Comment of the Week

Well, I must admit, I have never seen 'yikes' used in a cartoon that conveys so exactly and accurately the reader's impression of the panel in which it occurs. I mean, yikes.

Chance

Post Content

Blondie, 9/13/25

Blondie began in 1930, in a world now mostly alien to us, but it was originally a story about urban hipsters: a young woman who the artists imbued with every characteristic of trendy youth culture, and her beau, the slumming, dissolute scion of a wealthy family. You could see a scenario where the strip tried to stay true to those origins while updating to match the changing cultural specifics over the ensuing century. But that’s not how things actually work: instead, a strip’s readership ages and wants something different, and their creators age alongside them. That’s why Blondie in the year 2025 is your go-to for the pettiest boomer gripes about everyday suburban life imaginable, put into the mouths of characters who have completely forgotten that alien world and in their current form have never been cool a day in their lives.

Judge Parker, 9/13/25

Meanwhile, in Judge Parker, Neddy, who was never cool even when she was living in Los Angeles and trying to break into the entertainment industry, has returned home in failure and shame. Abbey has tried to soften the blow by turning their dining room into a simulacrum of a fast food restaurant so Neddy doesn’t feel trapped and isolated on the Spencer Farms compound, but the staff has been unable to reproduce the crispy-edged “smashburger” form so popular in LA, and Neddy is not having it.

Six Chix, 9/13/25

In a strip where people dry-hump sandwiches, the idea of ghostfucking seems frankly pretty tame. It’s like a Gothic novel! There are literary antecedents!

Post Content

Sorry folks, things to do, places to be, comment of the week to post:

“Well, I must admit, I have never seen ‘yikes’ used in a cartoon that conveys so exactly and accurately the reader’s impression of the panel in which it occurs. I mean, yikes.” –Chance

And your runners up? Well, you can never be too early on those:

“So the other officers get annoyed when Sarge … comes in early and gets his work done? I don’t know what kind of Army they’re running here, but it can’t be the one we need.” –BigTed

“Leroy’s right to feel jealous. Nothing turns a hunk on like a gnome dressed like the ghost of a Victorian orphan.” –Schroduck

“Mary Worth clumsily exposition-dropping the Santa Royale hot-air balloon festival has big ‘…and Mr. Chekhov has a brand new gun in his desk drawer!’ energy.” –raincannon

“‘But we haven’t told you when we were going!’ Ed and Evy smile and nod, smile and nod. ‘That’s right,’ they intone together. –I’m Not Cthulhu, But I Play Him On TV

“I know that eventually you just have to accept the weird bolding in Mary Worth, but even within that, come on. If you’re gonna drop something like, ‘I have some prior commitments,’ you absolutely have to smash cut to Olive’s mom doing something humorous. The panel is even drawn so everyone’s looking at her expectantly! I have to assume what comes next is dead silence, Olive coughing once, and everyone moves on.” –Dan

“Andrew D. Capp, known to his friends as Andy, was killed in a knife attack in a pub in Liverpool last evening. Accordingly to witnesses, Mr. Capp interfered in a snooker game. Rest in peace, Mr. Capp (1921(1932(1941(1954(1962(1972(1981)))))))-2025).” –Voshkod

“Sorry, Loretta had the flu last week. Well, she died! I came here to you because I wanted to report this to someone who would care.” –Ettorre

“Anyway Reggie has confirmed that Veronica is the being containing all perfections from Descartes’s ontological argument, so that’s that settled.” –matt w

“I assume that Mother Goose’s pose is intended to partially hide her mammalian breasts from the reader. I don’t approve. Mike Peters made this anatomically freakish bed, and he should be forced to lie in it.” –Mr. A

“The cow is sad because the horse snarfed down all the drugs. The birds have to lead the horse because he’s too high to figure out where to go on his own. The kid’s smug because he loves that the horse denied his mortal enemy, the cow, any drugs. And yes, the birds are leading the mammals to their deaths. The birds’ll be pecking on their carcasses for dinner tonight until the larger scavengers find out. Simples.” –Baja Gaijin

