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Gil Thorp, 6/16/26

Good news, everyone! Luke has given up on his pagan beliefs that Milford High is haunted by the shades of its dead coaches, and has now returned to the orthodox doctrine of the Holy Mother Church, which holds that Jesus’s “spiritual body” can physically interpose itself between horny teens to prevent sexual sin.

Bizarro, 6/16/26

A few hours ago, they force-fed that antelope something with the winner’s name written on it — something hard, inedible, and painful to eat, as that’s the only thing that could remain intact in the digestive system long enough for this to work — and now that lion is going to eviscerate the poor animal live on stage and pull the name from its steaming, quivering guts. That’s what’s happening here, right? That’s the joke? That’s the nightmare to which this pun has led us?

Shoe, 6/16/26

“It’s so … erotic! Old guys usually aren’t my thing, but I’m not made of stone.”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 6/15/26

I genuinely love that Mae Mae and this lady from “the media” are having a respectful argument by making statements that are as close as possible to flat, unadorned statements of fact. There’s no big secret here: Mae Mae quit Hollywood years ago. She’s just working in a cafe now. But consider: She’s famous, and her disappearance was a mystery. Well, she was famous, but now she’s just a regular person — albeit, as one cannot deny, a person who was once the top box-office draw in the world. It really lets us quickly and efficiently see that the dispute has arisen over the question of what constitutes a “mystery” — must there be some inherently complex or surprising “solution” for something to qualify? or is a mystery simply a thing that many people want to know, but do not? — and whether “famous” is a permanent or temporary quality. Looking forward to everyone getting epistemological closure on this by Thursday at the latest!

Garfield, 6/15/26

Look, Garfield hates Mondays. Fundamentally, bone-deep, he hates them. And that’s not just because he needs coffee to pep him up after the relaxing weekend — it’s because Monday is a truly cursed 24-hour period, and nothing should bring him joy on this, the worst day of the week. That big smile in panel three is a betrayal of everything that the Garfield brand should stand for, and it makes me sick.

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Pluggers, 6/14/26

I’m beginning to suspect that some of my sense that Pluggers is increasingly all over the place on explaining plugger identity is that the strips have gradually shifted from out-group messaging (pluggers explaining to non-pluggers what pluggers are like) to in-group messaging (pluggers talking with other pluggers about the plugger experience, anticipating a good amount of background knowledge and sympathy in advance). Take this panel, for instance: I am reasonably sure that the thrust of it is “We’re all pluggers here, and as pluggers we love to garden but we know how hard it can be, right? Plants always growing in the wrong places, haha!” But from an outside perspective, what it looks like it’s saying is “Pluggers are terrible gardeners. Just awful at it. Grass growing where it shouldn’t, but their attempts to coax it into growing elsewhere fail miserably. Pathetic.”

Hagar the Horrible, 6/14/26

I realize that the main character in this strip is specifically called “the Horrible,” and not to be all like “Things are meaner and baser now than they used to be,” but I kind of feel like Hagar the Horrible used to be less explicit about “the main character in this strip, Hagar the Horrible, is a cold-blooded killer who hunts his fellow human beings both for profit and for sport.” I mean, I laughed at this, so I guess I’m part of the problem, but still!