Hagar the Horrible: Why can't we ever have a conversation at dinner like other couples?!

This comic is hilarious because women nag and men are slobs.

Hagar the Horrible: I think that was Hagar breaking one of his New Year's Resolutions!

We're left to guess at the specifics here, but it would appear that Hagar has either fallen off the wagon or started beating his wife again.

Needless to say, the comic is hilarious either way.

Hagar the Horrible: No Gift Wrapping For Vikings

The joke here is harmless, but segregation really seems like the sort of thing comic strips should probably avoid making even loose references to.

Hagar the Horrible: This is a great place to practice sand shots!

I'm really hoping that this is the beginning of an extended storyline in which Hagar goes slowly insane, hitting endless imaginary golf balls into the ocean and muttering wildly for Helga to bring him his dinner. It will no doubt all culminate with Hagar finally killing Eddie, eating his flesh and using his bones to somehow create a themed mini golf course.

Hagar the Horrible: What's for dinner, Helga?!

Men. Dates. Hilarity. Etc.

Hagar the Horrible: I say the secret to success is to choose a job that will make you happy!

This comic is hilarious because Hagar is a high-functioning alcoholic and his wife hates him.

I wouldn't say I love my new husband, Nelson, as much as I value him: Love and Marriage in the Comics Section

Are jokes about hot young women marrying rich old men ever funny?

No, they're not. But they are ubiquitous. This is because we, as a society, recognize that there's something wrong about these sorts of relationships, but nothing so wrong that we can't laugh at them. More or less, they reveal in their participants what society has judged to be an unhealthy overvaluation of either sex or money and an unhealthy devaluation of romantic love. Note that both of these cartoons make clear that this is an either/or situation. These women have chosen money over love. They are bad.

But nothing is ever the case of merely pointing and laughing at the supposedly immoral freaks. Rather, we recognize in these relationships our own unhealthy overvaluations of sex and money, as well as the instability of romantic love. What do we do when, as so often happens, a woman in one of these relationships claims that, no, she really does love the withering old fart she has married? Well, we do as the authors of these comics do: we assume they're lying. Hence, "My biggest fear is that I'm going to slip up and say what I'm really thinking." What they're really thinking. Except, of course, what if what they're really thinking is that, no, they actually do love this fellow? It's unthinkable, so our jokes don't allow for the possibility.

But the whole reason the jokes exist in the first place is because of that very possibility. We know that what must have drawn these people together in the first place was her sex appeal and his money. Given that, if they actually do love each other, it could mean that that's all love is. In which case, romantic love would lose its mystical quality and be reduced to nothing more than a set of external circumstances. Which would make our own relationships not so different from those ones. Because, after all, weren't we first drawn to the people we've been with because of their sex appeal or their signs of financial success or some other similarly cold, hard material marker?*

On the other hand, isn't the transcending of all boundaries supposed to be part of the mystique of romantic love? So why do we assume that age is the boundary that can't be transcended? That if you're with a person twice or half your age, you must be with them for precisely the same reason that first attracted you to them? Because, after all, that's the part that's immoral, right? The failure to move from the initial material attraction into the mystical realm of romantic love?

This becomes all the odder when you stop to consider what is perhaps the dominant trope of the comics section, at least among the most hackish strips: "Ha ha, doesn't marriage suck!" Examples of the form can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.** But Hagar the Horrible is the comic that works best for our purposes, as it often plays off the harsh transition from romantic love to marriage.

Here we see Helga schooling her daughter, who is often depicted as being head-over-heels in love with her lute-playing boyfriend, in married life. The basic lesson seems to be that it's utterly miserable, except for those times when you can get away from your husband. Likewise, the only times Hagar's ever happy are when he's away from his wife, usually off drinking or raping and pillaging. And then we get jokes like this:

And we see nothing wrong with them, even though they feature characters expressing the same sort of materialistic valuation that was castigated in the cartoons above. Here, somehow, it's not an overvaluation at all, but merely a perfectly reasonable desire, a way of saying, "I'd like someone sexier and richer, but romantic love stuck me with you." We're not immoral bad like the hot young things or the pervy old coots above, because ultimately we chose romantic love, but it did lead us into a bad, albeit moral, situation.

