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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/21/26

The Comics Curmudgeon has been, in one sense, an experiment to see what writing a blog about newspaper comic strips for 20-plus years does to the human brain, and I’m here to testify that the results are … let’s say, mixed? Like, for instance, last night I literally had a dream that the end of the scam twins storyline in Rex Morgan, M.D., was revealed to be the swan song for the strip as a whole, and I woke up quite bereft! But thank goodness this was just a product of my fevered mind, and instead we’ve got a new adventure brewing, involving … a retired cartoonist working on some commissions? Pass. Hard pass. Glad it’s still happening, but we’ll be skipping this one.

Dick Tracy, 9/21/26

I thought this fellow was holding up his index finger in panel two in a “So you see…” sense, indicating impending exposition in which he would explain at length how Vio routed the money he stole from Ubusoft. But I guess he’s just pointing at that floating, indecipherable text (?) box on his monitor because it contains the explanation, somehow, which is honestly a real relief to me because now I don’t have to even briefly pretend I’m going to try to understand how it all worked.

Garfield, 9/21/26

Not to speak ill of another representative of the mid-to-late ’00s newspaper comics blog milieu from which I myself emerged, but I always thought the idea behind Garfield Minus Garfield was a little off. To me, the funny twist is not imagining that Garfield doesn’t exist, but that to Jon he’s an ordinary cat whose thought balloons are outside of his ability to experience. That really works with today’s strip, where as a cat owner he might be thinking, “Huh, my cat, who obviously does not speak or think in complete English sentences, does seem to be unusually dramatic and despondent on Mondays. Weird! Also not sure where he got that coffee mug from.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/21/26

Sorry, this strip doesn’t work for me at all. Nobody in Hootin’ Holler knows what a “citrus fruit” is, and if you tried to explain it to them they’d have you executed for witchcraft.

Intelligent Life, 9/21/26

Jesus Christ, you two, the Borg aren’t “AI,” they’re cybernetically enhanced biological intelligence, and Picard famously defended the citizenship rights of his AI friend in court, how are you such incredible losers but also not even good at being sci-fi geeks