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Herb and Jamaal, 12/3/25

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Pluggers was insanely on the cutting edge of doing a 6-7 meme joke in the syndicated newspaper comics, the joke being that a child-plugger says “6-7” and an adult plugger says “How did you know?” and the caption says “For many pluggers, 6-7 is the year they graduated high school.” Which is, you know, fine, although it continues to center boomer pluggers and not the vibrant, rising Gen X plugger community. Anyway, I guess we should be taking bets on the order in which other comics will tackle this important cultural phenomenon and in what fashion they handle it. I’m not sure if any of us would’ve answered the first question for Herb and Jamaal with “right after Pluggers,” but for the second one many of us would’ve correctly guessed “incomprehensibly.”

Alice, 12/3/25

I’ve spent literally decades angrily telling comics artists that you can’t just have your characters look directly at the readers and make complaints that you personally have about the world with no other joke or wordplay, but you know what? It happens all the time so clearly I’m wrong and they’re right. Anyway, cars are just too expensive! The manufacturers forgot that the purpose of a car is to get you from point A to point B. Does every new car need all that stuff?

Dick Tracy, 12/3/25

Oh, yeah, remember how Silver Nitrate is having a hard time in prison? You might think it’s because America’s carceral system is inherently dehumanizing, but maybe it’s because he’s being kept away from his true passion: driving around town in a souped-up funny car with his barefoot sister spraying machine gun fire at random.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/3/25

It’s easy to forget when you read it every day for years, but the title of Mother Goose and Grimm reminds you that the strip was originally situated as being at least kind of a spoof of fairy tale/nursery rhyme stuff, sometimes it makes a half-hearted attempt to go back to its roots. I like how the cow knows in advance how bad this joke is going to be and clearly doesn’t want to be there. Hey, buddy, none of us want to be here, OK?

The Wizard of Id, 12/3/25

Hey, everyone, they did a My Chemical Romance joke in the Wizard of Id, right here in the year 2025! I guess we don’t have to worry about a 6-7 joke from this crew for several decades.

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Herb and Jamaal, 12/2/25

Usually when Herb and Jamaal does its “hilariously nonspecific” bit, it’s taking an actually quite specific scenario but changing proper nouns to generic ones for some reason. Today, though, they’re going actually nonspecific, in the sense that this could be about literally anything, as long as it’s intense and happens over the course of a Monday and the early part of a Tuesday, and I for one respect it.

Blondie, 12/2/25

Dagwood looks awfully shocked in panel three here, but I guess it makes sense that he’s unable to distinguish between “Thanksgiving leftovers, which many people end up with in their capacity as private individuals after the big holiday meal” and “food prepared by a restaurant and sold to paying customers.” After all, all comestables in his field of vision merely exist to be sucked down into his gullet so as to feed his infinite appetite, and he rarely makes distinctions among their economic origins or any of their other qualities, really.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 12/2/25

Oh, yeah, I haven’t been updating you on Rex Morgan, M.D.! It turns out Summer was really hurt that Auggie based the protagonist in his book on her without telling her, but then she finally finished the book and realized that said protagonist is actually super cool. Problem solved!

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Luann, 12/1/25

Back in the ’80s, when this strip first debuted and its characters were in high school but acted like they were 12, much of its energy was put into the competition between handsome hunk Aaron Hill and awful nerd Gunther Berger for Luann’s love. This eventually ended with Aaron moving off to Hawaii and Gunther actually becoming too good for Luann, but that doesn’t mean the strip doesn’t like to return to the classics, so today, when the characters are in college but act like they’re 15, there’s a new awful nerd obsessed with our heroine, and I do appreciate that they’ve taken steps to make Alan awful in a specifically 2025 way. Like the only way “Oh, do you think there’s a problematic age gap between my belovèd and myself? Well, I’ve done my research about historical sex affairs and come up with a little factoid that proves that’s no impediment” could get more of the moment would be if Alan triumphantly showed Bernice a bunch of AI-generated erotic anime-style images of him and Luann wearing Renaissance clothing to prove his point.

Dustin, 12/1/25

I think this may be the first Dustin I’ve ever seen where Dustin’s dad tries to have a genuine moment of connection and companionship with his son. That moment will end immediately after the third panel here, because Dustin’s terrible little quip will remind his father that he’s insufferable and that’s why nobody wants to spend time with him.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/1/25

OK, sure, if Humpty opened up that carton and cracked open an egg in cold blood? That’s a crime, and he deserves his punishment. But if he and the victim were in that carton together? Well, you can’t blame an egg for doing what he has to do in there, in a darkness that could end at any moment or last forever, a world where it’s crack or be cracked.