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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!

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Pardon My Planet, 8/20/26

OK, here’s a sentence that I’m reasonably sure I’ve never written before, and probably nobody else has either: I’m actually enjoying the art in Pardon My Planet today. Specifically, I love how incredibly exhausted the girlfriend character (the Pardon My Planet gang may have names, but I steadfastly refuse to learn them) looks. How long has her boyfriend been nattering on with this nonsense? Hours? She doesn’t have to get ready for school either, but she does have to get up in the morning. She just wants to sleep, damn it! She just wants to sleep!

The Lockhorns, 8/20/26

Speaking of comic panel faces I’m enjoying, I’m enjoying Leroy’s boss’s face here. Specifically, I enjoy how mad he looks. He’s not one of those LinkedIn influencer execs bragging about replacing his workers with AI! No, he’s discovered that AI is slowly and silently replacing his workers one by one, right under his nose … and there’s nothing he can do about it. You can’t even test to see if someone’s a robot anymore, according to the killjoys in HR!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/20/26

No, Attila, it’s a joke! You’re a character in a comic strip, where ostensibly there’s a joke every day! I say “ostensibly” because the specific comic strip you’re in is Mother Goose and Grimm, but still, you should know this.

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Crock, 8/12/26

I’ll admit it: I am, in fact, a gentleman of a certain age, which means I must begin working out how I’m going to start facing mortality. Turning, as one does, to the comics for masculine role models, I learn that, if I feel my heart starting to give out on me, I should simply glare out over the parapet in manly silence waiting for it to pass (“it” here being either this cardiac event or my fleeting life on earth). And if anyone tries to engage me in conversation in my final moments? Well, that’s when I make it their problem that I’m dying, and make them feel bad about it.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/12/26

Pinocchio has what looks to me to be a big frown on his face, but maybe that’s just supposed to be what his face as a puppet looks like? Unclear. If it’s the latter, it’s depressing that he looks like that all the time, but if it’s the former it’s because he’s learning that the autonomy he long yearned for carries with it the terrible burdens of responsibility for one’s own personhood, which is frankly even more depressing.