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Mary Worth, 3/23/26

One of my favorite books of the last 10 years is Because Internet, which focuses on how the internet has changed language use but has a lot to say about online culture in general. An insight from the book that I think about a lot is that there are identifiable “generations” of internet users that are determined by when people first got online and don’t necessarily map onto people’s calendar ages. A lot of Gen Xers and elder Millennials first got online in college in the 1990s, for instance, while their boomer parents might not have gained extensive experience with the internet for another 10 or 15 years.

One of the biggest internet generational divides in my opinion is whether you consider the computer or the phone to be your primary device, and one way I think it shows up is how you prefer to make large payments. Speaking as a fiftysomething, I’m fine with using Venmo to split a restaurant bill, but am constantly amazed and a little discomfited by contractors who want me to use Zelle to send them four-figure sums of money — I should be sitting down in front of a real physical keyboard to do that! Now, these are mostly young people, of course, but clearly Harvey is one of those older guys who worked in some high-compensation, ascot-forward industry and was able to coast to retirement with his personal assistant taking care of all the computer stuff, only truly getting online in his dotage, with zero defenses built up. So why shouldn’t he send two hundred thousand American dollars to Trixie by tapping on the screen of his Samsung Galaxy S22 phone? After all, that’s the very device on which he met her in the first place, and the Vanguard app makes it so easy!

Dennis the Menace, 3/23/26

OK, sure, in real life we know that this is an example of the syndicate colorist just charging in with the paint fill tool without actually reading the caption, but I’d like to think that Dennis’s grandpa is sitting there watching some revisionist post-1975 Western in color and absolutely seething about it. That’s why Dennis is telling Gina this: because he knows if she makes the mistake of asking the old man what he’s watching, she’ll get an earful about how he doesn’t tune into a cowboy movie for a bunch of moral ambiguity or whatever.

Slylock Fox, 3/23/26

I know that this multispecies society of sapient animals is still finding its footing, and maybe they haven’t gotten their education system really organized yet, but the fact that Kolton Kangaroo is so ignorant of marsupial reproductive biology is frankly embarrassing. Honestly if he doesn’t understand how capable of movement his own child is, he deserves to be a victim of whatever kind of scam Shady is pulling on him here.

Beetle Bailey, 3/23/26

Here’s today’s Beetle Bailey! It’s about how the title character was having a pretty good day … until his commanding officer showed up to beat the shit out of him. Honestly a surprising number of Beetle Bailey strips are about this!

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Mary Worth, 3/8/26

Five years ago, Mary tried to broach the question of whether Estelle was being grifted rather gingerly. With Harvey, she’s being somewhat more direct, and it immediately blew up in her face, though maybe that’s just his masculine pride kicking in and driving him to comically storm out of the room. It’s just like beloved [note to self: look up what kind of job “B.C. Forbes” has held or what sort of person they are before publishing this post and insert description here] “B.C. Forbes” says: if you don’t have your life savings drained every few years or so by a Cambodian-based criminal syndicate, you were leaving legitimate opportunities to have sex with hot babes much younger than you on the table!

Shoe, 3/8/26

I know, I know this is a perennial gripe of mine, but: You absolutely cannot do whimsical jokes about birds in a comic strip where everyone is a bird. This is a joke about a number of these characters’ peers committing violent, awful suicide! It’s pretty believable that they’d do it, since all the bird-people in this strip are very depressed, and with good reason, since they live in a world dominated by sapient birds where nevertheless KFC is a viable business.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 3/8/26

Now, this strip? Where Slylock Fox, a sapient animal cop in a world dominated by sapient animals, is providing enhanced security to a wealthy and influential sapient animal who is fairly obviously wearing a fur coat? That doesn’t make me mad at all. That’s just how the world works. That’s a mystery that kids need to learn how to solve a lot more than anything about gloves and how people won’t pick up just one lying there by itself no matter how lovely it is.

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Wizard of Id, 2/2/26

Thanks to the several faithful readers who pointed out that the Wizard of Id I featured a week ago is reusing the exact same art as a strip from 2015, except the dialogue has been rewritten to be horny instead of bloodthirsty. Let’s hear it for the victory of eros over thanatos? I guess??? Not sure if this one is a repeat too, but I do find the backstory reveal interesting, in that we learn that it was the Wizard’s wife who turned him on to “this,” though it’s not entirely clear what “this” is (football, the TV set, a dimension outside Id’s pseudo-medieval setting, etc.).

Slylock Fox, 2/2/26

Look, I joke a lot about the arbitrary nature of justice in the Forest Kingdom, but years ago I was a juror on an honest to god drug conspiracy case in Baltimore, and there were significantly fewer witnesses than this, so maybe I’ve been overhasty.

Pluggers, 2/2/26

Oh, what’s that, pluggers? You think you’re trapped in a never-ending slog, where each day is exactly like the last and you never make any kind of forward progress? Well, so do the rest of us! You’re not special!