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Gil Thorp, 6/23/26

I love the abrupt emotional turn Gil takes in panel three: he lowers his sunglasses over his eyes to hide the flash of anger, but we can still see the bitter scowl on his face. Jet fuel is a miracle, making it possible for machines to hurtle through the air at hundreds of miles an hour and bringing the world within reach of ordinary people in just a few hours. Major geopolitical actors have been unable to resolve their disputes peacefully and have disrupted the flow of this amazing substance, raising the price of air travel beyond many people’s ability to pay, and frankly, it makes Gil sick just to think about it.

Archie, 6/23/26

Cell phones may have destroyed human attention spans, filled public spaces with inescapable, annoying noise, and even sabotaged our species’s ability to reproduce itself, but at least we no longer have to suffer the indignity of missing a phone call as depicted in this 1990s Archie rerun, so who’s to say if they’re good or bad?

Luann, 6/23/26

Look, I dunno man, Brad and Toni are still having sex in the shower, right here in the funny pages in front of the children, so what am I supposed to do, not tell you about it? I do kind of like how prominent Brad’s wedding ring is in panel one. They’re married so this series of erotic drawings is tasteful and wholesome, actually.

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Intelligent Life, 6/22/26

Everything I’ve learned about all the characters in Intelligent Life has been against my will. I wasn’t thrilled when I realized I instantly recognized this blond guy as “Barry,” the stereotypical jock used as a punching bag by the nerd characters in the strip. He likes beer and wings and is constantly unsuccessfully hitting on women, and — and now we’re at the point where I’m learning new stuff about him, which I didn’t ask for and don’t care for — he also has a terrible relationship with his father, I guess.

Pluggers, 6/22/26

Look, for as long as I’ve been reading this strip, the answer to the question “Are pluggers OK?” has been a resounding “no.” But I feel like they’re building less and less of a superstructure around this sentiment in individual panels and are now just hitting us with “Life is suffering, for pluggers. Every moment is agony. They’d be happier dead.”

Pickles, 6/22/26

Pickles, meanwhile, is a comic strip about the foibles of old people that isn’t afraid to get a little edgy sometimes, but I declare today’s strip, where the vagaries of fading memory mean that poor Opal has spent hours in an act of loving artistry, making a scarf for a member of her family only to be struck anew by grief, is a little too edgy for my tastes.

Pardon My Planet, 6/22/26

Yesterday’s Pardon My Planet was about domestic discord among wolf-people, and I thought about doing a post basically saying “Ha ha, this strip, which is mostly unpleasant marital drama among its cast of mostly interchangeable regular characters, has finally branched out into doing unpleasant marital drama with furries” but decided against it. But today, with the clown stuff? Well, I feel like you all needed to know about it. Do you think “Bobo” is a male clown name? No judgement, but it does add an extra little twist to this scenario.

Luann, 6/22/26

I saved the grimmest one for last. Brad and Toni are going to have sex in the shower, you guys. They’re going to have sex in the shower after she announced herself as “zit” and there’s nothing you can do about it.

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Judge Parker, 6/21/26

Look, we know what you want and what you don’t want out of your soap opera comic strips, and what you don’t want is character growth. That sort of thing is how you get the man once known as “Tommy the Tweaker” yammering about his skivvies in a supermarket, where he’s gainfully employed, to Dawn Weston of all people. So, don’t worry, kids, Sophie moved to Norway a year ago but she hasn’t “found herself” or grown as a person at all! Instead she broke up with her boyfriend for reasons she can barely articulate. She’s going to drift back to the United States as dumb as she was when she left, and I think that’s great.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 6/21/26

Sorry, I’m sure Snuffy loves his son Li’l Tater and his nephew Jughaid who has, through some sequence of events we don’t talk about, come to be his full-time ward, but I refuse to believe that he would ever have a structure on his property, no matter how ramshackle, that has “work” in its name. The very concept is anathema to him!

Heathcliff, 6/21/26

[normally, conversationally, as if the sentence I’m saying is the most natural thing in the world] Butterflies are the emojis of stoke.