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Gil Thorp, 6/8/26

Isis, a Mudlark student-athlete, was taken by ICE earlier this year, and she’s now being released after much protest by fellow students, and this big local news story with national implications is being covered by … local podcaster Marty Moon, using the same iPhone camera streaming setup he uses to comment on high school golf? Honestly, I’ve never been more concerned about the health of the Milford media ecosystem.

Beetle Bailey, 6/8/26

I have to admit that I’m not really sure what the “joke” here is supposed to be, so I’m choosing to believe that Beetle wasn’t sure whether to dig a foxhole as he learned to do as part of his military training or to dig a hole that would be appealing to an actual fox, so he tried to split the difference and has satisfied nobody.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/8/26

Mae Mae is wiped out by her first two mornings of honest work in years, and needs to go take a nap before dinner. Mud is amorously moved by her choice to take self-care in this manner, and honestly it’s the most romantic thing I’ve seen in the comics pages in years.

Herb and Jamaal, 6/8/26

For one brief, terrifying moment, I was convinced that Herb and Jamaal was going to introduce the concept of polyamory to its audience via one of its child characters. But, thankfully, it was just setting up a joke that’s been circulating in print and online for nearly 40 years instead, which is frankly much more on brand.

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Pluggers, 6/7/26

Look, I know that Pluggers has lost its focus on pluggers being hard-working, blue collar real Americans and now mostly dwells on stuff like “pluggers eat a lot” and “pluggers are old and have mobility issues that significantly degrade their quality of life.” Still, I don’t think we should accept “pluggers exist on several layers of narrative and metanarrative and are slowly becoming aware of that fact.” That’s just not the sort of thing pluggers do or think about! They’re down-home regular beast-people, not characters in a damn Borges short story.

Beetle Bailey, 6/7/26

Pretty sure this is the closest Walker-Browne Amalgamated Humor Industries LLC has come to acknowledging that Beetle and Miss Buxley, as young adults in a relationship in ostensibly the modern day, are probably having sex? Things quickly go south right after that acknowledgement, though, thank goodness.

Mary Worth, 6/7/26

“I used to hate myself! But now I’ve done a lot of work and I don’t anymore. When my girlfriend left town to take care of some important family members I immediately assumed it meant she was breaking up with me, by the way! Ha ha, my head is made of wood!”

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Archie, 6/6/26

I guess the joke here is that Archie, who we mostly know through his romantic misadventures but who is in many ways still a boy, likes Ninja Turtles cereal, this being a rerun from the ’90s or ’00s when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were popular (not going to bother checking those dates, life’s too short), and the household caters to his culinary whims, much to his father’s distress. I do like Archie’s mom’s facial expression in the last panel. “Ha ha, he says he won’t eat it, but he’s gonna eat it. What’s he going to do, go shopping himself and pick out his own cereal? I don’t fuckin’ think so.”

Blondie, 6/6/26

There’s a lot of sad stuff you see in Blondie and I guess I should be inured to it by now, but I’m sorry, this is among the saddest. Blondie is clutching her hands together with a forced look of joy on her face and telling her daughter about how wonderful her third date with her husband was, but in her thought balloon we can see she clearly thought she was going to be doing some light making out on this park bench but is horrified and disappointed to discover that young Dagwood has simply collapsed into some kind of meat coma, and now she can’t decide if she should just get up and leave him there or what. I was going to make a joke about how she should be a flapper in the flashback, but the whole scenario is so grim that I simply don’t have the energy.