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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!

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/11/26

OK, there’s two things that could be going on here. The first is that we’re meant to understand that Hootin’ Holler is one of the proposed wackiest places to live in America, which, no! No!! It’s poor and depressing and violent! That’s not wacky at all! The other possibility is that the gag writer just thought of the idea of a “wackiest places to live in America” list to serve as a counterpoint to the well-trod territory of the best places to live list, and decided that Snuffy hearing about this idea that certainly isn’t a joke and can barely be called a premise was good enough for a Saturday strip and then moved on with their life. Honestly, I respect the second one more.

Mary Worth, 4/11/26

“Mary has immediately begun to use her new pet to serve as a sounding board for her to workshop what she thinks is the best possible spin on her meddling,” is, I guess, not a huge surprise. Anyway, I just want to say now and for the record that it’s possible for an older man to have a perfectly good relationship with his children and to fall in love with a fake internet babe and send her lots of money! I feel like sending lots of money to a hot girl you met online is not necessarily something you check in with your kids about, even if you love them and speak to them regularly! The correlation here is not causation!

Family Circus, 4/11/26

The movies? Why would Billy want to do that when he could keep reading about The City of Brotherly Love, America’s silliest town! Eagles fans pelting Santa Claus with batteries … the MOVE bombing … that innocent robot they murdered … it’s all very silly and Billy simply can’t get enough!

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Family Circus, 4/1/26

Happy April Fool’s day, everybody! As I’ve noted over the last few years, the “trick” the passage of time has played on me is my growing appreciation of the Family Circus’s whole deal, which is that the kids are annoying on purpose, like that’s the whole joke. Look at Ma Keane’s face here! She wants to die, and maybe also to kill!

Crankshaft, 4/1/26

If I’m remembering right, for a long time Lena was a never-seen off-panel character that the other characters at the bus depot would constantly complain about, and then we started seeing her in person and she was always depicted as a perfectly nice woman that everyone is unfathomably cruel to for no reason. Look, in this one she briefly believes they’re being nice to her! That’s the “prank”!

Pluggers, 4/1/26

At least that’s intelligible as a prank, though. Is the prank here … on us? Like we’re supposed to believe that Mr. Whipple sent a letter to Pluggers HQ from beyond the grave encouraging them to do a panel where his successor as Charmin spokesbeing comes into a plugger’s home and takes a huge dump? “Look, pal, you’re in the wrong house,” says the bear-man, in what is becoming less and less what anyone would consider a “prank.” “I don’t get all that excited about toilet paper. I appreciate its utility in keeping my butthole and buttcrack clean of feces, but I’m not really invested in it emotionally.”

Intelligent Life, 4/1/26

Not even going to engage with the prank content on this one. These guys know what movie tickets cost! They see movies in the theater all the time, and talk about box office numbers while they’re there! Instead, I just want to point out that in panel one Skip has responded to “Wow … it’s April Fool’s Day,” with “Woot!”, which is absurd. Nobody’s excited about April Fool’s Day. This is just another example of these losers responding to any cultural reference they recognize with a sort of Pavlovian noise of general approval. It says a lot about society, and it sickens me.