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Mary Worth, 11/4/25

Sorry to be a “liberal coastal elitist” who “has a basic understanding of how academia works,” but a “teachers conference” isn’t really a thing that a tenured PhD English prof at a large state university like Ian would go to; there are plenty of academic conferences where he’d make the rounds, of course, but those tend to run the length of a long weekend, not “a few weeks.” What I’m trying to say is that Toby has no real idea where her husband actually is right now, maybe because he never told her, or maybe because he did tell her and she forgot. When he does finally get home, in a few days or weeks or months or whatever, he will presumably find her on this park bench, her face having been viciously pecked off after she fought a parrot for control of a bag of sunflower seeds and lost.

Pardon My Planet, 11/4/25

I concede that there’s the core of a halfway funny joke about “runway models” here. But building a superstructure around it where you’ve got a dumpy old man grousing that someone misrepresented their attractiveness on a dating app, and also somehow a sex-with-twins fantasy is involved? That’s the misogynist pervert vibe that Pardon My Planet does best.

Marvin, 11/4/25

Glad to see we’re moving past “fire hydrants: they’re toilets, for dogs” to “fire hydrants: they’re the center of a dog’s social life, because they piss there, but for once we’re not dwelling on that part.” Anyway, what’s the most weird and off-putting way to describe someone using color to mask the fact that they’re going grey? It’s probably “has fake brown hair,” right?

Archie, 11/4/25

Hey, teens! It’s Archie! The comic strip about teens, full of jokes that are relatable … to teens!

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Crankshaft, 10/26/25

Mr. Crankshaft, I know Dagwood Bumstead. Dagwood Bumstead is a friend of mine. He puts together comically large foodstuffs that no ordinary human could even get their mouth around, let alone chew. Those are just normal-ass pastries you bought at a gas station. Mr. Crankshaft, you’re no Dagwood Bumstead.

Pardon My Planet, 10/26/25

I love the contrast between the blond guy at the bar and the bartender as this strip’s beloved (?) Bitter Late-Middle-Aged Man unloads a monologue that’s dark even by Pardon My Planet standards. The young man sees how grim this is and is genuinely disturbed; the bartender, who spends his existence serving up brain-numbing hooch to the hateful drunks who populate the PMPiverse, has long ago become numb to this sort of thing.

Marvin, 10/26/25

“Hello neighbors! I want to offer you nothing but love and compassion. Anyway, it’s come to my attention that some of you are leaving the hallways smeared with feces.” Perfect Marvin strip, no notes.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/26/25

Writing a syndicated newspaper comic strip is of course a great way to write off the cost of a cruise on your taxes as “research,” but remember, you don’t always have to aim so high. Do you want to draw an almost perfectly realistic plate of delicious pad thai? Well then, you’d have to order some delicious pad thai, wouldn’t you? You know, for professional reasons! It sure does look great, doesn’t it, Augie? Just like the real thing!

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/3/25

Hopefully by now you are all well acquainted with my beef with how comic strips depict the relationship between dogs and fire hydrants, but if you’re not, my beef is as follows: in real life, dogs pee on fire hydrants because they like to pee on vertical surfaces and fire hydrants are often a good place to let your dog do that so that they don’t do it on a tree or your neighbor’s house or whatever, and it’s weird that cartoon dogs treat them as a strong equivalent to toilets. Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm is particularly weird to me because of the way Grimm is like, “Oh no! I really have to pee, but the only object I could reasonably pee on, a fire hydrant, is nowhere to be found,” but looming in the middle of the panel is a mailbox, extremely visible but unmentioned in the dialogue, upon which in real life a dog would absolutely pee without a second thought. What exactly are we meant to take from this scene? Is it deliberately ambiguous, and we’re supposed to contemplate whether Grimm’s biological needs are going to outweigh his reticence to deface government property? Or is this simply the result of a sponsorship deal with the U.S. Postal Service, executed in one of the worst ways imaginable?

Mary Worth, 9/3/25

“Or are you thinking about mummifying your father and I after our deaths in the Egyptian fashion, removing our brains through our noses; then making an incision along our flanks with an Ethiopian stone blade so you can remove our organs and place them in canopic jars before rinsing our abdominal cavities with palm oil and filling them with spices; and then finally placing our preserved corpses in a massive pyramid built along the Hudson on the Upper West Side? Because that would be nice, actually.”

Pardon My Planet, 9/3/25

Pardon My Planet’s takes on women tend to be in the ballpark of “women love to demand expensive consumer goods from men,” so before today I would’ve encouraged an attempt to dig into women’s real thoughts and desires to find out what they actually want. But after seeing this panel, I gotta say: never try to do that again, because, Jesus Christ. Have you heard they like to shop? Maybe do some strips on that.