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Archie, 1/13/26

Against all odds, the fact that I’ve been doing this blog for more than 20 years doesn’t usually make me feel old, mostly because I’m still substantially younger than most newspaper comics creators and readers, but occasionally I do catch a glimpse of the way my years have been piling up. For instance, these Archie strips are repeats from the early to mid ’00s, around the time I started commenting on them, and back then, teens (Archie’s ostensible target audience) would’ve read this and said, “Ha ha! The idiots who make this strip only have the vaguest idea what an iPod is and have no idea what it looks like!” before popping in their white earbuds and jamming out to Lindsay Lohan’s Speak, which they had pirated via LimeWire. Whereas today’s teens would read this rerun in the newspaper (an unlikely scenario, I admit, but stay with me here) and say “Wow, is that what iPods looked like, back when they were popular, several years before we were born? With curly wires and one (?) grey earphone and everything?”

Luann, 1/13/26

What’s worse than Brad and Toni having sex in their car in an empty amusement park parking lot late at night? Up until today you would’ve said “Nothing, obviously,” but now you know the answer actually is “Luann and Phil are desperate to have sex in their car in a nursing home parking lot in broad daylight except they’ve been foiled because it’s full of eager recyclers.”

B.C., 1/13/26

So do the deer … think the humans want to have sex with them? Is … is that the joke? Do the humans want to have sex with them? Is that the joke? Strong dislikes all around whatever the case.

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Hi and Lois, 11/18/25

Sorry, Lois. The latest Gen Alpha trend is eldermaxxing. Kids are putting on their grandpa’s clothes, and they’re so young they don’t even remember the Macklemore song so they don’t think it’s cringe. They’re shoplifting Ben Gay from local pharmacies so they can get the smell right. They’re setting off airhorns near each other’s ears so they can get into the “Eh? What’s that, sonny?” vibe. It’s happening all over the country and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll beg for skibidi toilet or “6-7” or whatever when Chip starts demanding dinner at 4:45 p.m. so he can finish in time to doze off in front of the local news.

Archie, 11/18/25

Sure, yes, Jughead’s hat is dumb-looking, or at least extremely out of date, but here’s the thing, Reggie: he’s been wearing it, depending on how you think of the chronology, either since 1941 or the whole time you’ve been in high school together. Everyone has already arrived at an opinion about it, and probably has pretty much stopped thinking about it, years ago! What made you think this would be a successfully sick burn that would raise your clout amongst your peers?

Dennis the Menace, 11/18/25

Now, Reggie, this is a sick burn. This is genuinely the most menacing thing Dennis has said in years, in that it’s simultaneously very funny and also if he said it to me I would die inside. The face he’s making is also great! Kudos all around.

Hagar the Horrible, 11/18/25

I love that she distinguishes between “the god Baldr” and just plain Thor. I assume this means she’s referring not to Baldr’s brother, the storm god, but just some guy named Thor, maybe one of their neighbors. His face is enh but he’s extremely ripped.

Beetle Bailey, 11/18/25

Hey, now, Killer — Otto walks around on two legs and wears human clothes! He’s not stupid at all, and honestly I’m not 100% convinced that he’s a dog.

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Mary Worth, 11/4/25

Sorry to be a “liberal coastal elitist” who “has a basic understanding of how academia works,” but a “teachers conference” isn’t really a thing that a tenured PhD English prof at a large state university like Ian would go to; there are plenty of academic conferences where he’d make the rounds, of course, but those tend to run the length of a long weekend, not “a few weeks.” What I’m trying to say is that Toby has no real idea where her husband actually is right now, maybe because he never told her, or maybe because he did tell her and she forgot. When he does finally get home, in a few days or weeks or months or whatever, he will presumably find her on this park bench, her face having been viciously pecked off after she fought a parrot for control of a bag of sunflower seeds and lost.

Pardon My Planet, 11/4/25

I concede that there’s the core of a halfway funny joke about “runway models” here. But building a superstructure around it where you’ve got a dumpy old man grousing that someone misrepresented their attractiveness on a dating app, and also somehow a sex-with-twins fantasy is involved? That’s the misogynist pervert vibe that Pardon My Planet does best.

Marvin, 11/4/25

Glad to see we’re moving past “fire hydrants: they’re toilets, for dogs” to “fire hydrants: they’re the center of a dog’s social life, because they piss there, but for once we’re not dwelling on that part.” Anyway, what’s the most weird and off-putting way to describe someone using color to mask the fact that they’re going grey? It’s probably “has fake brown hair,” right?

Archie, 11/4/25

Hey, teens! It’s Archie! The comic strip about teens, full of jokes that are relatable … to teens!