Post Content

Intelligent Life, 6/22/26

Everything I’ve learned about all the characters in Intelligent Life has been against my will. I wasn’t thrilled when I realized I instantly recognized this blond guy as “Barry,” the stereotypical jock used as a punching bag by the nerd characters in the strip. He likes beer and wings and is constantly unsuccessfully hitting on women, and — and now we’re at the point where I’m learning new stuff about him, which I didn’t ask for and don’t care for — he also has a terrible relationship with his father, I guess.

Pluggers, 6/22/26

Look, for as long as I’ve been reading this strip, the answer to the question “Are pluggers OK?” has been a resounding “no.” But I feel like they’re building less and less of a superstructure around this sentiment in individual panels and are now just hitting us with “Life is suffering, for pluggers. Every moment is agony. They’d be happier dead.”

Pickles, 6/22/26

Pickles, meanwhile, is a comic strip about the foibles of old people that isn’t afraid to get a little edgy sometimes, but I declare today’s strip, where the vagaries of fading memory mean that poor Opal has spent hours in an act of loving artistry, making a scarf for a member of her family only to be struck anew by grief, is a little too edgy for my tastes.

Pardon My Planet, 6/22/26

Yesterday’s Pardon My Planet was about domestic discord among wolf-people, and I thought about doing a post basically saying “Ha ha, this strip, which is mostly unpleasant marital drama among its cast of mostly interchangeable regular characters, has finally branched out into doing unpleasant marital drama with furries” but decided against it. But today, with the clown stuff? Well, I feel like you all needed to know about it. Do you think “Bobo” is a male clown name? No judgement, but it does add an extra little twist to this scenario.

Luann, 6/22/26

I saved the grimmest one for last. Brad and Toni are going to have sex in the shower, you guys. They’re going to have sex in the shower after she announced herself as “zit” and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Post Content

Pluggers, 6/14/26

I’m beginning to suspect that some of my sense that Pluggers is increasingly all over the place on explaining plugger identity is that the strips have gradually shifted from out-group messaging (pluggers explaining to non-pluggers what pluggers are like) to in-group messaging (pluggers talking with other pluggers about the plugger experience, anticipating a good amount of background knowledge and sympathy in advance). Take this panel, for instance: I am reasonably sure that the thrust of it is “We’re all pluggers here, and as pluggers we love to garden but we know how hard it can be, right? Plants always growing in the wrong places, haha!” But from an outside perspective, what it looks like it’s saying is “Pluggers are terrible gardeners. Just awful at it. Grass growing where it shouldn’t, but their attempts to coax it into growing elsewhere fail miserably. Pathetic.”

Hagar the Horrible, 6/14/26

I realize that the main character in this strip is specifically called “the Horrible,” and not to be all like “Things are meaner and baser now than they used to be,” but I kind of feel like Hagar the Horrible used to be less explicit about “the main character in this strip, Hagar the Horrible, is a cold-blooded killer who hunts his fellow human beings both for profit and for sport.” I mean, I laughed at this, so I guess I’m part of the problem, but still!

Post Content

Pluggers, 6/7/26

Look, I know that Pluggers has lost its focus on pluggers being hard-working, blue collar real Americans and now mostly dwells on stuff like “pluggers eat a lot” and “pluggers are old and have mobility issues that significantly degrade their quality of life.” Still, I don’t think we should accept “pluggers exist on several layers of narrative and metanarrative and are slowly becoming aware of that fact.” That’s just not the sort of thing pluggers do or think about! They’re down-home regular beast-people, not characters in a damn Borges short story.

Beetle Bailey, 6/7/26

Pretty sure this is the closest Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has come to acknowledging that Beetle and Miss Buxley, as young adults in a relationship in ostensibly the modern day, are probably having sex? Things quickly go south right after that acknowledgement, though, thank goodness.

Mary Worth, 6/7/26

“I used to hate myself! But now I’ve done a lot of work and I don’t anymore. When my girlfriend left town to take care of some important family members I immediately assumed it meant she was breaking up with me, by the way! Ha ha, my head is made of wood!”