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Alice, 11/3/25

Today’s Alice will I think be particularly inscrutable to non-Alice regulars, but in my late blog era I have myself become an Alice regular and am here to read Alice so you don’t have to! [scans through comic again] OK, fine, actually, this one is inscrutable to me too. I guess the little scene in the inset panel is supposed to be taking place simultaneous to the main action, but it’s not clear to me why it looks like a painting or maybe a window in the room where Alice and her boyfriend are sitting, why the alien guy is being debriefed by a human, or whether it’s supposed to be ironic somehow that the alien says humans are “too emotional” when Alice and her boyfriend are just staring off blankly into the middle distance together. At least one thing’s settled, though: Spock was a fictional half human/half Vulcan character from the Star Trek series in the 1960s.

Mary Worth, 11/3/25

At last, the saga of Olive the dog psychic has reached a triumphant conclusion sort of petered out, and now we’re getting … a Toby story? Oh, hell yeah. Toby, abandoned once again by her elderly husband (getting drunk at some academic conference) and her middle-aged best friend (nattering on to her not-boyfriend about a tween psychic), leaving her to ramble internally about her bag of sunflower seeds? Hell yeah. “It’s just me, myself, and my snack!” thinks a woman who probably once thought of herself as a “trophy wife” for an older high-prestige man and is now the saddest person alive. This week’s gonna be great.

Zits, 11/3/25

Definitely one of my pet peeves is when comics artists get older but their characters stay the same age, and yet also maintain the same set of cultural touchstones, and one thing I’ve always respected about Zits is that it leans into comic strip time, shifting the middle-aged parent of its teen main character from Boomer to Gen Xer over the decades. Not sure if I’m comfortable with “Walt got naked at Burning Man” now becoming part of the lore, but I admire the strip’s dedication and consistency.

Judge Parker, 11/3/25

“Anyway, the horses didn’t have anywhere to live so they just kind of … wandered off, I guess? I’m sure they’re fine.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 11/2/25

So the big news that Augie delivered over pad thai is that not one but two publishers are interested in his manuscript and are bidding up the price! Is this the sort of thing that will finally get him riled up enough to have sex with his girlfriend? Well, no, apparently not. Sorry, Summer! He’s got papers to grade, and anyway Thai food does a number on his tummy, so you’re dodging a bullet, really.

Mary Worth, 11/2/25

“It sometimes feels like the good is getting better … and the bad is getting worse. But children like Olive give me hope that their psychic powers will turn the tide in the imminent final apocalyptic confrontation between the evil and the righteous.”

“Ha ha, so true! But through it all, one thing is for sure … our love is here to stay. That is for sure, right, Mary? Because you still haven’t changed your relationship status on Facebook.”

Garfield, 11/2/25

THINGS GARFIELD IS NOT AFRAID OF: The shades of the dead, terrifying the living by demonstrating that the veil between this world and the next is much thinner than you might believe

THINGS GARFIELD IS AFRAID OF: Running out of ice cream

THINGS GARFIELD SHOULD BE AFRAID OF: Having his flesh torn from his body and hung from a tree, where his soul remains trapped and in agony within a somehow still living husk

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Blondie, 11/1/25

The thing about Dagwood is that he’s a dullard. He’s not stupid, though he’s also clearly not a genius, but mostly he just lacks any kind of imagination, which is driven home by the fact that we get to see his reveries and learn that they’re just the most on-the-nose stuff imaginable. “Wow, chefs racing through kitchens on zip lines? I think that would go … a little … like this!” [imagines a bunch of chefs racing through a kitchen on a zip line, adding zero additional information or details]

Gil Thorp, 11/1/25

The current Gil Thorp storyline is a flashback to the ’80s, when Milford dabbled in having a girls’ football team, with Emily “Mimi” Clover, the future Coach Mrs. Coach Thorp and subsequent Coach Ex-Mrs. Coach Thorp, being one of the students most excited about the prospect, and Coach Gil Thorp being the team’s … coach? A student coach, maybe? I hope??? Because he married Mimi later????? Anyway, we learned earlier that the whole scenario ended badly for unspecified reasons, which is why Mimi doesn’t like to talk about it, but I think after today’s panel three we’re going to learn that the school district shut the team down because it was getting “too sexy.”