“‘To quote a meta-research paper, Loch Ness is the one body of water on Earth we can be most sure doesn’t have a monster in it. It’s been so thoroughly searched and mapped, for generations you just had to say you were thinking of looking for the Loch Ness monster and you’d get funding. It’s a pretty funny situation. Anyway, time to get some jokes from this century, Roz.’ ‘Well. I guess then we know where your uncle doesn’t dump the bodies. He’s the … Not-Ness Mobster? Something Elliot Ness something? Look, we’ll workshop it later.’ ‘Again, he’s murdered a lot of people.’’ –Amelie Wikström

“What the fuck is a ‘12 minute animated graphic,’ anyway? In a psych course, no less? Doesn’t this sound like a super 1998 kind of thing? Does the baby dance to B.F. Skinner quotations this time? AM I back in 1998? Can … can I be?” –A Grave Mind

“I’m actually grateful that Dustin’s dad brought up that awful subject because the camera rotates 180° between panels 1 and 2, yet Megan’s posture is completely unchanged. Her body has inverted itself to present the same outward appearance to all directions, even having (apparently) moved from behind the chair to in front of it. She’s either a metamorph or a walking optical illusion, and the effect is so unsettling that anything that forces my mind to consider something even more repellent is a blessing.” –Vice President John Adams

“I actually don’t think this is a sex joke at all. I think that Dustin’s dad is saying that he probably hasn’t spent 10,000 hours with his kids over their entire lives, and they’ve never been taken by the state, so, you know, can’t argue with results?” –pugfuggly

Ten thousand hours? Dustin’s dad chuckled. Indeed, he had needed far less time to attain mystery of the forbidden alchemies contained in that weathered tome he had found in the law school library all those years ago. The formulas and incantations were so precisely laid out that even a novice like Dustin’s dad could create a reasonably convincing homunculus after a few tries. Likening himself to God who created man from dust, he named his handiwork ‘Dustin,’ though, like God, he soon saw the frailty, the spinelessness, the lack of ambition of his creation. But Dustin’s dad had corrected the flaws in his formula. As Meg turned from her father, she saw it: the Dadling, a diminutive facsimile of its creator and the final evolution of his craft. Meg screamed, for she saw in its eyes the signs that to this creature she was sister, yet alien, inferior.” –Abram Beazer

“Thanks for your advice, Truck, but I’ve already leased a billboard that Jonah can see from his hospital bed.” –MKay

Remember: If you want an ad-free version of this site sent to you every day via email, for $3 a month you can become a Comics Curmudgeon newsletter subscriber! And if you never want to see banner ads on this site, and want to get cool comment-editing features to boot, for the same low price you can become a Comics Curmudgeon website subscriber! You can get each day’s post ad-free via Patreon if that’s your style! And if you just want to give me money directly, you can put some scratch in my tip jar! Thanks to all for your support and readership!

Post Content

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/12/25

Say what you will about Rex Morgan, M.D., but it is straight-up killing it in the “characters make interestingly exaggerated hand gestures” department. Nobody is even close! I expect the strip to once again sweep the Handy Awards this year. (People keep telling the Academy of Hand Gesture Artistry that “handy” sounds like a sex thing and they should change the name, but they just go on and on about “tradition” while gesticulating wildly.)

Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/12/25

Ha ha, yes, The Handmaid’s Tale certainly is a cultural touchstone with striking visuals and production design elements that we can see on various billboards and commercials! Quick question for the Mother Goose and Grimm creative team, though: you know the show is about a society facing an existential fertility crisis that becomes a cult where the few remaining fertile women are enslaved and ritually raped by high-status men, right? Oh, you don’t? You don’t read my blog, huh? I know I’m mean to you sometimes, but I think reading my blog would help you out in situations like this.

Archie, 9/12/25

The Millennials are addicted to Instagram, and Zoomers have already had their brains rotted by TikTok, but what means of cybercommunication will the rising Gen Alpha embrace? Well, according to today’s Archie, which is definitely an informed commentary on contemporary teens and not a rerun from more than 20 years ago, it’s email. That’s right, folks, check your spam filter, because if you cross a teen in the year 2025 you will soon be roasted in absolutely devastating fashion in a message from lakyn13@juno.com!