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Slylock Fox, 9/10/25

This is one of the most baffling Six Differences cartoons I’ve seen in quite a while. Why does the horse have a butt wound? Why does he look high as a kite? Why does the kid look so smug? Why does the cow look so sad? Where are the birds leading the horse and the kid? Are they leading them to their deaths? None of these questions are meant as criticisms, obviously, they’re a series of delightful unsolvable mysteries that I will enjoy contemplating, unlike the question of whether the clouds in the two panels actually look different from one another.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/10/25

How much of Jughaid’s flesh do you think Sukey would eat before she realized he wasn’t actually a giant carrot? Would it be little enough that the lad would survive the procedure?

Shoe, 9/10/25

“No, he has a gang that sells drugs and stolen property out of ice cream trucks. He killed six people by burning down their house once. It’s really quite grim and I’m not sure why you’re making light of it.”

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Crock, 9/1/25

Even if you hate Crock with a passion, you don’t read it every day for 20+ years without learning a little something about its character dynamics, though if you’re me and you’re notoriously terrible with names, you do manage to not learn some of the names of those characters. I wanna say this woman’s name is … Fatima? We’re going to go with that, although she doesn’t make the Wikipedia list of characters, and while I normally am quite dubious about the utility of Google’s AI answers, based on its “In the comic strip Crock, there is no ‘pretty girl’ character” response to me, I have to admit it may be getting better at parsing visual input. Anyway, the point of (let’s call her) Fatima here is that she’s supposed to be pretty, and also that she’s a foil for Grossie, who is supposed to not be pretty, and who she hangs out with a lot and routinely insults. You can tell that she’s not supposed to be pretty because they named her “Grossie,” and I think it’s telling that Fatima (?) abbreviates Maggot’s equally vile name to the cuter “Mag,” whereas Grossie gets no similarly softened nickname.

Anyway, speaking of character dynamics, I get that Fatima (??) has to be talking to some third party for this joke to work, but it’s kind of weird that she’s having drinks with Captain Poulet, right? It’s like running into your English teacher and your shop teacher hanging out together outside of work. Sure, it sort of makes sense that they know each other, but you’ve never seen them interact and it feels wrong, somehow.

Blondie, 9/1/25

As AI becomes integrated into every feature of human life and we begin to worry about who’s really calling the shots, a new question arises: Which of our fellow biological humans will go quisling when the clankers take over? Well, the team behind Blondie seems to be making tentative moves in that direction, and sad as it is, it makes a sort of sense: if anyone serves as a model for “humans don’t really desire autonomy and would be satisfied to simply have their needs met by industrially produced foods and material goods,” it’s the characters in this strip. Once a robot figures out how to make a giant sandwich, it’s curtains for the human race!

Slylock Fox, 9/1/25

Um, actually, we know that those are Reeky’s pants he left behind because a janky thrift store with magic eight balls and VHS tapes displayed on the floor would never sell torn-up jeans; those are fashionable garments that can only be found in high-end boutiques.

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Folks! I am back from my vacation, I am tanned, rested, and ready, and I am diving back into that most beloved of all artistic mediums: the daily comics! Big thanks to Uncle Lumpy, and Turtle Carl, and everyone who contributed to the summer fundraiser (you’ll all be getting personal thank-yous soon), but for now I must dedicate my energy to urgent, pressing matters, like what’s going on in the Flagston marriage:

Hi and Lois, 8/18/25

I guess what’s going on in the Flagston marriage is that it’s crying for help! “Fix me!” screams every object in the home Hi and Lois built together, at Lois’s command. “Please!” Ha ha, just kidding, this is about chores or whatever, it’s definitely not a metaphor for anything.

Slylock Fox, 8/18/25

You know who can’t scream anymore, though? That fish, whose skeleton, picked clean, is lying in the middle of Slylock’s crime scene. Hey, did you know that some species of shrew eat small fish? Just thought that was a fun fact. I’m sure Shady’s transparent lies about the disruption of a sand sculpture contest — exactly the sort of thing that we know catches Slylock’s attention — are just his usual clumsy attempts to exonerate himself, and not a distraction from a much more monstrous crime.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/18/25

Since I often criticize syndicate colorists on here, I have to compliment whoever it was that made Ma Goose’s little breath clouds that particularly unpleasant shade of brown, which does a much better job of conveying how vile her morning breath is than the clichéd writing of the joke. Comics: occasionally remembering that they are, in fact, a visual medium!

Judge Parker, 8/18/25

Good news: Ever since a series of embarrassing Senate hearings in 1976, the CIA has “strongly discouraged” its agents from murdering children. Bad news: Well, I guess the second panel here has already established what the bad news is, ha ha!