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Mother Goose and Grimm, 5/29/25

Look, obviously I’m not asking that a comic strip that deliberately has fun with a character that’s in some ways like a person and in some ways like an animal be 100% realistic or even consistent. I’m just saying that we should acknowledge that a dog telling a dentist “Sometimes I have chunks of human flesh stuck between my teeth” is fairly menacing! Like not in a cute Dennis way, but in a genuine “I attack and seriously wound those who irritate me” way.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 5/29/25

An aging roots country star wearing colorful western gear silently ruminates over his past failures as a husband while contemplating a beige-ish blob of fried (?) diner food he has speared on the end of his fork. Is this the perfectly representative Rex Morgan, M.D., strip? Well, it doesn’t have Rene Belluso trying to pull off some obvious scam, but it also doesn’t have Rex doing any doctor stuff, so it’s pretty close.

Dick Tracy, 5/29/25

“Remember, Sam. People with criminal histories? Criminals. People without criminal histories? Also probably criminals, and talented ones too. Now let’s go down to the courthouse and get arrest warrants for everyone in town, including ourselves.”

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Dennis the Menace, 5/28/25

When you have a long-running strip like Dennis the Menace, where one of the main characters is a child who never grows up and another is an old man who never dies, it does force you to contemplate how comic strip time operates for the two of them. Are we meant to understand that they are locked in an eternal, changeless struggle? Or is Dennis just a kid who’s only started wandering over and annoying his neighbor in the past few months? Mr. Wilson’s reaction today points towards the latter: clearly he’s never even thought about the fact that Dennis will have his days free during the summer, much less experienced it. “Ah shit! Ah fuck!” is his immediate, visceral reaction.

Wizard of Id, 5/28/25

The idea of this joke — “two armies must fill out paperwork with the owner of the battlefield before they hack each other to bits” — is solid enough, but I have a quibble with the execution. Specifically, we’re in a faux medieval setting, so you could just put this guy in vaguely medieval peasant garb or something and people would easily follow everything thanks to the dialogue. Instead, the logic seems to be “we’re saying field so it should be a recognizable farmer, let’s put him in overalls and a hat from the early to mid 20th century,” which doesn’t work at all, in my opinion. The fact that the colorist decided to make said overalls the exact same shade of brown as the ground doesn’t help.

Herb and Jamaal, 5/28/25

TIRED: Herb and Jamaal uses weird circumlocutions to avoid proper nouns so as to make the strips “timeless” and reusable in the future

WIRED: Herb and Jamaal takes place in an extremely specific alt-timeline where Star Wars-style droids are real and the subject of political controversy that elected officials need to field questions about at press conferences

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Herb and Jamaal, 5/27/25

Of the 99 most recent Herb and Jamaal strips I’ve commented on, all but one have four panels, so I guess the strip is pretty married to that format, but I feel like this one should’ve been another exception. It’s already a pretty nothing joke, and the punchline being stretched out over two panels makes you think the second half of it is going to be much more interesting than it turns out to be, and reading it made me genuinely mad. No, Jamaal, that’s not true! This scenario you’re describing is admittedly annoying, but discovering secret government codes is in fact a significantly more difficult process!

Hi and Lois, 5/27/25

Lois knew! Lois knew when Big Government opened commie pinko institutions like the so-called “library” in town, it would destroy hard-working businesses that just wanted to derive profits from the sale of goods and services. First they came for the bookstore, the most obvious target, but now Lois herself is feeling the pinch. Why would anyone engage the services of a realtor if they could simply go to the library and look at Zillow on some grimy PCs running Windows Vista? Your goose is cooked now, Lois!