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Wizard of Id, 1/8/26

The syndicated newspaper comics are, among other things, your #1 source for gender stereotypes so out of date that everyone has pretty much forgotten them, like “women love to drag their husbands to the opera even though men find opera boring.” Usually your source for these gags is The Lockhorns, where it’s at least vaguely realistic because they live a mere hour from Lincoln Center via the Long Island Railroad; I suppose you might think the Wizard of Id’s pseudo-medieval setting also makes it a good candidate for opera gags, if you were a philistine who didn’t know that opera originated in the 1600s and didn’t truly flower into the oft-parodied art form we see here until the baroque era. Anyway, this lady has a rare talent that she’s chosen to share with the world, and maybe it makes me a gender traitor, but I feel that she does not deserve to experience the painful and horrifying ideal of transformation into a bird, right here and now, at the height of her career.

Gearhead Gertie, 1/8/26

There was in fact a big NASCAR lawsuit settlement recently, and I’m gonna be real with you, I read some of that article I just linked to but couldn’t really follow what it was about and tapped out around halfway through. I don’t feel too bad about that, though, because I read enough to know that the dispute in hand was between the league and team owners and had nothing to do with anything that might get free tickets to fans, so apparently I understood it better than NASCAR superfan Gearhead Gertie.

Dennis the Menace, 1/8/26

I guess Mr. Wilson is supposed to be hinting darkly that Dennis may someday move on from childish menacing and become some sort of evil dictator or criminal mastermind and menace the whole world, but I think he’s letting his endless antagonism with the boy cloud his judgement. Dennis is actually pretty dumb, and I’ve seen no indication that he has the intention or the ability to better himself. It might still be annoying living next door to him when he’s an adult, but I think most of us will be safe.

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Mary Worth, 12/11/25

Sorry to be a killjoy, but I’m deeply concerned that Ian appears to own the exact same robe that Wilbur does. Yes, they’re different colors, but we all know the coloring in the daily strips is done by the syndicate and isn’t canon. At first I thought that this was simply clip art of Ian’s head put onto an existing drawing of Wilbur’s body, but I’m reasonably sure we never had the opportunity to look at a berobèd Wilbur from this angle, given that the pet he had a weird emotional relationship with floated around at eye level most of the time. Anyway, this just raises a lot of questions, like is there a standard-issue Charterstone robe that all male inhabitants are assigned upon arrival? Troubling. Still, I don’t mean to take away from the main event, which is that Toby is shrieking “Don’t be ridiculous! Birds can’t read!” and somehow she’s the voice of reason in this conversation. That part’s good.

Wizard of Id, 12/11/25

Is this really the sort of thing that works for politicians? I think of their classic move as being more along the lines of “I tell people something good will happen. Then, when it doesn’t, I say it did, actually, and moreover I’m responsible for it.” I guess I don’t live in a pseudo-medieval kingdom ruled by a hereditary monarch working in tandem with a chaotic wizard, though, so maybe I’m operating out of context here.

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Herb and Jamaal, 12/3/25

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Pluggers was insanely on the cutting edge of doing a 6-7 meme joke in the syndicated newspaper comics, the joke being that a child-plugger says “6-7” and an adult plugger says “How did you know?” and the caption says “For many pluggers, 6-7 is the year they graduated high school.” Which is, you know, fine, although it continues to center boomer pluggers and not the vibrant, rising Gen X plugger community. Anyway, I guess we should be taking bets on the order in which other comics will tackle this important cultural phenomenon and in what fashion they handle it. I’m not sure if any of us would’ve answered the first question for Herb and Jamaal with “right after Pluggers,” but for the second one many of us would’ve correctly guessed “incomprehensibly.”

Alice, 12/3/25

I’ve spent literally decades angrily telling comics artists that you can’t just have your characters look directly at the readers and make complaints that you personally have about the world with no other joke or wordplay, but you know what? It happens all the time so clearly I’m wrong and they’re right. Anyway, cars are just too expensive! The manufacturers forgot that the purpose of a car is to get you from point A to point B. Does every new car need all that stuff?

Dick Tracy, 12/3/25

Oh, yeah, remember how Silver Nitrate is having a hard time in prison? You might think it’s because America’s carceral system is inherently dehumanizing, but maybe it’s because he’s being kept away from his true passion: driving around town in a souped-up funny car with his barefoot sister spraying machine gun fire at random.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 12/3/25

It’s easy to forget when you read it every day for years, but the title of Mother Goose and Grimm reminds you that the strip was originally situated as being at least kind of a spoof of fairy tale/nursery rhyme stuff, sometimes it makes a half-hearted attempt to go back to its roots. I like how the cow knows in advance how bad this joke is going to be and clearly doesn’t want to be there. Hey, buddy, none of us want to be here, OK?

The Wizard of Id, 12/3/25

Hey, everyone, they did a My Chemical Romance joke in the Wizard of Id, right here in the year 2025! I guess we don’t have to worry about a 6-7 joke from this crew for several decades.