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Dick Tracy, 5/3/26

There’s no such thing as the “J. Duveen Art Gallery” (though Joseph Duveen was a famous early 20th century art dealer), but the fictional building so named in this strip appears to be a Frank Gehry design. I’d like to believe that in the Dick Tracy universe, Gehry worked extensively in Neo-Chicago, taking inspiration from the dramatic and abstract skull shapes of the various members of Tracy’s rogues gallery.

Mary Worth, 5/3/26

Not a lot of new stuff in this Sunday recap of the recap, but I do like how languorous Mary and Toby look in that hot tub. Mary is so relaxed she can’t even bring herself to lift her hands out of the water to make air quotes around “relationship” and “girlfriend”! Anyway, I admit this plot has been fun but I’m hoping that the Sunday quote from martial arts master Jet Li presages an upcoming storyline that’s a bit more dynamic.

Crankshaft, 5/3/26

Crankshaft did a strip about hot flashes, and it didn’t make a pun or wordplay of any kind about them, and you can tell from Ed’s picture here that he’s absolutely furious about it. “If I had been there, it wouldn’t have went down like it did,” he’s thinking. “I would’ve malaproped ‘menopause’ so intensely that people would be talking about it for years.”

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Mary Worth, 4/29/26

I was briefly excited that this Mary Worth storyline was going to end with Mary and Toby enjoying a self-congratulatory spa trip rather than Mary and Dr. Jeff enjoying a self-congratulatory dinner date and boat ride, but then I realized that probably we’re going to get a self-congratulatory spa trip followed by a self-congratulatory dinner date and boat ride during which Mary relays to Jeff an excruciatingly detailed recap of both the storyline that’s just wrapped up and the spa trip.

Dick Tracy, 4/29/26

Look, I’m open minded, I cheerfully accepted “Dick Tracy is canonically aware of the existence of furries,” but, hmm, “Mumbles, the iconic Dick Tracy villain who was first introduced in 1947 and was played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1990 Warren Beatty Dick Tracy movie, is canonically a furry, and told Dick this himself,” boy, I dunno. Anyway, the MCU is on the tail (haha, get it) of Mumbles and his pals after their dramatic prison breakout, so I guess we’re going to see the cops staking out [extremely heavy sigh] fursuit shops or something.

Hi and Lois, 4/29/26

I’m really enjoying Lois’s facial expression in the second panel here. “Ah shit ah fuck the 22-year-old realtor influencer on TikTok who won’t shut up about ‘boosting revenues with concierge services’ did not say anything about this,” she appears to be thinking.

The Phantom, 4/29/26

I’m also really enjoying the facial expressions on long-time Phantom antagonist Eric “The Infamous Nomad” Sahara and his Gitmo guard as they give Ignis Vindicta a once over. “Is this an … actual alien guy, or some dude in a mask from Spirit Halloween, or what?” they’re both trying to figure out, with varying degrees of confusion and contempt.

Crankshaft, 4/29/26

I’m really not enjoying the facial expression on this lady in panel two, but I accept that, for denizens of the Funkyverse, “I’ve awkwardly set up a truly terrible bit of wordplay and now I’m about to unleash it” is an all-too-common scenario, and they need a visual signal to let people know that it’s about to happen.

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Herb and Jamaal, 4/21/26

I went to grad school for history (NOTE: DO NOT DO THIS) from 1996 to 1999, which was about at the tail end of the period when it might seem reasonable for someone to be going to grad school and not own a computer. Our department had a tiny little “computer lab” for grad students that was basically a little cubby off the admin office with a couple of outdated Macs and a printer. The whole time I was going there I would often see this one guy using the computers, a heavy-set dude with a shaggy beard and thick glasses who would never talk to anyone else and always be typing away furiously, which was normal enough grad student appearance/behavior/vibes that I never thought much of it, except to notice that I never saw anyone else using the lab. Anyway, one day, not long before I finally left the program in disgrace and relief, I noticed that he had left some printed pages behind, and I picked them up to finally figure out what his specialization was in the department, only to discover that what he was writing was in fact no-paragraph-breaks all-caps paranoid ideation. The question that immediately occurred to me: Did a genuinely crazy person somehow figure out that our computer lab was never used and that nobody would question him if he came in to type up his little manifestos? Or had he at one point been a normal (“normal”) grad student who was driven mad by academia, in a turn that validated my decision to quit?

Anyway, just thought of this little episode as I read today’s Herb and Jamaal. When I told my stepmother my story, she asked “Did you, uh, tell anyone? Because he might be dangerous?” And I was like “Nope! Ha ha! Not my business!” But I can see that Herb is taking his responsibilities a little more seriously than I did.

Pluggers, 4/21/26

It’s kind of interesting that there are no plugger cows, right? I sort of thought that maybe it’s because their society is tilted towards predators and aggressive herbivores like Rhino-Man, but maybe it’s actually because plugger envy of the gentle bovine’s digestive prowess has led to cows being pushed out of their society.

Dick Tracy, 4/21/26

“What with them all being freaks of nature with weird skull shapes and all. They’re easy for us to spot and catch! Hey, you ever think there might be a bunch of normal-looking criminals getting away with stuff around here because we don’t really notice them?”

Heathcliff, 4/21/26

What do you think goes on at the nightclub for frogs named after their main prey animal? Probably some real fucked-up shit, right?