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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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Pluggers, 6/7/26

Look, I know that Pluggers has lost its focus on pluggers being hard-working, blue collar real Americans and now mostly dwells on stuff like “pluggers eat a lot” and “pluggers are old and have mobility issues that significantly degrade their quality of life.” Still, I don’t think we should accept “pluggers exist on several layers of narrative and metanarrative and are slowly becoming aware of that fact.” That’s just not the sort of thing pluggers do or think about! They’re down-home regular beast-people, not characters in a damn Borges short story.

Beetle Bailey, 6/7/26

Pretty sure this is the closest Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has come to acknowledging that Beetle and Miss Buxley, as young adults in a relationship in ostensibly the modern day, are probably having sex? Things quickly go south right after that acknowledgement, though, thank goodness.

Mary Worth, 6/7/26

“I used to hate myself! But now I’ve done a lot of work and I don’t anymore. When my girlfriend left town to take care of some important family members I immediately assumed it meant she was breaking up with me, by the way! Ha ha, my head is made of wood!”

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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?