The Comics Curmudgeon

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Comment of the Week

Pinocchio holds his own control bars aloft and finally earns his therapist's approval despite the obvious fact that the physics of the whole situation -- just like the original 'lifting oneself by one's bootstraps' -- are quite impossible. He is no Aristotelian unmoved mover. Pinocchio knows this; he has grimly resigned himself to a performative dance of supposed self-determination to avoid the smug nagging of those around him.

—hurricanenate
133

Good faces

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Pardon My Planet, 8/20/26

OK, here’s a sentence that I’m reasonably sure I’ve never written before, and probably nobody else has either: I’m actually enjoying the art in Pardon My Planet today. Specifically, I love how incredibly exhausted the girlfriend character (the Pardon My Planet gang may have names, but I steadfastly refuse to learn them) looks. How long has her boyfriend been nattering on with this nonsense? Hours? She doesn’t have to get ready for school either, but she does have to get up in the morning. She just wants to sleep, damn it! She just wants to sleep!

The Lockhorns, 8/20/26

Speaking of comic panel faces I’m enjoying, I’m enjoying Leroy’s boss’s face here. Specifically, I enjoy how mad he looks. He’s not one of those LinkedIn influencer execs bragging about replacing his workers with AI! No, he’s discovered that AI is slowly and silently replacing his workers one by one, right under his nose … and there’s nothing he can do about it. You can’t even test to see if someone’s a robot anymore, according to the killjoys in HR!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 8/20/26

No, Attila, it’s a joke! You’re a character in a comic strip, where ostensibly there’s a joke every day! I say “ostensibly” because the specific comic strip you’re in is Mother Goose and Grimm, but still, you should know this.

157

Ominous developments

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Crankshaft, 8/19/26

The last time Crankshaft and Harry Dinkle started an adventure together, Crankshaft looked real cherry but it ended up with Harry confronting the truly depressing circumstances of his father’s death. Now Ed has shown up at his place of work to drag him off on some other journey and he looks pissed, so maybe this time will turn out to be more fun for Harry, or maybe Crankshaft has just decided to murder him and put him out of his misery.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/19/26

At one point the scam twins were thinking about kidnapping a child, but then they realized that would not only get them in a lot of trouble, but also make this strip dangerously exciting, so now they’re trying to negotiate down to an acceptable level of plot development. I love the idea that squatting is too much of a commitment to bother doing. Like, most people squat just because that means they get to live someplace for free, but in the Twins’ conception, they’d be squatting for revenge, which means they’d have to stick around even if it turns out that the Morgan house has bad vibes or is unpleasant to be inside (it definitely does and is).

Beetle Bailey, 8/19/26

Hey, General, I just want to point out that the U.S. has fought in, like, several wars in the time that you’ve been an officer. Heck, there’s one going on right now! I know what you mean is that you want to have been in one of the cool ones, not the cringe wars we keep finding ourselves in lately, but still, I feel like you shouldn’t be quite so vocal on this point at the office if you don’t want to find yourself abruptly in the field.

162

Troubling youth, etc.

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Pickles, 8/18/26

Not to sound old, but I do find someone replying “k” to me to be irritating sometimes (and to prove I’m not doing generational discourse, I’ll say these people are as likely to be older than me as they are to be younger). But expecting someone to type out “okay” instead of “ok”? That’s madness. That’s insanity.

B.C., 8/18/26

Speaking of generational discourse, I’m not sure what syndicated newspaper comic strip I would’ve guessed would be the first to go in for “Weren’t things different and better back in the wonderful long-ago year two thousand and twelve?” nostalgia slop for millennials, but I definitely would not have picked B.C.

Hi and Lois, 8/18/26

There are something like 1.5 million real estate agents in the US, according to some cursory Googling, and I don’t think there’s ever been a comic strip dedicated to their specific interests and concerns, so maybe Hi and Lois should lean into that and become primarily realtor-focused. The Roaring ’20s ended and Blondie shifted from being about a cool flapper and her dissolute failson husband to being about a suburban dipshit who’s bad at his white collar job but manages to hold onto it anyway; so too, as America’s economy becomes increasingly asset-based, we must turn away from Hi’s generic office antics and instead focus on his wife’s attempts to facilitate people cashing out their home equity and hoping the money lasts until they die. The creative team will need to do a bit more research on the various dilemmas realtors encounter in their day-to-day life to give the thing a little more variety, though. They can’t all be about hoarders!