Post Content

Alice, 10/6/25

We all know of course about the various beloved characters in Alice, the normal comic strip we all read every day and fully understand: Alice, Alice’s friend, Alice’s boyfriend, Alice’s niece, and the late Kurt Vonnegut, who is both Alice’s doctor and her vet. Today’s strip features a couple of our more outlandish favorites, Alice’s robot antagonist and the space alien who’s in love with her, but also … someone new! A glowing orb of some sort who judges the living and the dead, or maybe just asks you where you’re from. Frankly there’s getting to be more of these guys than I would ideally like to keep track of! Yet I persist, for my faithful blog readers, for whom I read Alice and other comics so they don’t have to.

Hi and Lois, 10/6/25

Look, Hi, I think we all know that Ditto was saying “I wish you were a different sort of person than you actually are.” You don’t have to drop this philosophical bombshell on him about how he’s trying to wish himself into the void or whatever. He’s a child and not a particularly smart one. You’ve tricked him into being on hugging terms with you again at the end here, but you aren’t really playing fair.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/6/25

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m now nostalgic for the time when syndicated newspaper comics scat content was confined to Marvin, where you could at least argue that he was a baby and so it was normal for him to poop into his diaper. I get that Grimm is a talking dog, but I still think it crosses some kind of line to have a newspaper comics strip character yelling “I don’t get it, why don’t these big, manly football players start shitting in the middle of the field on live TV so we can all watch it the way I know we all want to????”

Mary Worth, 10/6/25

I’m honestly not comfortable with how pleased Stanley looks in panel two here. Sure, this could’ve ended in total disaster, but look at all these people who are now paying attention to Stanley, and concerned about his well being! Ha ha, Mary, ladies first, Stanley’s all right! Stanley’s as right as rain! There’s no such thing as a bad way to get attention, is what Stanley’s learning!

Post Content

Dick Tracy, 10/5/25

Longtime readers of this blog know that I have a lot of favorite etymological facts. One of those favorites is that the word “electrocute” was coined in 1889 by combining “electricity” and “execute,” and was originally meant to market the then-new electric chair; its use for being killed by electricity in non-judicial contexts only came later. That’s why I’m excited to see that Diet Smith Enterprises has an “Electrothanasia Room,” which I assume involves painless, voluntary death via electricity. Over the past few years in this strip, there have been hints that Diet Smith has shifted from playing the role for Dick Tracy that Q plays for James Bond to something darker, where he has his own shadowy agenda not always aligned with the MCU. Anyway, that seems to be confirmed today, when Dick is about to get electrothanized, or maybe electrocuted, or I guess just zapped, by a lady Diet Smith Enterprises was trying to sign on to its Superweapon Incubator program.

Pluggers, 10/5/25

Pluggers’ own failing bodies deny them even their most keenly anticipated pleasures! The thing about this strip is that in general it makes being a plugger sound frankly awful.

Post Content

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/4/25

Oh, man, Rex and June thought they were going to have an early night of it, but now it looks like they’ll be up late spinning an elaborate web of lies for their children. Will they be able to convince the boys that some sad slice of soggy coffee cake they bought at a gas station is in fact left over from Glenwood’s shindig of the year? It’s a tough call: on the one hand, the boys are pretty stupid, but on the other, they seem hyperfixated on cake, so they might figure it out.

Beetle Bailey, 10/4/25

Remember, folks, Beetle Bailey’s Sgt. Snorkel isn’t just a violent man with an eating problem; he also has a drinking problem! They don’t dwell on that so much these days but it’s still canon.