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Pluggers, 9/7/26

This year, my 80-year-old stepmother fractured her hip badly enough to need a replacement, and although “hip replacement” sounds very dire, the hip is a large but simple joint and the whole procedure was remarkably easy: it’s an outpatient procedure and she was up and walking again in just a few days. A few years ago, a friend of mine in her 40s fell and hit the ground just right to cause a similar fracture, but her situation wasn’t so simple: the doctors told her that normally with that kind of injury they’d do a hip replacement, but the people who normally have that kind of injury are old, and they don’t think an artificial hip would last through the full lifetime of someone in their 40s, so my friend had to endure months of painful, immobilizing recovery instead.

Anyway, the idea that decisions about certain medical procedures have to take into account the projected lifespan of the patient is one I think about a lot. Like, yeah, it’s great that the sort of people who are most likely to need a quick and easy hip replacement are the same sort of people who don’t have to worry about whether that artificial hip will last more than a couple decades. And obviously it’s great to be told that you don’t have to go through the annoying process of doing a colonoscopy anymore! But I don’t know if I’d be quite so excited to learn that “Enh, you haven’t developed colon cancer yet, and if you start to do so at this point it almost certainly won’t be the thing that kills you.”

Marvin, 9/7/26

I really enjoy how upset everyone looks in this comic. Obviously the joke is that Marvin’s grandpa is like “Wife no cook food? Where food come from if wife no cook it?” (with the implication that in this context he is as helpless as a small pet dog), and that’s a classic sitcom-style bit. But Marvin’s grandma isn’t happy about this either! She thought writing the apartment newsletter would be a fun lark and a way for her to connect with her community, but instead it’s eating up time she’d rather spend caring for her family!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/7/26

“They kept saying stuff like, ‘What’s that lump on your head,’ and ‘Is it supposed to be hair? Because it doesn’t look like hair’ and ‘We’re moving out because the lump on your head has bad vibes.’ Good riddance, I say, and that’s coming from both me and my head-lump.”

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Dick Tracy, 9/2/26

So I guess that computer didn’t just magically explode, but had actually been already fitted with some kind of internal incendiary device without noticeably increasing its size or weight, which definitely is a real thing that we should believe might happen. Anyway, I personally am loving our jaunty fire inspector here, who loves nothing more than using big, theatrical gestures to walk people through the aftermath of some horrifying incendiary event. Now, obviously he’s seen a “USB killer” used before for pranks and pyrotechnics displays and such. The occasional gender reveal party, you know. That’s just the normal stuff you encounter every day in the fire marshall biz. But murder? Well, that’s a new one on him.

Pluggers, 9/2/26

Now, an unlucky angler pulling a non-fish object out of the water is a classic cartoon bit that we must respect. Usually it’s an old boot or a tin can or something, but given that our dog-man plugger has caught himself a hat, I’m a little puzzled here by what the … excitement? activity? … lines emitting from his bald head are signifying. Are we supposed to understand that this is a beloved long lost hat that blew into the lake weeks or months ago, and his scalp is tingling with excitement at being reunited with it? That this is just some random hat he’s discovered, but he’s been immediately seized by the intrusive thought that he should put it on, despite the fact that it’s no doubt very wet and very disgusting? Or has he in desperation and despite his scalp’s protests decided to use that hat he put on this morning and wore out on this fishing trip as a lure?

Alice, 9/2/26

Hey, you guys heard about the omnipresent surveillance state? You heard about this? Thank goodness information on that topic has now been provided to the no doubt large share of people who only get their news from the comic strip Alice, though I think she’d be a more credible speaker on this point if she wasn’t also convinced that space aliens live in her floorboards.

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Mary Worth, 8/31/26

Hey, everyone, here’s a fun fact, if by “fun” you mean guaranteed to deliver the epiphany that oh my god I’m so old, how did I get to be so old: we are mere weeks away from the 20th anniversary of the death of Aldo Kelrast. Can contemporary Mary Worth come up with a storyline that could come close to that magic? Well, today we’re launching a new one, and I’m mildly hopeful, as it introduces two intriguing things: Mary and Ian spending time together socially and, apparently, enjoying themselves in a quite manic fashion; and some anhedonic old lady sitting in her Charterstone kitchen fuming about how nothing is as good as it used to be when she was young and had her whole life ahead of her. Not even putting oat milk on oat-based cereal (or “oatmaxxing,” as the kids call it) can bring her a frission of pleasure anymore! Looking forward to learning how she’s about to make this everybody else’s problem and nip Mary and Ian’s ha ha!ing in the bud.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/31/26

OK, fine, I guess we’re not going to get to see the scam twins try and fail to pull off a child kidnapping, but at least we’re going to be treated to a Socratic dialogue between Rene and his elaborately coiffed and mustachio’d jail buddy, in which the former attempts to explain how rating on a criminal associate entails turning them in to the authorities, usually in exchange for reducing one’s own looming criminal penalties, and is quite different from activating family networks to dissuade a loved one from a course of action that you don’t believe they’re equipped to handle.

Pluggers, 8/31/26

You could definitely have done a panel with this caption where the plugger is cheerfully strolling ahead with a measured pace, just like many older heavyset adults I see every day do. But we’re in the late Pluggers era, so instead we have to look at this, a “fun” comic in which a plugger is clearly in genuine distress.