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Andy Capp, 8/28/26

Guitar Bob is an Andy Capp ancillary character who may have been around since the strip launched in the ’50s or may have been spawned in the long zombie era of the last several decades, who can say, but I have to admit today’s strip offers a look into his life that kind of intrigues me. Clearly Andy’s constant jibes loom large in his mind, to the point that he couldn’t even enjoy his positive reception at the folk club on its own terms but instead filed it away as something he could throw in his antagonist’s face. And Andy manages to devastate him again with a throwaway quip that barely makes sense! Obviously he didn’t give the audience their money back, but you can tell that whatever feeling of accomplishment he experienced has been undone in a moment. Sad!

Crock, 8/28/26

I used to play a fun (“fun”) game where I would try to guess the date of a Crock rerun based on its ham-handed cultural references, but King Features has taken that away from me by ceasing to bother with replacing the original copyright date. So now I just get to contemplate the window into a lost world that these strips offer. For instance, remember 1998? Remember how, in the days before YouTube, we were all calling one another offering to mail VHS tapes of helpful how-to vids? I mean, I don’t remember this at all, it’s not ringing any bells, but I spent most of 1998 mired in a series of romantic and academic crises so I wasn’t really paying very close attention, I admit.

Judge Parker, 8/28/26

Hey, remember how Judge Parker Emeritus Senior has been kind of losing it, maybe because he has dementia or maybe because he’s a drunk, but it seemed like he was kind of rallying in his attempt to help Ann get a job? Well, Ann is a big-shot TV consultant now, so now he can go back to his first love, being a Judge, or a “judicial hearing officer,” which I assume is kind of like being an assistant judge and is a job you can hold if you’re kind of old and slow, and also spent time in jail. You might think that he’d be happier just hanging around his giant mansion with his granddaughter and newly returned family members, but Judge Parker Emeritus Junior over there has done a number of crimes himself that have ruined his career for good, so apparently someone around here has to start pulling in a paycheck.

Mary Worth, 8/28/26

“Yes, Mary, I should live outside of routine every once in a while! Variety is the spice of life! I’ll have” [thinks for 15 seconds, brain starts to freeze up, panic sets in] “the exact same thing you’re having.”

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Dennis the Menace, 8/27/26

As my readers well know, part of Dennis’s whole deal is that he hates his mother’s cooking and will insult it at any opportunity. Today, though, he ruefully admits that, even though his mother is bad at cooking, he doesn’t know anyone who’s better at it. Presumably he knows what good food tastes like as a result of his parents’ occasional attempts to bring him to fancy restaurants, but he doesn’t know any other cooks personally because his parents’ occasional attempts to make friends end in disaster when Dennis repeats their catty insults, so they never get invited over to anyone else’s house for dinner.

Daddy Daze, 8/27/26

Uh oh! The Daddy Daze family’s car is being fixed, but the garage won’t take credit cards, and the Daddy Daze daddy doesn’t have enough cash. What is he going to do? Follow the Daddy Daze baby’s suggestion, and … steal money from a carnival bathroom, I think?

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Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/26/26

The Goofy/Pluto paradox is a situation many comics and cartoons that feature sapient animals find themselves in, whereby some animal characters (like Goofy) are clearly supposed to be standins for people while others (like Pluto) are clearly supposed to be standins for animals, even if the animal-animals seem to be a lot smarter than real animals are. Mother Goose and Grimm has a truly baroque case of this, where Mother Goose (a bird) clearly has an owner-pet relationship with Grimm and Ralph (dogs), in that she wears clothes and drives a car and is in charge of the house while they go around naked on all fours and drink out of the toilet, but also they have conversations with her in English and call her “mom.” Anyway, today’s strip is particularly unpleasant when you think about it in those terms, as it features a bird with human-like levels of intelligence, authority, and prestige taking two dogs who are also sapient but kept in a subservient “pet” role to watch their enslaved (?) kin race around a track, and then the bird says “These dogs aren’t that fast, you know who’s fast? The dogs in Alaska, because there aren’t many places where they’re allowed to go to the bathroom. Their poor bladders! Their lives are agony!”

The Phantom, 8/26/26

Hey, remember how Ignis Vindicta sent a bunch of armed drones to free, and also control, the Python? Well, the Ghost Who Shoots shot the drones with a couple of handguns and, uh, that seems to have worked, I guess. Tip to anyone fighting in one of several ongoing wars where drones are playing an increasingly important part: just shoot at them! You don’t even have to use particularly fancy guns, it turns out!