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Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/9/26

“Why do they mention the King’s Horses in ‘Humpty Dumpty?’” is an extremely hoary bit at this point, but I have to say I like the art here. Humpty’s shell has shattered, creating a jagged mouth for what we must assume is the first time. The very event that has caused him such agony also provided him with the means to scream! It’s a neat little trick.

Mary Worth, 9/9/26

Alma … no! You need to follow your first instincts and remain aloof from gossip and speculation here. Look at Nelly’s crazed expression in panel two! She says your guess is as good as hers … but she’s clearly been guessing in vivid, erotic detail for hours now. Let her be a cautionary example for you!

Shoe, 9/9/26

The saving grace of Shoe is that no matter how much you hate reading these jokes, the characters’ facial expressions make it clear that they hate saying them much, much more.

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Dick Tracy, 8/30/26

I had kind of lost interest in this Dick Tracy computer hacker storyline, mostly because both the ways in which it got computer stuff right and the ways in which it got it wrong were fundamentally boring. But today? When one of Widescreen’s gang members tries to quit and demands to get what he’s owed, and Widescreen gives him a USB drive shaped like the Space Shuttle, which I guess we’re supposed to understand the implication is that it has crypto on it or something, so the henchman goes online via a coffee shop’s public Wi-Fi network and plugs that USB drive into his laptop like any savvy hacker would, and then the laptop explodes in such a way that henchman himself is immediately engulfed in flames and dies in agony? Well, that’s extremely not how computers work, but it’s also pretty exciting, so I’ll allow it.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/30/26

So, yes, Grimm’s liminal position between human and animal is extremely discomfiting to think about. But on the other hand, it allows him to talk to cars and know their True Names, so who’s to say if it’s good or bad?

Mary Worth, 8/30/26

Extremely sinister that the inspirational quote about self-respect and being a role model in today’s strip comes from notorious steroid abuser Barry Bonds. Are we meant to understand that Mary is, in some way, juicing? Is she using performance-enhancing drugs to improve her level of meddle? Truly disturbing.

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/26/26

The Goofy/Pluto paradox is a situation many comics and cartoons that feature sapient animals find themselves in, whereby some animal characters (like Goofy) are clearly supposed to be standins for people while others (like Pluto) are clearly supposed to be standins for animals, even if the animal-animals seem to be a lot smarter than real animals are. Mother Goose and Grimm has a truly baroque case of this, where Mother Goose (a bird) clearly has an owner-pet relationship with Grimm and Ralph (dogs), in that she wears clothes and drives a car and is in charge of the house while they go around naked on all fours and drink out of the toilet, but also they have conversations with her in English and call her “mom.” Anyway, today’s strip is particularly unpleasant when you think about it in those terms, as it features a bird with human-like levels of intelligence, authority, and prestige taking two dogs who are also sapient but kept in a subservient “pet” role to watch their enslaved (?) kin race around a track, and then the bird says “These dogs aren’t that fast, you know who’s fast? The dogs in Alaska, because there aren’t many places where they’re allowed to go to the bathroom. Their poor bladders! Their lives are agony!”

The Phantom, 8/26/26

Hey, remember how Ignis Vindicta sent a bunch of armed drones to free, and also control, the Python? Well, the Ghost Who Shoots shot the drones with a couple of handguns and, uh, that seems to have worked, I guess. Tip to anyone fighting in one of several ongoing wars where drones are playing an increasingly important part: just shoot at them! You don’t even have to use particularly fancy guns, it turns out!