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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.

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Heathcliff, 6/11/26

It’s true that California has higher gas prices than the rest of the country, but I guarantee that every time you’ve seen a viral picture on social media of a station with shockingly high gas prices with a caption of “OMG Cali gas is crazy,” it’s one of two specific stations in Los Angeles where the prices are $2 or even $3 higher than they are everywhere else in the city for various odd reasons. One of these is in Chinatown, close to where I used to live, and once I was walking past it and saw a dark purple Bentley and there was something odd about it and I said to myself, “Wait, is that thing covered in velour?” so I went up to touch it and … reader, it was, or at least a thin layer of some vaguely fuzzy-feeling velour-like substance. No idea what the owner did when it rained, but I am 100% sure that that’s what’s going on with Heathcliff’s car.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/11/26

Look, I know that being hilariously nonspecific is one of Herb and Jamaal’s beloved running bits, but … Rev. Croom is clearly talking about hell, and all the people who are going there. He’s a Christian clergyman, he believes in hell and that’s what he’s talking about! Don’t give us this “inferno abyss” business, I’m pretty sure you’re allowed to say “hell” in the newspaper these days.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/11/26

It honestly bothers me so much that Ma Goose is delivering this extremely tepid joke to an unknown interlocutor over the phone. There are multiple named characters in this strip that she lives with that she could’ve bounced this off of! Then we could’ve seen their reaction! You know, because the comics are … a visual medium?

Crankshaft, 6/11/26

Like, for instance, it’s important that we can see Harry Dinkle’s face so we know how completely unenthusiastic he is about all this. If you just had the dialogue, you might think he was excited to go on a little adventure, rummage through his old memories, and help out his friends, but in fact he doesn’t look like he’s feeling much of anything at all. “Didn’t the strip I was in end?” he’s thinking. “Why am I in this one? Why am I here? Why can’t I die?”

Rhymes With Orange, 6/11/26

Folks, do you ever look up in the sky at clouds and wonder if they get horny? Well, they do … in the whimsical world of the comics.

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Pickles, 6/5/26

“We’re all gonna die eventually, but sometimes our ability to experience even basic pleasures dies before the rest of us” is a pretty grim thing for kids to read in the comics, so it’s a good thing that not many kids read the comics, I guess.

Heathcliff, 6/5/26

Although you know what legacy strip has a surprisingly strong zoomer fan base? Heathcliff! That’s why it can afford to play around with youth slang like this. Ha ha, the fish is “low-key” terrified, as the kids would say, if they were trapped in a bowl perched atop the head of a creature who was about to devour them.

Hi and Lois, 6/5/26

I’m not going to say that the art in Hi and Lois is “good,” exactly, but the faces are surprisingly expressive given how stylized they are. Like, with Lois today, they really nailed “Well that wasn’t an inappropriate thing to say exactly, but it also forced me to contemplate my teenage son as a sexual being, and I honestly don’t care for it.”

Crankshaft, 6/5/26

“That’s the pocket where I keep my phone. Did you know you can put pictures on your phone now? And also get copies of the pictures of your phone printed out? Truly we live in an age of wonders!”