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Crock, 7/6/25

I like the fact that Crock reruns are keeping their publication year in the strip now because you can tell exactly the era that created the dated and terrible joke you’re reading. Like, I guess in [squints] 1997, if you were 67-year-old cartoonist, the valence of “computer virus” would be “a thing that might happen to a nerd, which I take to be meaningless as a setback (since nothing that happens on a computer is real) and therefore proof of how soft these dorks are and how ludicrous the thought of one of them joining the Legion would be.” Today, of course, having your PC or phone infected with malware could result in major financial damage or identity theft on the sort of life-ruining level that would make joining the Legion seem like your only option, so this strip definitely hits different today.

Pluggers, 7/6/25

I assume that all of you faithful readers have different long-ago bits of Deep Lore about joshreads dot com ready for quick recall; personally, one of my favorites is how in the summer of 2006 four comics did jokes about how WILD it was that people would PAY EXTRA for jeans that were ALREADY TORN??? Anyway, one of those comics was Pluggers, obviously, and it was a defiant, contemptuous panel of a plugger throwing a pair of torn-up jeans in the garbage to show what he thought of the kids today and their depraved values. Today’s panel instead shows a plugger being humiliated by his own thrift and/or giant ass, with the fact that young people like the torn jeans look mentioned in a value-neutral way, as a comparison by which pluggers frankly suffer. Perhaps it makes me a plugger to feel slightly sad that it’s come to this!

Shoe, 7/6/25

Not thrilled about how Roz seems to be openly leering in the first panel here. It’s not just me, right? That’s the face of a woman who hopes to be treated to a story about how this lady and the Shoe had sex at the opera, in front of God and the tenor and everybody?

Blondie, 7/6/25

You know that I rely on Blondie to keep me up to date on what the old people are up to these days, and today’s strip confirms what I’m hearing from other sources: what the old people are into these days is pickleball.

Panel from The Lockhorns, 7/6/25

The Lockhorns aren’t into pickleball, though! Just more proof that they are, in fact, millennials.

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Shoe, 5/18/25

You know I’m a fan of the depressing Shoe strips where either the Perfesser or Skyler is sitting in the living room chair and the other one has to just stand there awkwardly in order to have a conversation because they don’t have a second living room chair and have no plans to get one. A nice touch about these strips is that often, as in today’s, the person sitting in the chair has to uncomfortably crane their neck around to talk, just to emphasize that the house layout is incredibly hostile to the very idea of the two people living there interacting with one another for more than the briefest stretches of time.

Dick Tracy, 5/18/25

“…111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60603! That’s the Art Institute of Chicago, which bought the painting from Grant Wood directly after it took a bronze medal in a competition there. It was lent to a couple European museums in the mid ’10s but it’s back now. Anyway, not sure why Dick Tracy needs to get this information over the phone from a real cagey guy who probably just murdered someone instead of looking it up online like a normal person, but I don’t tell him how to do his business.”

Panel from The Lockhorns, 5/18/25

This is about … Loretta dying, right? Like definitely Leroy is musing, right in the middle of their therapy session, about how great it would be for him personally if Loretta died?

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Hi and Lois, 5/15/25

Sorry, Hi: today’s teens would never try to read something and listen to something else simultaneously. Instead, they focus all their attention on one thing at a time so they can truly be present in the moment with a text or song. They call it “monotasking” and it’s an explicit rejection of the brain-scattered, information-overload world that your generation (Xennials) created. Get with the times, old man!

Gearhead Gertie, 5/15/25

The ironic thing here is that Gertie obviously owns the NASCAR Official Collector’s Edition of Monopoly that Parker Brothers put out in 1997, but she refuses to open the shrink wrap because she thinks it will lose its value. Gertie, you can buy that game on eBay for $12! You gain nothing by annoying your grandson like this.

Shoe, 5/15/25

I really enjoy the dynamic here where the Perfesser announces that he wants to do something fun that might be a little outside his comfort zone, and his boss, who he hates but is nevertheless spending his precious free time with, shits all over the idea. I assume that in panel two the Perfesser is getting a big whiff of Shoe’s cigar, which also must be pretty unpleasant for him.

The Lockhorns, 5/15/25

I like how downcast Leroy looks here. He knows this terrible pun is a subpar effort, but it’s all he can come up with, and what’s he going to do, not say something vaguely critical of his wife while she’s doing something she enjoys?