Post Content

Intelligent Life, 6/22/26

Everything I’ve learned about all the characters in Intelligent Life has been against my will. I wasn’t thrilled when I realized I instantly recognized this blond guy as “Barry,” the stereotypical jock used as a punching bag by the nerd characters in the strip. He likes beer and wings and is constantly unsuccessfully hitting on women, and — and now we’re at the point where I’m learning new stuff about him, which I didn’t ask for and don’t care for — he also has a terrible relationship with his father, I guess.

Pluggers, 6/22/26

Look, for as long as I’ve been reading this strip, the answer to the question “Are pluggers OK?” has been a resounding “no.” But I feel like they’re building less and less of a superstructure around this sentiment in individual panels and are now just hitting us with “Life is suffering, for pluggers. Every moment is agony. They’d be happier dead.”

Pickles, 6/22/26

Pickles, meanwhile, is a comic strip about the foibles of old people that isn’t afraid to get a little edgy sometimes, but I declare today’s strip, where the vagaries of fading memory mean that poor Opal has spent hours in an act of loving artistry, making a scarf for a member of her family only to be struck anew by grief, is a little too edgy for my tastes.

Pardon My Planet, 6/22/26

Yesterday’s Pardon My Planet was about domestic discord among wolf-people, and I thought about doing a post basically saying “Ha ha, this strip, which is mostly unpleasant marital drama among its cast of mostly interchangeable regular characters, has finally branched out into doing unpleasant marital drama with furries” but decided against it. But today, with the clown stuff? Well, I feel like you all needed to know about it. Do you think “Bobo” is a male clown name? No judgement, but it does add an extra little twist to this scenario.

Luann, 6/22/26

I saved the grimmest one for last. Brad and Toni are going to have sex in the shower, you guys. They’re going to have sex in the shower after she announced herself as “zit” and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Post Content

Judge Parker, 6/21/26

Look, we know what you want and what you don’t want out of your soap opera comic strips, and what you don’t want is character growth. That sort of thing is how you get the man once known as “Tommy the Tweaker” yammering about his skivvies in a supermarket, where he’s gainfully employed, to Dawn Weston of all people. So, don’t worry, kids, Sophie moved to Norway a year ago but she hasn’t “found herself” or grown as a person at all! Instead she broke up with her boyfriend for reasons she can barely articulate. She’s going to drift back to the United States as dumb as she was when she left, and I think that’s great.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/21/26

Sorry, I’m sure Snuffy loves his son Li’l Tater and his nephew Jughaid who has, through some sequence of events we don’t talk about, come to be his full-time ward, but I refuse to believe that he would ever have a structure on his property, no matter how ramshackle, that has “work” in its name. The very concept is anathema to him!

Heathcliff, 6/21/26

[normally, conversationally, as if the sentence I’m saying is the most natural thing in the world] Butterflies are the emojis of stoke.

Post Content

Curtis, 6/20/26

As a longtime Wikipedia editor and aficionado of Wikipedia silliness, I enjoy it when I stumble upon evidence of a vicious long-ago battle between two editors on the wording of some article. For instance, when some fairly anodyne assertion has a ludicrous number of citations given to support it, that usually means that some editor who wanted that sentence in the article when someone else didn’t went nuclear to justify its inclusion. I bring this up because the article for Spielberg’s War of the Worlds calls it a “science-fiction action thriller film,” and supports that genre description with a footnote that contains seven subordinate footnotes backing it up. But is it a horror movie, maybe? The nationally syndicated newspaper comic strip Curtis calls it a “horror remake.” Maybe it’s time to open this discussion again. See ya out there in the marketplace of ideas!

Dennis the Menace, 6/20/26

I guess Henry is supposed to be sweaty and exhausted, but it really looks to me like he’s crying, possibly because it also really does not look to me that the Mitchells are in Disneyland, the actually trademarked happiest place on Earth. They lied to him and told him this obviously non-branded amusement park was Disneyland, but he can’t handle the deception anymore! He’s weeping because of the web of lies he’s spun for his only son!

Blondie, 6/20/26

Please, Elmo, ever since the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, nobody cares about tariffs anymore. “Lemonade prices are spiking because so much of this year’s lemon crop has been unable to get through the Strait of Hormuz” is the new hotness!