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Family Circus, 4/1/26

Happy April Fool’s day, everybody! As I’ve noted over the last few years, the “trick” the passage of time has played on me is my growing appreciation of the Family Circus’s whole deal, which is that the kids are annoying on purpose, like that’s the whole joke. Look at Ma Keane’s face here! She wants to die, and maybe also to kill!

Crankshaft, 4/1/26

If I’m remembering right, for a long time Lena was a never-seen off-panel character that the other characters at the bus depot would constantly complain about, and then we started seeing her in person and she was always depicted as a perfectly nice woman that everyone is unfathomably cruel to for no reason. Look, in this one she briefly believes they’re being nice to her! That’s the “prank”!

Pluggers, 4/1/26

At least that’s intelligible as a prank, though. Is the prank here … on us? Like we’re supposed to believe that Mr. Whipple sent a letter to Pluggers HQ from beyond the grave encouraging them to do a panel where his successor as Charmin spokesbeing comes into a plugger’s home and takes a huge dump? “Look, pal, you’re in the wrong house,” says the bear-man, in what is becoming less and less what anyone would consider a “prank.” “I don’t get all that excited about toilet paper. I appreciate its utility in keeping my butthole and buttcrack clean of feces, but I’m not really invested in it emotionally.”

Intelligent Life, 4/1/26

Not even going to engage with the prank content on this one. These guys know what movie tickets cost! They see movies in the theater all the time, and talk about box office numbers while they’re there! Instead, I just want to point out that in panel one Skip has responded to “Wow … it’s April Fool’s Day,” with “Woot!”, which is absurd. Nobody’s excited about April Fool’s Day. This is just another example of these losers responding to any cultural reference they recognize with a sort of Pavlovian noise of general approval. It says a lot about society, and it sickens me.

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Judge Parker, 3/31/26

Ha ha, has this ever happened to you? After generations of coexistence with increasingly tame horses, your tribe of steppe pastoralists has finally mastered the art of riding them, and are using this technological advance to impose a reign of terror on neighboring nomadic groups and settled agriculturalists alike. And you’ve certainly come to the conclusion that there’s no point to walking when you can just ride horses! But then — you learn that your horse taming techniques, which you had thought to be a gift from your clan’s protective deities alone, have also been learned by your hated rivals to the east. How dare they? Other people are riding them now? This means war, obviously — a war between two groups on horseback, a war of the sort that the great grasslands across the center of Eurasia have never seen before.

Mary Worth, 3/31/26

I’m trying to figure out who the best person is for Mary to call in to help here and against all odds I think the answer may be Wilbur. Hear me out: You describe to him what Harvey’s been through, and definitely show him a picture of “Trixie.” If Wilbur gets all starry eyed like “Gosh, what a beauty, you did the right thing, Harvey,” then Harvey will see immediately what a dope he was to fall for a trap that could ensnare Charterstone’s biggest idiot. And if Wilbur says, “Wow, you sure got scammed pretty bad, couldn’t be me” — well, then, how humiliating would that be? Surely he’d snap out of it immediately.

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Pluggers, 3/30/26

Wait, so we’re saying that pluggers … don’t like sports? Watching the wildly popular NCAA basketball tournament is non-plugger behavior? Pluggers prefer to pore over their financial statements, like a bunch of fucking nerds? Is that what pluggers have come to these days? This is much more shocking than them being poly now or whatever.

Archie, 3/30/26

I have to say that a dark horse for “most unrealistic aspect of Archie comics” is that Veronica, daughter of the most cartoonishly wealthy family in town, attends the local public school with the plebes. That having been said, this is a decent joke, and in my opinion what really makes it is that it’s Archie who’s been assigned the task of delivering the RSVP, despite the Lodges canonically having a butler.

Dick Tracy, 3/30/26

Oh, hey, I guess we know why Silver Nitrate has had such anxiety since he’s been in prison: turns out he’s a snitch! I sure hope none of his fellow prisoners read the syndicated newspaper comic strip Dick Tracy.