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Mary Worth, 3/23/26

One of my favorite books of the last 10 years is Because Internet, which focuses on how the internet has changed language use but has a lot to say about online culture in general. An insight from the book that I think about a lot is that there are identifiable “generations” of internet users that are determined by when people first got online and don’t necessarily map onto people’s calendar ages. A lot of Gen Xers and elder Millennials first got online in college in the 1990s, for instance, while their boomer parents might not have gained extensive experience with the internet for another 10 or 15 years.

One of the biggest internet generational divides in my opinion is whether you consider the computer or the phone to be your primary device, and one way I think it shows up is how you prefer to make large payments. Speaking as a fiftysomething, I’m fine with using Venmo to split a restaurant bill, but am constantly amazed and a little discomfited by contractors who want me to use Zelle to send them four-figure sums of money — I should be sitting down in front of a real physical keyboard to do that! Now, these are mostly young people, of course, but clearly Harvey is one of those older guys who worked in some high-compensation, ascot-forward industry and was able to coast to retirement with his personal assistant taking care of all the computer stuff, only truly getting online in his dotage, with zero defenses built up. So why shouldn’t he send two hundred thousand American dollars to Trixie by tapping on the screen of his Samsung Galaxy S22 phone? After all, that’s the very device on which he met her in the first place, and the Vanguard app makes it so easy!

Dennis the Menace, 3/23/26

OK, sure, in real life we know that this is an example of the syndicate colorist just charging in with the paint fill tool without actually reading the caption, but I’d like to think that Dennis’s grandpa is sitting there watching some revisionist post-1975 Western in color and absolutely seething about it. That’s why Dennis is telling Gina this: because he knows if she makes the mistake of asking the old man what he’s watching, she’ll get an earful about how he doesn’t tune into a cowboy movie for a bunch of moral ambiguity or whatever.

Slylock Fox, 3/23/26

I know that this multispecies society of sapient animals is still finding its footing, and maybe they haven’t gotten their education system really organized yet, but the fact that Kolton Kangaroo is so ignorant of marsupial reproductive biology is frankly embarrassing. Honestly if he doesn’t understand how capable of movement his own child is, he deserves to be a victim of whatever kind of scam Shady is pulling on him here.

Beetle Bailey, 3/23/26

Here’s today’s Beetle Bailey! It’s about how the title character was having a pretty good day … until his commanding officer showed up to beat the shit out of him. Honestly a surprising number of Beetle Bailey strips are about this!

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Blondie, 3/22/26

The saddest part of this strip is the throwaway panel, which reveals that Blondie has a whole spring cleaning bit lined up to unleash on her husband, only for it to be totally short-circuited by Dagwood’s avoiding-spring-cleaning bit, so they just end up mad at each other. Imagine if she had told him about laundry-robics! Maybe he would’ve been into it, maybe it would have become a beloved family tradition, but I guess we’ll never know. Dagwood’s spring cleaning chore being painting the house isn’t sad per se, but it is confusing.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/22/26

I’m beginning to think that a decade of sheltering inside her vast Hollywood mansion has left Mae Mae/Lorna unprepared for actually living in the world incognito. “He’ll never put two and two together, and certainly there’s no way he can hear me, speaking at full volume, in this relatively small and otherwise empty hotel cafe! My secret is safe … forever.”

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Mary Worth, 3/21/26

“My heart … my delicate heart … too weak to fly to see my injured beloved. Time to heal myself using the best technique known to man: taking a pill and then tucking into an enormous bowl of hearty chili. It’s an old family recipe: you cook a pound and a half of ground beef, add barbecue sauce and exactly two beans, and serve!”

Blondie, 3/21/26

“Yeah, it turns out that every day of the year — every moment, really — is a crushing, depressing chore. But at least there’s death waiting for us, right? At least there’s death. [suddenly remembers he’s a character in a long-running comic strip who hasn’t aged appreciably in nearly a century] oh NO”