The Comics Curmudgeon

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Comment of the Week

Tune in tomorrow as Rev. Croom embarks on a new life of selective observance. He'll dine and dash (thou shalt not steal), covet Herb's wife, murder Jamaal, and make a graven image, but he'll at least call his mom to wish her a happy birthday (honor thy father and mother). The funnies haven't been this theologically bold since Judge Parker financed the construction of a giant needle big enough for a dozen camels to thread.

—Abram Beazer
48

Wednesday is for sex-havers and non-sex-havers alike

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Rhymes With Orange, 8/5/26

Stale legacy strips like Hagar the Horrible (start date: 1973) still find tired tropes like “Oooh, what if a human were to form an erotic attachment with a mermaid???” to be edgy. New, cutting-edge strips like Rhymes With Orange (start date: 1995), meanwhile, will tell you that everyone and everything under the sea, both natural and mythological, is fucking everyone and everything else.

Luann, 8/5/26

Look, man, I’ve tried to get my head around the question of how we’re supposed to parse the state of sexual relations in Luann for, literally, the bulk of my adult life, but mere minutes ago in strip time Luann and Phil were unpleasantly tongue kissing in front of her mom and now he’s like, “What if we were roommates, with separate bedrooms, to save on rent?” and … I am nothing. I am defeated utterly. I could live a thousand lifetimes and still not understand the mysteries this strip puts before me.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/5/26

So far all the scams we’ve seen the Scam Twins pull off have been things like “busking but only pretending to play the violin” or “lying about being from the health department so you can eat for free at the mall food court,” so yeah, you could say that kidnapping a child would represent something of a “bigger deal.” The twins aren’t exactly drawn with what I’d call expressive faces, but I’m choosing to believe that Driver’s Seat Twin’s sunglasses levitated cartoonishly in surprise at this suggestion before settling back down on her nose in panel two.

127

You don’t get a lot of chances to drag a guy off by the collar like that, so you gotta take advantage

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Gil Thorp, 8/4/26

I have thought for some time now that Gil is universally considered the most important person in Milford, and perhaps even in whatever geographic region is covered by the whole Valley Conference (“the Valley,” I guess). Today’s strip is more evidence: I simply don’t believe that an ordinary person could call the cops and say “Uh, this guy at my wedding is being weird” and they’d show up in less time than it takes for said guy to finish his supervillain monologue.

Judge Parker, 8/4/26

The fun thing about Judge Parker is that there are two potential ways this could play out — April is furious that Neddy has left their child in the care of her perfectly capable adult sister, with a family rift and endless boring emotional processing to come, or the “April” calling Neddy is actually an AI deepfake voice program and this is part of a larger plot to kidnap Charlotte — and I’m not sure which it’s going to be.

Hi and Lois, 8/4/26

Hey, Irma is married to Thirsty, and Lois, her only friend, recently (in 1980, 1980 is recently in comic strip time) got a job as a realtor and can’t spend as much time hanging out with her as she used to. Let her have fun on her dang phone! Are a few afternoons lost to an infinite scroll through one AI slop reel after another really that much worse than watching her claw desperately at a block of wood like an animal?

132

I think it’s weird that Slylock enforces laws about both deceptive advertising practices and major felonies

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Slylock Fox, 8/3/26

I have no idea what the relationship is between Count Weirdly and the little purple being who’s always hanging around his workplace/castle — is it his creation? his adopted child? his [gulp] biological child? was it spawned by some unnatural process that doesn’t fall into any of those three categories cleanly but falls into all of them in part? — but clearly it views the count in a paternal light, and it’s pretty devastating that it’s so excited to show off the Count’s supposedly legitimate business enterprise to Slylock, only for the Fox Detective to immediately debunk the whole scam. Also, unrelated, but I’ve never really had much reason to contemplate whether Weirdly was wearing anything under his trademark shapeless nightgown, but the very vivid buttrack on display here implies that he probably isn’t.

Crock, 8/3/26

The past is in fact another country, as this Crock strip from 1998 demonstrates. Sure, the idea of a boy baby aggressively hitting on a girl baby and being punished for it is timeless, but why is the girl named “Cyber”? Was this the setup to a joke about computers that turned out to be too hard to execute so they fell back on the classics, or did the Crock creative team in 1998 simply say “What are they naming girl babies these days? Cyber, right? That’s a word I hear a lot but I don’t know what it means, so it’s probably a girl’s name.”

The Lockhorns, 8/3/26

I spent some time trying to parse Leroy’s facial expression here and the conclusion I came to is that it’s supposed to represent “sophisticated horny.” Like he’s thinking, “Ah, yes, women’s beach volleyball … the intellectual’s sport. You get to enjoy athletes at the top of their game demonstrating their prowess at leaping and spiking the ball, all in a beautiful seaside setting. And if one of these statuesque competitors were to engender a pleasant feeling of arousal in me while I watched? Well, I’m mostly trying to keep tabs on various stats to see how my fantasy team is doing, but that would be an added bonus.”