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Gearhead Gertie, 10/2/25

I was actually visiting a friend in Durham on the day Dale Earnhardt died, a date that I will always think of as “North Carolina’s 9/11,” so I know the strong feelings that his life and death elicit, and hopefully I’m not about to step out of line in this post, but: Dale Earnhardt died in a car crash during the Daytona 500? Because he ran into a wall at 160 miles an hour? And had previously complained about some rules that NASCAR had changed that slowed down races, and so NASCAR tweaked the rules again for the “aerodynamic package” allowed for cars, in order to (in the words of the remarkably detailed Wikipedia article on the subject) “keep cars bunched up close together and to allow more frequent passing at high speed”? Anyway, Gearhead Gertie has been a lot of business about her petty gripes with her husband lately, so I’m pretty excited that today’s panel is about Dale Earnhardt’s ghost or soul or whatever, which has been trapped in a photo on Gertie’s end table, saying, “Learn no lessons from my death. Go faster. Ever faster. Never slower. If they tell you to slow down, tell ’em to go to hell and leave them in your dust.”

Mary Worth, 10/2/25

Santa Royale is a bucolic California seaside college town, a fairly transparent stand-in for Santa Barbara, so it’s very funny that we suddenly have introduced into canon the idea that it’s immediately adjacent to a vast, dense forest, with no cell reception. I assume that Saul is terrified because he knows it’s full of … brigands? Wolves? Fae folk? Looking forward to finding out!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/2/25

Look, I’ve talked a lot of shit about the roots country Americana Ameripolitan scene on this blog, but I’m not such a hater that I won’t admit that a wedding full of musicians who are all playing for one another would be extremely fun and interesting! Not Rex and June, though. They need to go home and go to bed. They’re very boring people!

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Dennis the Menace, 10/1/25

I was thinking the other day about how Dagwood Bumstead and Hi Flagston have extremely generic jobs. Technically Dagwood is an “office manager” and Hi is the “head of the eastern sales team,” but we literally never see them doing anything at work that might match up with those descriptions; instead, we just get “office” hijinks that could involve anyone in any white collar professional setting. Lois and Blondie, meanwhile, who got jobs in the ’80s and ’90s, respectively, got the much more specific (and female-coded) jobs of realtor and caterer, respectively, and while I wouldn’t say the strips about them are exactly gold mines of laffs, I do in general think specific settings are funnier than bland and generic ones.

Some comics dads do get pretty specific jobs, mind you: Calvin’s dad was, like Bill Watterson’s, a patent attorney, Walt in Zits is an orthodontist, and Henry Mitchell, at least in some character iterations, has been an aerospace engineer. I’m not sure if this version of Henry is still in that line of work, but if so he should be absolutely embarrassed about trying to program his smart TV, a task that any idiot could tell you is achieved by use of the remote control and on-screen menus, with a wrench. He should also be embarrassed by even joking about putting Dennis to work on this, as his son is notoriously pretty stupid.

Mary Worth, 10/1/25

I wasn’t sure how exactly Olive’s psychic summoning was going to work, but I don’t think I ever would have guessed that the answer would be “the dogs will run along the side of the road while Saul and Eve fail to overtake them in their puce Buick.” I think it’s very funny that Mary and the gang are in a remote enough area that their phones don’t work but close enough to civilization that two dogs could run to them without dropping dead from exhaustion.

The Phantom, 10/1/25

The Phantom is in the midst of a storyline where our hero is breaking up a forced labor camp in Ivory Lana that’s been perfectly serviceable if not interesting enough to comment on here. But today’s panel put the phrase “SHADOW CROTCH — STRIPEY ASS” into my brain on repeat and if I have to think about it, now you do too!

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Hagar the Horrible, 9/30/25

Hagar is the protagonist of this strip, so we usually see things from his perspective, and I have to admit I never really tried to figure out what his crew might think of him. Indeed, his warriors do most of the fighting and dying in their various raids, but Hagar (perhaps already relatively well-off, as minor gentry?) gets the lion’s share of the booty and uses it to take his wife and favorite lieutenant to white tablecloth restaurants while they settle for scraps. Anyway, the way the guy in the back answers Hagar’s question implies that he’s contemplating the choice between asking Hagar for more money and spending that money on fancy food, or skipping several steps and simply eating Hagar directly.

Beetle Bailey, 9/30/25

I guess the point of this strip is that the U.S. Army isn’t just an office job, but rather a calling, and even the least of our brave warfighters might find themselves deployed at a moment’s notice wherever necessary to protect America’s people and interests. Unfortunately, by taking a phone call from his mother, Beetle has violated every opsec rule and revealed the location of his unit to the enemy, and will be killed by a drone-launched missile in approximately seven to nine minutes.

Pluggers, 9/30/25

I’m genuinely digging this plugger’s facial expression here. It’s not “Ah, another way in which my body is failing as I slowly decline towards death,” as you might expect. No, it’s sharp and genuine alarm. “Tennis elbow? But … I don’t even play tennis. Who’s been playing tennis with my elbow?”

Mother Goose and Grimm, 9/30/25

Mother Goose and Grimm: this is clearly a single-panel joke. You are 100% allowed to do single-panel jokes! You do them all the time! It’s also a very bad joke, but if you kept the proper structure, it would at least take up less of our time and cognitive energy.