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Marvin, 9/20/26

Now, if you were a normal person, by which I mean someone who has no idea what Marvin’s whole deal was beyond “Isn’t that a comic about, like, a baby?”, you would probably be taken aback by this strip, which seems to be a pretty harsh indictment of modern millennial parents, sucked into social media and checked out from what the wondrous moments of their kid’s toddlerhood, precious memories they’ll never get back. But Marvin realheads like you and me know that Marvin, the character, is the worst baby around, and deserves his father’s neglect. Who cares what he’s wearing? He sucks!

Shoe, 9/20/26

Given that the uncle-nephew bond is apparently the closest intergenerational relationship the bird-men of Shoe can experience, it’s too bad for the Perfesser that his uncles keep dying. Anyway, I think they should wait to make sure Uncle Walter’s coffin successfully lands in the grave before carving anything into marble.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 9/20/26

OK, yes, he should’ve been smart enough to take the cap off the pen. But the legal status of this monster — is he a sapient animal and therefore a citizen of the Forest Kingdom who needs liberation? a creation of an unclean human and therefore a lesser beast? a dangerous criminal who is competent to be tried and must be jailed? — should send the newly established animal political establishment into a frenzy, and you have to admire the good Count for his gumption in creating it.

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The Phantom, 9/11/26

Happy Friday, everybody! I was going to explain the backstory to today’s Phantom to those who haven’t been reading along, but, you know what? Snakes, aliens, devil-Phantoms, screaming, flames … this right here is art and it doesn’t need any explanation. Just let it wash over you! Let loose with an enthusiastic “YAAAAHHHH!!!” while you’re at it. The weekend is almost here!

Marvin, 9/11/26

Marvin’s grandmother lives with her husband in an apartment building for which she has to write the newsletter because the Great Financial Crisis wiped out all their retirement savings, which forced them to briefly move in with Marvin’s parents (an episode for which their son-in-law has never forgiven them) before eventually settling into their current digs. Sometimes I feel like I must be one of the only people on earth walking around with this amount of Marvin lore in their heads, but I’m pleased to learn that the strip’s current creative team at least remembers that they’re too poor to live in one of the nicer apartment buildings that gets first dibs on the bingo guy.

Mary Worth, 9/11/26

Damn, Nelly must be a true master of the gossiping arts. How else can you explain the fact that Alma has gone in mere minutes from “So what?” to “Wow, that Worth lady always seems so proper, but if you say she and Prof. Cameron were engaged in full penetration intercourse right there in her car in the Charterstone parking lot, I have no choice but to believe you! I guess you can never really tell about a person!”

Daddy Daze, 9/11/26

Men will literally project a truly awful death-related pun onto the nonsense “ba” syllables their children produce rather than going to therapy so they can deal with their grief at losing a parent. It’s sad!

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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.”