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Marvin, 8/9/25

Sincere thanks to the editors who demanded that Marvin‘s creative team add the garden hose, change the punchline, and recolor the runoff.

Blondie, 8/9/25

Like me, Dagwood is of a generation for whom drinking out of the backyard hose brings back cherished summer memories of refreshment, petty transgression, and freedom. If Elmo’s lemonade was tapped from such a wellspring of fond nostalgia, Dagwood will savor it all the more. Nevertheless, he’ll make damn sure it came from Elmo’s own backyard, not that pissy toddler’s up the block.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/9/25

And anyway, it could be a lot worse.

9 Chickweed Lane, 8/9/25

Way back in 2016, I outlined the problem faced by 9 Chickweed Lane after the 2008 consummation of Amos’s and Edda’s courtship, which resolved the sexual tension that had long been the foundation of the strip. The solution, then as now, was to create Amos and Edda surrogates and run the whole will-they-or-won’t-they routine (spoiler alert: they will) over and over again.

But after nine years of barely disguised reruns, the narrative present has become overrun with Amos and Edda surrogates whispering coy innuendos, sublimating their lust into musical performance, and humping all over the damn place. What to do?

Apparently this: slip the bounds of time and plant those recaps in the past and future. Hence today’s legacy Edda demanding attention from prepubescent Amos, the pair’s future children, teenage twins Lolly and Polly, tormenting their own thralls, and an assortment of past, present, and future walk-on foils being sexually one-upped by the regulars. One constant is that they all seem to migrate to this lake here, which by now has got to be more grotty than Marvin’s pool.

Hi there, faithful reader! I’m sitting in for Josh through Sunday the 17^th, with a sampling of comics even Josh won’t touch, as well as the old soapers I know you crave. If you run into any issues with the site, subscriber emails, or Patreon posts, please contact me at uncle.lumpy@comcast.net and I’ll do what I can to help. Enjoy!

—Uncle Lumpy

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Blondie, 8/6/25

Look, obviously Mr. Dithers is an asshole, but also Dagwood is talking to his wife on speaker while standing like six inches away from Dithers while he’s trying to work? The dysfunctionality of this relationship goes both ways, is what I’m saying.

Dennis the Menace, 8/6/25

Alice cringing and saying “My cooking, which you notoriously hate … is that why you’re so angry?” while Dennis stares sullenly off into space: this is by far the most menacing this strip has been in quite some time.

Slylock Fox, 8/6/25

Max is roughly the same size as this goat kid and wants to play video games with him … is it possible that Max Mouse, assistant police detective, is a child? This entirely reorders how I think about his relationship with Slylock, and not for the better.

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Blondie, 7/27/25

The Blondie creative team has never met a young person that it didn’t want to call a lazy sack of shit, but … I kept waiting for this strip’s punchline to be “Napping and playing video games at work? This nepo baby is just like me for real!” but somehow it never happens. I guess the whole thing could be a subtle joke, but nothing about Blondie in general or today’s installment in particular, which includes the normal English phrase “urban expression,” has ever made it seem like the strip is capable of subtlety.

Mary Worth, 7/27/25

Some claim that New York is the so-called “Greatest City In The World,” but Mary, despite her professed love of the place, has on previous visits already encountered two of its greatest dangers: the criminals who lurk in the city parks and shove innocent bystandards with no warning, and the reckless drivers who speed into pedestrians as they innocently step into the street. Now we must add a third member to this unholy trinity: air conditioning units that simply rain down from the windows of New York’s famously tall buildings, killing dozens a year. Anyway, Olive is thinking about the challenges that come with her gifts, which is a weird setup to her using her gifts to save Mary from a certain bludgeoning death, seemingly without any challenges at all. Unless maybe this wasn’t a use of her psychic powers, but instead she just heard the classic Big Apple “Eyyyy! I’m droppin’ an air conditioning unit outta my window ovah here!” Only in New York, baybee! Amiright folks?