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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!

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Mary Worth, 6/13/26

Dawn’s never alone because of her friends! You know, like Cathy, who’s always eating giant salads, and other Cathy, who Dawn probably drifted away from because she didn’t “get” Dawn’s weird and possibly sexual relationship with her art history professor, and her terrible ex-boyfriend Jared, who dumped her and then bullied her into being friends with him so he could feel OK about getting together with the girl he dumped her for, and … uh, I think that’s it. Well, there’s Mary, I guess. She’s sort of a friend. And Tommy! Over the course of the day they’ve at least become friendly. That’s close enough, right?

Mother Goose and Grimm, 6/13/26

The good news is that Ma Goose is now reciting her tepid jokes at some random character we’ve never seen before instead of just saying them into the phone. The bad news is that she looks terrible. I think she might be dying?

Six Chix, 6/13/26

Hey, wouldn’t it be interesting if your dog were chased by some kind of giant, nightmarish bug creature? Have a fun weekend, everybody!