Comment of the Week

Pinocchio holds his own control bars aloft and finally earns his therapist's approval despite the obvious fact that the physics of the whole situation -- just like the original 'lifting oneself by one's bootstraps' -- are quite impossible. He is no Aristotelian unmoved mover. Pinocchio knows this; he has grimly resigned himself to a performative dance of supposed self-determination to avoid the smug nagging of those around him.

hurricanenate

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Pickles, 8/18/26

Not to sound old, but I do find someone replying “k” to me to be irritating sometimes (and to prove I’m not doing generational discourse, I’ll say these people are as likely to be older than me as they are to be younger). But expecting someone to type out “okay” instead of “ok”? That’s madness. That’s insanity.

B.C., 8/18/26

Speaking of generational discourse, I’m not sure what syndicated newspaper comic strip I would’ve guessed would be the first to go in for “Weren’t things different and better back in the wonderful long-ago year two thousand and twelve?” nostalgia slop for millennials, but I definitely would not have picked B.C.

Hi and Lois, 8/18/26

There are something like 1.5 million real estate agents in the US, according to some cursory Googling, and I don’t think there’s ever been a comic strip dedicated to their specific interests and concerns, so maybe Hi and Lois should lean into that and become primarily realtor-focused. The Roaring ’20s ended and Blondie shifted from being about a cool flapper and her dissolute failson husband to being about a suburban dipshit who’s bad at his white collar job but manages to hold onto it anyway; so too, as America’s economy becomes increasingly asset-based, we must turn away from Hi’s generic office antics and instead focus on his wife’s attempts to facilitate people cashing out their home equity and hoping the money lasts until they die. The creative team will need to do a bit more research on the various dilemmas realtors encounter in their day-to-day life to give the thing a little more variety, though. They can’t all be about hoarders!

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Dustin, 8/17/26

Hey kids! Do you remember the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that dumped 150 million gallons of oil into the ocean? Well, that happened in April of 2010, which I regret to inform you all was more than 16 years ago. I’m not saying that it’s impossible for someone in their early 20s, as Dustin is supposed to be, to have a memory of this event that includes the total amount of oil spilled over the course of the disaster; I am saying that it’s a testament to the unparalleled period of peace and prosperity we’ve experienced since, given that this is Dustin’s go-to reference for “something world-historically bad happening” within his lifetime.

Crankshaft, 8/17/26

Hey, kids! Do you remember Funky Winkerbean, the comic strip that was originally about wacky high school students in Northeast Ohio who hung out at Montoni’s Pizza, but eventually came to be about depressed adults in Northeast Ohio whose lives all revolved around Montoni’s Pizza in some way, before finally becoming about survivors living in a futuristic sci-fi Northeast Ohio hellscape where books were eradicated in “the burnings” and the last few precious copies are guarded by robots, with the status of Montoni’s Pizza being unclear? Anyway, long story short, Crankshaft hopes you do, because clearly the intention here is that Crankshaft sitting down and saying “a nice big slice of … Montoni’s Pizza” with an extremely knowing expression on his face will have all of us hootin’ and hollerin’ and yellin’ “got the reference” like we’re the live studio audience for Family Matters and Urkel just walked on set.

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Six Chix, 8/16/26

The Wednesday Chik has not given up on her mission to educate comics readers on the true nature of the afterlife, which is that everyone there is horny as all get-out. Your soul, after you ascend from this plane of base matter, will still want to fuck, and specifically will want to fuck Simon, known as Cephas or Peter, who holds the keys of the kingdom of heaven, so that whatever he binds on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever he looses on earth will be loosed in heaven. He’ll be wearing sunglasses for whatever reason.

Mary Worth, 8/16/26

Oh, uh, I guess despite Dawn’s cheery demeanor earlier this week, she has in fact fallen for Tommy’s roguish charms, and not just in a platonic way, I’m talking about the fact that she wants to bone him, and now she’s sad that Brandy, his long-term girlfriend who he never broke up with, is back in the picture, as symbolized by the dramatic single tear she’s dropping in the final panel. I guess we shouldn’t find this surprising, and in fact should be encouraged that she actually was able to hold it together emotionally for the length of this conversation.

Dennis the Menace, 8/16/26

I love that Dennis is just kind of silently lurking on the edges of this conversation, enjoying a juice box. “Seems like Mrs. Wilson is doing plenty of menacing at Mr. Wilson,” he’s thinking. “I’ll stick around just in case I need to jump in, but it looks like she’s got it handled for today.”