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Luann, 12/1/25

Back in the ’80s, when this strip first debuted and its characters were in high school but acted like they were 12, much of its energy was put into the competition between handsome hunk Aaron Hill and awful nerd Gunther Berger for Luann’s love. This eventually ended with Aaron moving off to Hawaii and Gunther actually becoming too good for Luann, but that doesn’t mean the strip doesn’t like to return to the classics, so today, when the characters are in college but act like they’re 15, there’s a new awful nerd obsessed with our heroine, and I do appreciate that they’ve taken steps to make Alan awful in a specifically 2025 way. Like the only way “Oh, do you think there’s a problematic age gap between my belovèd and myself? Well, I’ve done my research about historical sex affairs and come up with a little factoid that proves that’s no impediment” could get more of the moment would be if Alan triumphantly showed Bernice a bunch of AI-generated erotic anime-style images of him and Luann wearing Renaissance clothing to prove his point.

Dustin, 12/1/25

I think this may be the first Dustin I’ve ever seen where Dustin’s dad tries to have a genuine moment of connection and companionship with his son. That moment will end immediately after the third panel here, because Dustin’s terrible little quip will remind his father that he’s insufferable and that’s why nobody wants to spend time with him.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/1/25

OK, sure, if Humpty opened up that carton and cracked open an egg in cold blood? That’s a crime, and he deserves his punishment. But if he and the victim were in that carton together? Well, you can’t blame an egg for doing what he has to do in there, in a darkness that could end at any moment or last forever, a world where it’s crack or be cracked.

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Mary Worth, 10/13/25

OK, sorry, Mary, I know you don’t want to think too hard about the strange logic of Olive’s powers and the implications for free will and the nature of time itself, but what Olive’s saying doesn’t make any sense. Oh, she didn’t have a feeling of doom before the balloon crash, because it all worked out in the end (due to her psychic powers, not her prophetic powers)? So how do her visions sometimes help change the future? What about the time she was able to stop Mary from being killed by a falling air conditioner? That scenario had a happy ending, and yet … wait. Did Olive have the unmistakable feeling of doom because Mary survived? Holy shit. Holy shit. This whole thing just got a lot more twisted.

Herb and Jamaal, 10/13/25

Hey, Jamaal, I don’t think … anyone thinks baldness is a curse from God? Why would you even bring this up? Sounds like someone’s actually just overcompensating for some internalized baldophobia and you need to do some work on yourself and your self-image.

Luann, 10/13/25

Big news, everyone! Bernice and Luann have been Consumed by some kind of mysterious Portal. More on this story as it develops, if it turns out to be interesting (it won’t).

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Crock, 9/24/25

In my freshman year of college, there was an outbreak of E. coli at various Jack in the Boxes that killed four children, and a friend of mine who had worked at McDonald’s told me something I have never forgotten, which was that (at the time, anyway) they never taught fast food workers how to tell if a burger was cooked properly, but instead just taught them to put it on a bun when the timer rang. “If that timer went haywire and started ringing early, I would have definitely been serving people raw hamburgers,” he said. It was enough to keep me off fast food hamburgers for life, though for some entirely fake reason the flash-fried breaded chicken products seem safe to me. Anyway, my point is, I was using this news peg to play my fun “what year is this Crock rerun from?” game and was going to triumphantly announce that it was 1993, but then I saw that it actually had a 1997 copyright date, which means that even upon its original publication it was four years out of date.

Luann, 9/24/25

So Gunther and his girlfriend Bets are doing some sort of fundraiser for animal adoption with their cosplay group and are of course cosplaying appropriately. At first I was going to come in hot and absolutely furious at how much more work she had put into her costume than he did, but then I remembered the last time Gunther engaged in sexy, elaborate cosplay it was fucking horrifying, so I think he should actually be discouraged from applying any more effort to this whole thing than he’s doing now.

Rhymes With Orange, 9/24/25

Have you guys seen how much mortuary services cost? If my funeral were botched in such a disgraceful fashion, I would certainly hope that one of my loved ones would speak up on behalf of my dignity and the dignity of those gathered to mourn, rather than just cracking wise.

Mary Worth, 9/24/25

If there’s one thing I hope to have established in 20 years of blogging, it’s that joshreads dot com is your number one website for finding out if today’s comics pages feature Mary Worth, a psychic child, and a guy dressed sort of like an old lighthouse keeper screaming in terror as their hot air balloon crashes into a pine forest. If you’re wondering, today is, at long last, that day.