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Luann, 5/11/26

So Luann has a boyfriend named “Phil” now, and sure, the strip has done a certain amount of classic Luann stuff about their relationship where its treatment is simultaneously unrealistically chaste and unpleasantly horny, but I have to admire the fact that they’re setting up a “two people in their early 20s who are dating are thinking about cohabitation” plot and they aren’t immediately getting sexually weird with it. Instead they’re making it about how Luann isn’t a functional adult, which, you know, fair.

Family Circus, 5/11/26

You notice how there’s only one of every animal kind here? Sadly, for disobeying God’s commands, Jeffy and Dolly will be forced to watch Earth’s biodiversity crumble as the last representative of each species grows old and dies. Whatever grotesque future humans descend from this brother-sister pair will have only whatever plants survived the Flood to eat — or, horrifically, each other.

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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!