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Blondie, 9/20/25

My favorite part of this Blondie strip is “40 reps of what?” Like, she knows that this is some elaborate Dagwood bullshit and she’s trying to cut to the chase and find out exactly what kind of bullshit it is. Sadly, it’s dumber bullshit than she could’ve possibly guessed.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/20/25

We must of course never forget that the first time we met Mud Mountain Murphy, he was sharing a bill with Truck and pretended to shit his pants on stage just so he could get a better spot in the order. Subsequently he joined a scam cult that accidentally made him into a better person for real, and I think we can all agree that there would be no funnier time for his cult conditioning to abruptly wear off than right now, when he once again is on stage with Truck, and his ego might be a little bruised because he’s not the center of attention but he can fix that with one weird trick (the trick is pretending to shit his pants).

Crankshaft, 9/20/25

As America’s preeminent newspaper comics blogger, one of my important jobs is to point out when syndicated strip creative teams seemingly forget long-established lore. Take today’s Crankshaft, for instance, which features the title character experiencing shame, something he would simply never do!

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Blondie, 9/13/25

Blondie began in 1930, in a world now mostly alien to us, but it was originally a story about urban hipsters: a young woman who the artists imbued with every characteristic of trendy youth culture, and her beau, the slumming, dissolute scion of a wealthy family. You could see a scenario where the strip tried to stay true to those origins while updating to match the changing cultural specifics over the ensuing century. But that’s not how things actually work: instead, a strip’s readership ages and wants something different, and their creators age alongside them. That’s why Blondie in the year 2025 is your go-to for the pettiest boomer gripes about everyday suburban life imaginable, put into the mouths of characters who have completely forgotten that alien world and in their current form have never been cool a day in their lives.

Judge Parker, 9/13/25

Meanwhile, in Judge Parker, Neddy, who was never cool even when she was living in Los Angeles and trying to break into the entertainment industry, has returned home in failure and shame. Abbey has tried to soften the blow by turning their dining room into a simulacrum of a fast food restaurant so Neddy doesn’t feel trapped and isolated on the Spencer Farms compound, but the staff has been unable to reproduce the crispy-edged “smashburger” form so popular in LA, and Neddy is not having it.

Six Chix, 9/13/25

In a strip where people dry-hump sandwiches, the idea of ghostfucking seems frankly pretty tame. It’s like a Gothic novel! There are literary antecedents!

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Crock, 9/1/25

Even if you hate Crock with a passion, you don’t read it every day for 20+ years without learning a little something about its character dynamics, though if you’re me and you’re notoriously terrible with names, you do manage to not learn some of the names of those characters. I wanna say this woman’s name is … Fatima? We’re going to go with that, although she doesn’t make the Wikipedia list of characters, and while I normally am quite dubious about the utility of Google’s AI answers, based on its “In the comic strip Crock, there is no ‘pretty girl’ character” response to me, I have to admit it may be getting better at parsing visual input. Anyway, the point of (let’s call her) Fatima here is that she’s supposed to be pretty, and also that she’s a foil for Grossie, who is supposed to not be pretty, and who she hangs out with a lot and routinely insults. You can tell that she’s not supposed to be pretty because they named her “Grossie,” and I think it’s telling that Fatima (?) abbreviates Maggot’s equally vile name to the cuter “Mag,” whereas Grossie gets no similarly softened nickname.

Anyway, speaking of character dynamics, I get that Fatima (??) has to be talking to some third party for this joke to work, but it’s kind of weird that she’s having drinks with Captain Poulet, right? It’s like running into your English teacher and your shop teacher hanging out together outside of work. Sure, it sort of makes sense that they know each other, but you’ve never seen them interact and it feels wrong, somehow.

Blondie, 9/1/25

As AI becomes integrated into every feature of human life and we begin to worry about who’s really calling the shots, a new question arises: Which of our fellow biological humans will go quisling when the clankers take over? Well, the team behind Blondie seems to be making tentative moves in that direction, and sad as it is, it makes a sort of sense: if anyone serves as a model for “humans don’t really desire autonomy and would be satisfied to simply have their needs met by industrially produced foods and material goods,” it’s the characters in this strip. Once a robot figures out how to make a giant sandwich, it’s curtains for the human race!

Slylock Fox, 9/1/25

Um, actually, we know that those are Reeky’s pants he left behind because a janky thrift store with magic eight balls and VHS tapes displayed on the floor would never sell torn-up jeans; those are fashionable garments that can only be found in high-end boutiques.