And so what are these comics telling us? They're telling us that romantic love is morally good, but also a transient and naive hope. Further, despite being good, it stems from base materialistic desires and leads to a lifetime of misery. In other words, it's an ephemerally good thing that comes from and leads to materially bad things. But because the materially bad things it comes from are considered immoral, we do our best to not acknowledge them, whereas we often talk and joke about the materially bad thing it leads to, because it is considered moral. The jokes about hot women and old men exist to reinforce the myth*** of marriage based on romantic love, while the "Ha ha, marriage sucks!" jokes exist because we feel suffocated by that myth.

It seems to me that we're rather conflicted about all of this.

*Not that we willingly admit this. No, we married the person we married because they were The One, right from the very beginning.

**Of course, not all comics depict marriage as a barren hellscape. But the trope is widely used enough--and not just in the comics section--that I think it's fair to say that it represents a widespread cultural anxiety about marriage, which for the last couple hundred years or so has been based almost exclusively on romantic love, which, as these comics show, we have a whole other set of anxieties about.

***I use "myth" here not as a pejorative (as in, "It's just a myth that dolphins are gay sharks"), but rather as a synonym for "cultural story."

Hagar the Horrible and Dennis the Menace: But I miss SHOPPING in the city!

Those women and their shopping ha ha ha.

Hagar the Horrible: Give me ALL your jellybeans!!

Because what better way to celebrate the resurrection of Christ than by raping and pillaging the countryside?

Hagar the Horrible: A wife must get up before her husband, lay out his clothes, make his breakfast, pack his lunch and kiss him goodbye.

See, ladies, being oppressed by the male hegemony and having no say whatsoever in what you do with your life isn't so bad, now is it?

Hagar the Horrible: You're new to this business, aren't you?

Here we see the return of my least favorite trope to the comics section.

Hagar the Horrible: Don't sit on that bar stool...

This comic is hilarious because Hagar's fat.

Hagar the Horrible: Could you make the new one tall, dark and very wealthy?

Helga is no doubt fantasizing about Mark Trail, as that's the sort of thing female comic strip characters are into apparently.

Hagar the Horrible: But she's only visiting for a short time...

Mother-in-law ha ha ha.

Hagar the Horrible and Dilbert: Not only do you help to improve our world, but you will feel better personally by volunteering!!!

The moral of these comics is that people who ask you to volunteer are probably exploiting you, and might even be leading you to your death.

Hagar the Horrible: Why are we here?

This comic is hilarious because life is meaningless and marriage is miserable ha ha ha.

Hagar the Horrible: Psttt...

If this comic were just about plunder, it wouldn't be very funny. But since it's about plunder, kidnapping and a lifetime's worth of rape, it is very funny indeed.

Because nothing's more hilarious than a lifetime's worth of rape.

Hagar the Horrible: When did you switch from jogging to out-and-out running?

Domestic violence! Ha!

Hagar the Horrible: I'll surrender my castle right now...but taking my mother-in-law with it has to be part of the deal!

Shockingly enough, setting a mother-in-law joke during a castle raid does not make it any funnier.

Hagar the Horrible: Here you are--ice cream, chocolate syrup, whipped cream, and a cherry!

The Internet tells me that Kurt Vonnegut once said that "any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae." That's probably true, and probably even more true when the loathed subject is not a novel but a daily comic strip.

And so I attack a lot of hot fudge sundaes around here. This is a very mean-spirited blog, on which I write a lot of awful things about the work of people I've never met, perhaps in an effort to redirect my frustration from my own inability to produce anything better. It is almost certainly preposterous. But so it goes, I guess. Because the thing of it is, attacking hot fudge sundaes is kind of fun.

Besides, who's to say a bad hot fudge sundae shouldn't be attacked, preposterous or not? If I were to produce even something as mundane as the above Hagar the Horrible, let alone as unspeakably hackish as this piece of crap, I would expect it to be attacked. Indeed, I'd almost be disappointed if it weren't. What good is an audience if it isn't demanding?