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Mary Worth, 8/31/25

Yes, Olive, you “saw” that she was struggling in the water, with your “eyes,” as she was immediately in “front” of you as you stood on the beach just a few “yards” away from her. Note also that Olive is implying heavily that she had pity on Vicki, the least bad of the bully gang. If it had been Naomi, that girl would be smugly rolling her eyes on the ocean floor right now. You notice they’re quoting John 15:13 and not Matthew 5:44!

Heathcliff, 8/31/25

Much as I enjoy seeing Surf Mummy in action, I must be a pedant here and object to the way he apparently sinks into the earth. If he were the disembodied spirit of a dead Egyptian prince, then I would accept this depiction of his return to the Duat, the land of the dead. However, as a physical mummy, he should instead be shown returning to his sarcophagus, whether that’s inside a pyramid or in some rock-cut tomb in the Nile Valley, then drawing the lid closed behind him.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 8/28/25

Imagine: You’ve just finished putting together the script for a perfectly serviceable Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip, which hinges on wordplay around the phrase “Mr. Right.” But then you remember: in Hootin’ Holler patois, they never say “mister”; they say “mistopher.” Does this make the joke clunkier and weirder, and leave the reader wondering if “mistopher” itself is part of the punchline? Well, yes. But it doesn’t matter. You are the keeper of the sacred trust that is Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. You must scrupulously adhere to the lore, or else what’s the point? Would you jettison decades of tradition for a single day’s laugh? You wouldn’t dare.

Pluggers, 8/28/25

The joke here is whatever, but I’m very unsettled by the look on this plugger’s face as he approaches the bathroom. He looks like he knows he has a journey of awful discovery in store for him in there, and it is not reading-media-related. It’s something much darker and more visceral; he knows something awful is about to begin, but he can’t guess when or how it will end.

Heathcliff, 8/28/25

The robot’s smooth, featureless crotch is a reminder that cybernetic organisms are ghastly parodies of humanity, lacking the natural urges and drives that, troublesome as they may be, make us people. Grandma Nutmeg’s right to demand it be hidden from sight!

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Luann, 8/22/25

In the current Luann plot, Tiffany has dragged Les to a spa to get a mani-pedi and other treatments, and has been annoyed that he still wants to talk about video games, only to discover that [record scratch] the spa attendant is a gamer as well????? I was wondering if Leviathan was a real game, but the only game by that name I could find links to online is “a multiplayer extraction shooter set in a sci-fi universe where humanity has been abducted by a gargantuan, interstellar beast and changed over the course of several millennia. The abducted were ultimately discarded onto foreign planets. To survive, they have been forced to evolve into three factions of biologically and ideologically distinct lifeforms. Recently, a second wave of abductions have occurred. Fate has brought them together to the surface of the bountiful world of Domusalus; where only ONE FACTION can establish dominance for their survival.” So I guess Luann’s long-term goal is to woo gentle and impressionable young people attracted by the idea of a sea life simulator into a nightmarish world of violent mutants. Fun! Just the sort of thing that would send a hard-core gamer like Les into a state of orgasmic joy, which he appears to have achieved in panel three here.

Mark Trail, 8/22/25

Last week Uncle Lumpy declared gator-travel-assistance to be “not quite Fists of Justice™ territory, but at least macho-heroics-adjacent,” which Mark apparently took as a personal challenge! Today’s punch is less about putting a stop to imminent danger and more about putting a stop to a fight that some golf course developer jerk started, but I do enjoy the POV angle we get on the punching in panel three. Usually Mark is a “chin music” guy rather than a “nose bopping” guy, but this dude doesn’t have much of a chin, so you gotta do what you gotta do!

Heathcliff, 8/22/25

As the theme song to the mid-80s Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats cartoon so wisely put it: “Heathcliff, Heathcliff, no one should terrify their neighborhood. But Heathcliff just won’t be undone, playing pranks on everyone.” So why does the Nutmeg family tolerate his presence? Well, as today’s panel demonstrates, a pet who refuses to acknowledge the bounds of polite conventions can be a real asset. Look how happy they are to be relieved of their social obligations! Heathcliff says (via signs, flags, and so on) the truths that others won’t!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/22/25

Boy, Ma Goose sure takes a lot of pills! That’s … the joke, I guess? That’s a joke, I guess? They wouldn’t print it in the paper if it weren’t a joke, right?