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Crock, 9/24/25

In my freshman year of college, there was an outbreak of E. coli at various Jack in the Boxes that killed four children, and a friend of mine who had worked at McDonald’s told me something I have never forgotten, which was that (at the time, anyway) they never taught fast food workers how to tell if a burger was cooked properly, but instead just taught them to put it on a bun when the timer rang. “If that timer went haywire and started ringing early, I would have definitely been serving people raw hamburgers,” he said. It was enough to keep me off fast food hamburgers for life, though for some entirely fake reason the flash-fried breaded chicken products seem safe to me. Anyway, my point is, I was using this news peg to play my fun “what year is this Crock rerun from?” game and was going to triumphantly announce that it was 1993, but then I saw that it actually had a 1997 copyright date, which means that even upon its original publication it was four years out of date.

Luann, 9/24/25

So Gunther and his girlfriend Bets are doing some sort of fundraiser for animal adoption with their cosplay group and are of course cosplaying appropriately. At first I was going to come in hot and absolutely furious at how much more work she had put into her costume than he did, but then I remembered the last time Gunther engaged in sexy, elaborate cosplay it was fucking horrifying, so I think he should actually be discouraged from applying any more effort to this whole thing than he’s doing now.

Rhymes With Orange, 9/24/25

Have you guys seen how much mortuary services cost? If my funeral were botched in such a disgraceful fashion, I would certainly hope that one of my loved ones would speak up on behalf of my dignity and the dignity of those gathered to mourn, rather than just cracking wise.

Mary Worth, 9/24/25

If there’s one thing I hope to have established in 20 years of blogging, it’s that joshreads dot com is your number one website for finding out if today’s comics pages feature Mary Worth, a psychic child, and a guy dressed sort of like an old lighthouse keeper screaming in terror as their hot air balloon crashes into a pine forest. If you’re wondering, today is, at long last, that day.

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Blondie, 9/21/25

Comics Time is a damn complicated thing. Dagwood and Blondie are both relatively young parents of teenagers, which caused some of you to push back on my contention last week that “Blondie in the year 2025 is your go-to for the pettiest boomer gripes about everyday suburban life imaginable,” given that, going by age alone, the Bumsteads are, like the Lockhorns, Millennials. The thing is, though, that their every word and deed proves that they are not Millennials, but rather exude powerful boomer energy and just happen to be drawn as if they’re 40. If you need more evidence of that, take today’s strip, in which, based on the way Dagwood is holding his phone, I assume he has its speaker set at maximum volume and he’s forcing all these other people at the airport to listen to the conversation he’s having with his boss about yet another nephew who’s stealing his whole bit.

Crock, 9/21/25

Imagine a crazed terrorist bomber running straight for you and yelling “It’s kibosh time!” This may be the first time I’ve ever laughed at something in Crock that I’m reasonably sure is supposed to be funny. It’s not the punchline, of course, but baby steps I guess.

Dennis the Menace, 9/21/25

“Working from home? That sure would be a hassle if your kid was notorious menace Dennis Mitchell. You’d probably prefer not to do it.” –The Dennis the Menace creative team a full five and a half years after the COVID lockdowns led to an unprecedented explosion in remote work, apparently

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Pluggers, 9/15/25

A friend of mine in Baltimore, widely known for always looking younger than she was, when asked for her secret said, “Never make a noise when you bend over to pick something up,” something I think about all the time as I hit increasingly pluggerish ages and inevitably make noises when I bend over to pick things up. Anyway, today’s Pluggers is on this theme, but I like the way they’ve taken the suggestion and turned it into a little story about a woman who’s just trying to enjoy a football game but instead has to watch her husband drop dead as he attempts to get out of a chair.

Crock, 9/15/25

The thing about using the rule of three when you’re writing a joke is that while it’s true that the first two of the three should be similar enough to form a pattern, they shouldn’t literally be the exact same thing. Maybe my standards are too high, but I think if you’re doing a comic about how the French Foreign Legion is full of nefarious criminals, you should be aware of at least one other crime over and above jewel thievery!

Judge Parker, 9/15/25

“Anyway, just like Pilate, I’m washing my hands of him. He was the good guy in that story, right? It would’ve been more dramatic to do this right in front of Alan, obviously, but we were at a restaurant and trying to get him to go into the bathroom at the same time as me would’ve been weird.”