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Marvin, 11/5/26

The facial expressions in the second panel here are bone-chillingly perfect for the vibe of this strip. Marvin’s dad has a face that says “I want to watch football but I’m going to do the absolute bare minimum to care for my toddler son, and also probably a lot of uptight people are going to think that I’m not even doing the bare minimum,” and Marvin has a face that says “Oh no! I’m going to be stewing in my own poop, for extended periods of time!”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/5/26

Speaking of good facial expressions, I appreciate Rudy’s here. Like, I guess I’m not excited to look at the face of an ostrich in genuine distress because his head and neck are covered in ants, but if I have to, I want to see it done well, and they really nailed it here.

Hi and Lois, 11/5/26

I don’t think Hi and Lois should do strips where little kids talk about dead dogs! I think that’s a little grim, even for the current no-punchline iteration of the strip!

Pluggers, 11/5/26

You’re a plugger if you’re suffering all the time and you want everyone to know it.

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Crankshaft, 11/4/26

I don’t talk about it very much, but ever since Funky Winkerbean triumphantly (?) concluded, Crankshaft has been afflicted by thinly veiled authorial insert character Batton Thomas, creator of the comic strips 3 O’Clock High (thinly veiled Funky Winkerbean) and The Wrinkles (thinly veiled Crankshaft). Except the characters in Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean look more or less like people, while the characters in 3 O’Clock High and The Wrinkles are these grotesque, large-eared parodies of humanity, symbolizing the fact that they are a narrative layer further away from our real world. But now they’ve escaped containment! And they walk among their Funkyverse counterparts! What happens when Lovable 3 O’Clock High band director character [NAME NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH TO FIND] interacts with his obvious model, Harry Dinkle? Will it tear a hole in the fabric of reality and allow them to enter our universe, in a crossover event that will greatly amuse some unknowable-to-us observers in yet another, more “real” universe? I hope not! I don’t want to talk to any of these guys! What if they read all the mean stuff I’ve written about them on my blog?

Herb and Jamaal, 11/4/26

I was going to try to parse the “punchline” here and try to figure out if it represented a joke or even wordplay of any kind, but then I realized that the dialogue in the first panel is in a thought balloon, which I guess means that this isn’t Herb being sullen about one of his loudmouth customers, it’s him ruminating at random, possibly after experiencing a minor cerebrovascular event, so I don’t feel obligated.

Mary Worth, 11/4/26

I know “suspenseful” is not a term we usually use about Mary Worth plots, but I’m genuinely unsure if where she’s going with this is “Nelly is such an unhappy soul, nothing I could do or say would be worse punishment than just living with herself” or “Nelly could lash out and hurt anyone at any time, and that’s why we have to put her down like a rabid dog.”

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Dustin, 11/3/26

Man, man, I could’ve done without Dustin’s dad’s sheepish little I-did-an-oopsie smile in the last panel here. I don’t really care if this is happening in his subconscious and he’s about to wake up having made a mess of the sheets or if he’s decided to manifest his dreams in real life and this is the incident that finally gets him disbarred at minimum, but he’s clearly getting off on his coworker’s anger and disgust and that shouldn’t be in the funny pages, which are a sacred space for cats who hate Mondays and whatever they have going on in Peanuts reruns these days.

Crankshaft, 11/3/26

Speaking of little smiles I hate, I don’t think Comic Book John should be imprisoned or anything for his facial expression on panel two, but I still don’t care for it. “Ah, the children of today,” he seems to be thinking. “They’re incredibly stupid, as it should be. Only the dumbest of minds will eschew legitimate literature for the moronic capeslop I sell, so this is all good news for me. Sorry about society, I guess.”

Marvin, 11/3/26

Also, Marvin, don’t go outside at all! You are literally a toddler?