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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, 3/21/26

“My heart … my delicate heart … too weak to fly to see my injured beloved. Time to heal myself using the best technique known to man: taking a pill and then tucking into an enormous bowl of hearty chili. It’s an old family recipe: you cook a pound and a half of ground beef, add barbecue sauce and exactly two beans, and serve!”

Blondie, 3/21/26

“Yeah, it turns out that every day of the year — every moment, really — is a crushing, depressing chore. But at least there’s death waiting for us, right? At least there’s death. [suddenly remembers he’s a character in a long-running comic strip who hasn’t aged appreciably in nearly a century] oh NO”

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Mary Worth, 3/19/26

Say what you will about the evil gangs that are keeping “Trixie” captive in a Cambodian compound, but you have to respect that they let their enslaved workers customize their laptop’s UI. Going to a no-distraction, all-text screen for chatting with a mark really helps you get into the zone, you know? Like you can get into your character’s headspace and try to figure out what she might say that will ring true and also separate your victim from his money. Unfortunately, “Trixie” seems to have botched it: Harvey’s facial expression looks less like “Oh no! I must hurry to the nearest Western Union, post-haste!” and more “Hmm … devastating injury … perhaps a lifetime of impaired mobility … this is not aligning with my acrobatic sex plans for when we meet up … who else is out there on this app, I wonder?”

Gearhead Gertie, 3/19/26

Look, I don’t want to say that there’s only so many jokes you can make in a recurring comic panel that is committed to only doing jokes about NASCAR. I’m just saying that today we got to “You know what can interfere with your enjoyment of NASCAR? Your neighbor’s leaf blower. What if there was someone who loved NASCAR so much … that she did something about it,” which, honestly, having typed that out, I actually think is pretty good. I hope we go further down this road. Gertie will stop at nothing to remove all distractions from her monomania! She will leave a trail of dead behind her, you must remain silent at all times