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Luann, 4/2/26

“Oh my gosh,” you’re probably thinking. “Is Luann, the wildly ribald but perversely sexless comic strip about college students, implying that Les and Tara had sex?” No, dummy. She just came over to use and critique Les and Gunther’s bathroom. Remember, young men and women who are attracted to each other do bathroom–adjacent stuff all the time in this comic. It’s what they have instead of sex, I think!

Mary Worth, 4/2/26

“People have limits on which illusions they can accept,” says Toby, steadfastly refusing to turn around and see the pair of parrots eating out of a giant salad bowl on her counter. She needs to believe that this isn’t her life now! That’s the illusion she chooses to accept.

Herb and Jamaal, 4/2/26

Actually, Herb, making a mountain out of a molehill would take a great deal of dirt indeed, as the two are wildly divergent in size. That’s what gives the expression its meaning!

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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.