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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!”

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Heathcliff, 5/26/26

When Jewish theologians began to systematize the ideas they had inherited around the spiritual beings we call “angels,” one awkward question they had to answer was where they came from and how more of them could come into existence. While the Enochian literature interpreted the “nephilim” of Genesis 6 as the offspring that resulted from angels lusting after human women, and there was a potential memory of the Holy of Holies including a depiction of cherubim locked in erotic embrace, the rabbinic tradition ultimately rejected these interpretations, seeing the “Sons of God” who sired the Nephilim as noble humans and the art of the Ark representing the union between God and His people. They concluded that angels did not reproduce amongst themselves, but were directly and individually created by God; some of the minor angelic ranks were, based on a verse in Lamentations, believed to have been created fresh by God at the beginning of each day and extinguished at the end of it, while the cherubim and important named angels like Michael and Gabriel were permanent.

But of course, we cannot know how much of this thinking applies to Heathcliff’s cherubim, though we do know that, by some mechanism, their number is increasing. Does our boy Heathcliff create them at his whim and similarly banish them to nonexistence when he tires of them? Or are they sexual entities, like their notoriously horny creator?

Beetle Bailey, 5/26/26

So I looked it up and it turns out that modern tanks take at least three soldiers to properly operate, which leaves me wondering who’s inside that stalled out tank ready to annihilate this lady at point-blank range if she refuses to go along with the Camp Swampy gang’s demands. I’m thinking Zero would be unthinking enough to follow an order to fire and Plato would be coldly rational enough to issue one in the face of necessity. Beetle is, typically, doing the least work here, but doesn’t feel great about it.

Six Chix, 5/26/26

Hey, do you think newspaper comics are for old people? Well, Six Chix is here to prove you wrong, hiring cutting-edge millennial cartoonists to draw panels about … listening to boomer hero Bruce Springsteen’s iconic 1984 album Born In The USA? Hmm. Hmm! At least she’s weeping openly listening to it rather than jamming out, that’s … that’s innovative, right?