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Gil Thorp, 6/8/26

Isis, a Mudlark student-athlete, was taken by ICE earlier this year, and she’s now being released after much protest by fellow students, and this big local news story with national implications is being covered by … local podcaster Marty Moon, using the same iPhone camera streaming setup he uses to comment on high school golf? Honestly, I’ve never been more concerned about the health of the Milford media ecosystem.

Beetle Bailey, 6/8/26

I have to admit that I’m not really sure what the “joke” here is supposed to be, so I’m choosing to believe that Beetle wasn’t sure whether to dig a foxhole as he learned to do as part of his military training or to dig a hole that would be appealing to an actual fox, so he tried to split the difference and has satisfied nobody.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/8/26

Mae Mae is wiped out by her first two mornings of honest work in years, and needs to go take a nap before dinner. Mud is amorously moved by her choice to take self-care in this manner, and honestly it’s the most romantic thing I’ve seen in the comics pages in years.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/8/26

For one brief, terrifying moment, I was convinced that Herb and Jamaal was going to introduce the concept of polyamory to its audience via one of its child characters. But, thankfully, it was just setting up a joke that’s been circulating in print and online for nearly 40 years instead, which is frankly much more on brand.

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The Phantom, 5/4/26

President Goranda is, according to the extremely detailed Phantom wiki I just discovered, the leader of Ivory Lana, the country that was the setting of the storyline that just wrapped up, and, look, I get that it’s fun to be like, “Wow! There’s our friend! He’s on TV!” but if your friend is literally a president, he’s going to be on the news a fair amount. That’s like one of a president’s main jobs! So no need to get all worked up about it, is what I’m saying.

Mary Worth, 5/4/26

Oh hell yes it’s a Tommy storyline, everybody! A storyline where Tommy is sad! I don’t think we have to ask why he’s sad — the main driver of negative emotions in the Mary Worth universe is romantic failure, so I assume his onion ring fiancee just dumped him. The more fun question is how he’ll react. Will he turn to weed? Pills? Crack cocaine?
Our lord and savior Jesus Christ? I am very excited to find out!

Herb and Jamaal, 5/4/26

If you’re wondering “Which comics did a ‘May The Fourth Be With You’ joke today,” one of the answers is obviously that the dork-ass nerds over at Intelligent Life did it, which I’m not even going to bother showing you because you could’ve guessed that in advance. But if you’re wondering “Which comics did a ‘May The Fourth Be With You’ joke today and somehow managed to completely fuck up the phrasing in baffling ways,” then the possibly also not surprising answer is Herb and Jamaal, apparently.

Beetle Bailey, 5/4/26

OK, fine, newspaper comics are fundamentally an art form by and for old people at this point, but I still think that doing a strip whose punchline is “Everyone younger than 45 is literally an alien to me” is a little on the nose.

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Family Circus, 5/2/26

A thing about one-panel comic strips is that it can be hard to tell what order things are happening in, and a thing about the Family Circus is that I actually don’t have a strong sense of how Big Daddy Keane feels about basic gender stuff. What I’m saying is that I don’t know if his little smile is a reaction to what Dolly is saying, and he’s thinking “Heh, it’s true, we both love our pretty little baubles, I hadn’t thought of that,” or if it’s a glimpse of the last moment of his good mood right before his daughter’s observation ruins the whole rest of his day.

Dennis the Menace, 5/2/26

Most of the time you can pretend that Dennis the Menace more or less takes place in the 1950s, but I do kind of enjoy the dissonance this causes when they jam some reference to modernity in there. Yes, Henry Mitchell lives in a world where making electronic payments via smartphone apps is an everyday occurrence that a child would be well aware of, and yet he’s still wearing a tuxedo to church.

Herb and Jamaal, 5/2/26

Hey, Jamaal, fun fact: if you’re not going to send it, you don’t even have to be online! You could just purge all your negative energy into a Word doc or something. Just saying it would be an extra layer of security, I know from experience that “send” button can be tempting!