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The Phantom, 4/6/25

One thing I respect about the Phantom is that, for a strip that started out with a fairly dubious colonialist attitude, it now makes a good faith effort to imagine what life would be like realistically in Bangalla, a post-colonial African state that balances a modern capital inhabited by a Westernized elite with a large citizen body that still lives more traditional lifestyles. That’s why I’m intrigued by this new storyline, in which a group of Wambesi living in Mawitaan return home to [squints at last panel] [record scratch] THE UNGRAVED? Best case scenario, it’s some nightmare where corpses are strewn about the village; worst case scenario will be a zombie situation that will have me taking back all the stuff I just said about how far this strip has come.

Dustin and Beetle Bailey, 4/6/25

Ah, it’s time for some fun dream sequences starring two of the funnies’ most callow young people! The Dustin one is straightforward enough to parse — Dustin, who lives with the father who hates him, finds himself trapped on a tiny island with him, a horizon that he can never reach visible in every direction as his father keeps demanding he get a job just in time for another general economic collapse. Beetle Bailey is a bit sillier — ha ha, he’s sick of peeling potatoes, so he’s dreaming of Cookie as a giant angry potato! — but I have to admit that the potato-man seems more and more unsettling the more I look it. The way his body is all head, the way his arms apparently connect to his back, the way he waves around a knife that will be used to slice off the skin of his fellow potatoes and, ultimately, himself? … well, it’s an unsettling look into Beetle’s subconscious, I’ll just say that.

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Beetle Bailey, 4/4/25

That’s right, Zero! Article 17 of the Third Geneva Convention establishes that POWs are only required to give their name, rank, and service number to their captors; their identity so established is used for the administration of their rights under Article 71 to send and receive letters and cards, as supervised by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Your parents will be glad to know you’re alive and safe in … whatever country the men of Camp Swampy have been deployed to invade. It looks heavily forested, wherever it is. Good luck, fellas!

Gil Thorp, 4/4/25

Some say “Pops” was the heart and soul of Milford. Some say that he and “Pop” were the same person, while others say they were twin brothers, one of whom wore fancy clothes while the other wore workingman’s attire and a dumb hat. But everyone agreed that he sucked at coaching sports. He sucked so bad that Gil was credited with “turn[ing] the program around.” Gil! The coach we’ve been following for all these years, who frankly is not very good!

Hi and Lois, 4/4/25

I really love how exhausted Hi looks here. He’s reading that magazine right up until the final moment of unconsciousness, filling his mind with golf and nothing but golf. Golf will be the last thing he sees while he’s awake, so golf will be all he sees while he’s asleep! Golf, wonderful golf! Oh, also his wife is right there or whatever.

Family Circus, 4/4/25

“Let the kids watch PBS,” you said. “It’ll be educational and culturally enriching,” you said. “Definitely they won’t see a lady get stabbed to death by her jealous lover,” you said.

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Slylock Fox, 3/4/25

They called Count Weirdly mad at Oxford, of course, and the Medical Sciences Interdivisional Research Ethics Committee repeatedly sanctioned him. But he’s shown them now, or I guess he would have shown them, if they all hadn’t been violently killed in the great animal uprising that wiped out most of the human race. Oxford is run by owls or something these days, but he’d like to think that, if any of his old nemeses were still around, they would understand that in this horrifying new world there just isn’t the luxury to muse on medical ethics the way there used to be. And with so few humans left alive, could anyone really fault him for trying to build a new one, as a friend? It’s not like there’s any shortage of corpses to use as raw materials.

Pardon My Planet, 3/4/25

But … you’re the one buying the pie, cow! I really don’t want to think about why this scenario involves cows wearing shirts and shopping in human grocery stores, or why a cow might assume that products made from cow’s milk can render dishes “sanitary,” and thank goodness that I don’t have to, because I have this basic bit of storybuilding to get hung up on instead. If you think the pie is unsanitary, why are you buying it? You’re standing in the checkout line, there’s nobody else there, you clearly picked it out and are now buying it!

Beetle Bailey, 3/4/25

Beetle is … dead, right? He’s not there, they’re putting a memorial plaque above his bed, he’s clearly dead. RIP Beetle Bailey, 1950-2025, you will be missed, to a certain extent.