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Judge Parker, 7/8/26

Hey, remember when Neddy tried to be a TV writer, and managed to sell Netflix a pilot about April, the violent, terrifying CIA assassin daughter-in-law of the strip’s namesake? Well, having run out of ideas after her first idea, she’s now trying to pitch a TV show about Ann, the violent, terrifying scam artist daughter of the strip’s namesake. She’s gonna keep at it until she runs out of daughters!

Mother Goose and Grimm, 7/8/26

So the way a joke works, usually, is that you start with a setup that’s grounded in the known and the expected, and then you hit your audience with a surprising twist. Like, imagine beloved cartoon character Bugs Bunny giving us his classic line, “What’s up, doc?” That’s expected. But then the point of view expands, and we can see that he’s not just delivering a saucy greeting — he’s actually requesting medical data from a doctor, who has some tough news for him. Now, would that be a good joke? Enh, not really. But, I submit to you, it would be recognizable as a joke, in a way that today’s Mother Goose and Grimm most definitely is not.

Luann, 7/8/26

Luann, meanwhile, is beyond “jokes,” and I respect it. Bernice is going to become an influencer for toilet perverts! There’s some backstory leading up to this, but honestly you don’t need it.

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Daddy Daze, 7/7/26

One of my favorite aspects of The Shining, which is one of my favorite all-time movies, is that for most of the movie’s runtime it’s not clear whether the evil hotel ghosts are real or creations of Jack Nicholson’s increasingly deranged mind, until a point towards the end when they unlock the pantry where Shelley Duvall has managed to trap him. My experience with Daddy Daze is informed by a similar narrative tension: Is the Daddy Daze baby really communicating something with his “ba”s that only the Daddy Daze daddy can understand? Or is the Daddy Daze daddy merely projecting his own thoughts and concerns onto incoherent babble, possibly knowingly and possibly delusionally? Today, the Daddy Daze baby’s whimsical antics seem to have produced a real physical object, which implies that the Daddy Daze daddy isn’t so much mad as he is living in a mad universe.

Blondie, 7/7/26

Real joshreads dot com heads know that I enjoy what Blondie has to tell us about how old people are navigating the modern age. Remember when there only used to be three TV channels, and the weather gal on every channel told you it was the same temperature? Now there’s a million channels plus apps on your phone and what not, and everyone is talking about “Real Feel,” which is different from just the regular old temperature in some way that’s hard to understand. How’s a person supposed to stay tethered to actual, physical reality in this kind of information environment? I guess you should probably just go with what your boss says, right? He must know what he’s talking about, that’s why he’s the boss.

Dennis the Menace, 7/7/26

Damn, Dennis, it seems like your notorious antisocial behavior is starting to have an impact on your personal life! I guess the person you’re menacing the most is … yourself.

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Dick Tracy, 7/6/26

This Dick Tracy storyline isn’t just about the seedy, underground world of hard-core video “gamers”; it also introduces the strip’s readership to advanced cybersecurity and network concepts, like virtual private networks, or “VPNs”, a cutting-edge networking technique that was invented in the early 1990s and is only familiar to such tech-savvy users as “people who work office jobs from home” or “people who want to access offshore gambling sites.” Anyway, the big brains over at the FBI have narrowed down the hacker’s location to somewhere in North America, probably, so this case should be wrapped up in no time.

Heathcliff, 7/6/26

I like the fact that both the dogs and the humans are letting us know, each in their own way, that the vision of Heathcliff on a slug-chariot bothers them. Seeing him (I assume) inch forward agonizingly slowly yet standing tall in triumph unsettles the mind across species. You’ve gone too far into off-putting whimsy this time, Heathcliff. Too far!