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Mother Goose and Grimm, 2/15/26

You’d think I’d be happy to see a strip that eschews “someone wants to defy the laws of nature and have sex with a half-fish being” for “someone wants to obey the laws of nature and eat a half-fish being,” but sorry, I just don’t find it likely. Why would Atilla become fish-mad in the (literal) face of a being who is, in terms of the bits you usually interact with, mostly human, and yet ignore Ma Goose, who is 100% bird, albeit an anthropomorphized one? And sure, in real life a cat is far too small and a goose far too ornery for that conflict to go well for the cat, but these characters are roughly the same size so the power dynamic is different. You can make your silly fantasy comic setting increasingly convoluted and I will fight it every step of the way!

Luann, 2/15/26

Meanwhile, in Luann, everyone is fully human, yet nobody is acting like a normal human being. “I’m going to give my husband a gift card to a lingerie shop for Valentine’s Day, in the expectation that he will immediately become horny, rush off to purchase some erotic underwear for me, and then come back so I can put it on and then we can have sex. The ideal time to initiate this process? When our college-age daughter is standing inches away from us. She’ll be impressed!”

Dustin, 2/15/26

The thing about Dustin’s mom is that she exists in a reality where the comic strip Dustin is not in the newspaper. Unlike her, we unfortunately will read through the day’s news, feeling terror, anger, jealousy, and encroaching old age in turn, only to get to the comics section, encounter Dustin, and feel mingled contempt and disgust.

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Beetle Bailey, 1/14/26

I feel like if you have an elderly authority figure looking startled and somewhat confused and shouting “Take some notes!” and then immediately afterwards passing out, and his subordinates are gleeful about it because it means they don’t have to do work, that’s a little less “Ha, this is a zany situation” and a little more elder abuse. It’s sadly not that unheard of for a powerful but ailing person’s staff to basically puppet them for an extended period of time, and it’s all fun and games until, in this case, the area of the United States protected by Camp Swampy is invaded by enemy forces and no competent general officer is present to coordinate defensive operations.

Mary Worth, 1/14/26

I’m not sure how old Ian is supposed to be so I guess I won’t call this “elder abuse” per se but it’s clear that his mind has been broken by Toby and Sunny. Look at his sleepy, dopey smile as Sunny cackles evilly literally inches in front of his face! This is some real “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother” shit right here, only with a parrot.

Shoe, 1/14/26

To me, one of the most depressing things about the Perfesser and Skyler’s home is that there’s exactly one place to sit in their living room, which tells us volumes about the relationship between the uncle and his barely tolerated nephew/ward. Today we see that even when they eat out together, the Perfesser insists on sitting as far away from his nephew as possible.

Luann, 1/14/26

When I started commenting on Luann again, did I know things were going to end up less than a year later with Luann getting propositioned to go fuck over by the dumpsters? No, of course not. Obviously not. Different choices would’ve been made had I known, I’ll tell you that much.

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Archie, 1/13/26

Against all odds, the fact that I’ve been doing this blog for more than 20 years doesn’t usually make me feel old, mostly because I’m still substantially younger than most newspaper comics creators and readers, but occasionally I do catch a glimpse of the way my years have been piling up. For instance, these Archie strips are repeats from the early to mid ’00s, around the time I started commenting on them, and back then, teens (Archie’s ostensible target audience) would’ve read this and said, “Ha ha! The idiots who make this strip only have the vaguest idea what an iPod is and have no idea what it looks like!” before popping in their white earbuds and jamming out to Lindsay Lohan’s Speak, which they had pirated via LimeWire. Whereas today’s teens would read this rerun in the newspaper (an unlikely scenario, I admit, but stay with me here) and say “Wow, is that what iPods looked like, back when they were popular, several years before we were born? With curly wires and one (?) grey earphone and everything?”

Luann, 1/13/26

What’s worse than Brad and Toni having sex in their car in an empty amusement park parking lot late at night? Up until today you would’ve said “Nothing, obviously,” but now you know the answer actually is “Luann and Phil are desperate to have sex in their car in a nursing home parking lot in broad daylight except they’ve been foiled because it’s full of eager recyclers.”

B.C., 1/13/26

So do the deer … think the humans want to have sex with them? Is … is that the joke? Do the humans want to have sex with them? Is that the joke? Strong dislikes all around whatever the case.