the plot of ¡Three Amigos!, a 1986 Steve Martin-Chevy Chase-Martin Short vehicle that is widely remembered with a certain amount of warmth, but apparently Rusty has checked out from this lesson in pop culture to go talk to a girl. A girl! This is what happens when you leave the compound! Mark’s weird sidelong glance in the last panel shows that he knows that, in theory, it’s important for someone Rusty’s age to learn the basic social skills necessary to interact with another human outside of his immediate kinship group, but that doesn’t mean he has to be happy about it.

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Dennis the Menace, 5/2/18

Ha, yes, Dennis, we do exist in a world of corruption and decay, where we ingest not only the cooked and dismembered corpses of our fellow beings but also the dead microorganisms that once hitched a ride on, and in, their bodies, a slurry of organic matter from a thousand different ecological niches, most of it invisible to us. This is what being an animal is, of course: you eat other things that used to be alive. Like most of Dennis’s menacing, today’s incident is just ripping the polite mask off of our brutal, grotesque, and complex reality.

Pluggers, 5/2/18

One thing that I will always say when I try to explain why Pluggers annoys me (and I seem to annoy other people when I say it, but so it goes) is that it’s smug. Not always, but often! The not-so-subtle implication is that these salt-of-the-earth folks are better than you, you big-city elitist, somehow simultaneously simpler but also smarter. Today’s a great example: A plugger just sleeps on an ordinary pillow filled with feathers and not … some presumably much more suspect alternative to this? Yes, if you’re like me, you had to Google “My Pillow” to discover that it’s a poly-foam pillow heavily advertised on late-night infomercials, marketed by a company that was forced by numerous lawsuits to stop making various specious claims about its health benefits. Anyway, who’s morally superior? Pluggers, who are extremely smug about not having been taken in by the “My Pillow” scam that they’ve seen advertised endlessly? Or me, who’s never heard of it in the first place because I don’t watch infomercials but instead spend my aimless late nights reading articles about subway systems and 18th century wars on Wikipedia???? CHECKMATE PLUGGERS!!!!!!

Marvin, 5/2/18

So Marvin is sucking the life force out of his grandfather so he can remain forever an infant, un-potty-trained for all eternity? Sounds about right!