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The Lockhorns, 10/24/25

Loretta has, presumably, been jogging for some time with her friend acquaintance who we are definitely never going to see again, and is only now passing by her husband, who has been sitting on that bench staring contemplatively into space for who knows how long. Because absolutely nothing the Lockhorns do is left to chance, especially when it comes to attempting to passive-aggressively destroy one another emotionally, we must assume that she carefully planned both her route and her conversational cadence so that this little bon mot would drop just as she was getting close enough for Leroy to hear it.

Mother Goose and Grimm, 10/24/25

I’m a normal person, so I do almost all my shopping either online or in a store, but some people do it over the phone, I guess? Maybe they’re all old and increasingly senile and the person on the other end has to say “Shopping…” every once in a while, just to remind them what they’re doing.

Pluggers, 10/24/25

Gah, pathetic, there’s no joke or wordplay or anything here, it’s literally just “Pluggers continue to engage in a traditional cultural/aesthetic practice, unlike most people, who have abandoned it or never knew about it in the first place.” They didn’t even put a plugger in the cartoon! I’d like to think they all refused to participate in such a half-assed non-gag.

Crankshaft, 10/24/25

I love how depressed this guy looks in the final panel. He doesn’t want to say this shit any more than you want to listen to it!

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Crankshaft, 10/9/25

Look, characters in comic strips are, ultimately, not real people, and while you can chuckle at their antics, you ultimately shouldn’t feel bad for them. Especially not Ed Crankshaft, who’s a real asshole. Still, I can’t look at panel three here, where he has an extremely bleak facial expression as he’s compelled, apparently against his will, to make wordplay with “wiener” in it that doesn’t make sense at all but vaguely sounds like he’s referring to masturbation, and not feel a frisson of sympathy. He doesn’t want this! Nobody wants this!

Blondie, 10/9/25

You all know that I depend on Blondie, whose characters are spiritually boomers even if they’re younger in age as drawn, to find out what old people are doing on the computer. It’s not gambling, I guess! They’re still doing that the old fashioned way, by handing over wads of cash to some guy in their office building. They’re leaving losing life-damaging sums of cash on absurd parlays via an app to the young people, and, you know what, good for them.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/28/25

Well, I guess Truck’s not-son Cody did in fact come out ahead of beloved (?) tween neo-vaudeville novelty act “Shorty and the Beanpole,” because not only did he score an invite to Truck’s wedding but he was also allowed and/or required to perform. Obviously he was only paid in “exposure” and “the chance that he might feel the slightest amount of paternal affection for once in his life,” but now it’s all worked out … for him, anyway. Too bad about his band, but the lucrative world of younger people doing covers of country classics doesn’t have room for anything more than the one guy and one guitar that the nostalgics crave.

Mary Worth, 9/28/25

It’s only appropriate that in Mary Worth, interspecies psychic communication takes the form of a human projecting their own floating head into an animal’s mind, though I have to say that Greta and Max’s expressions look less like “We are receiving a message from our friend” and more like Olive has simply overridden their consciousness and will take control of their zombie-like bodies, for rescue purposes. Funnier to me, though, is Mary fretting “what if they forgot about us?” Like, as I age, I definitely have learned more and more that the people “in charge” in any given situation are just folks like me and often have things less in hand than I assumed all adults did as a kid, but I do sincerely believe that the people running a hot air balloon festival would in fact notice if one or more of the balloons went missing. Surely somebody involved has, like, a clipboard, right? A clipboard with a list of balloons on it?

Pickles, 9/28/25

It’s true, Grandpa Pickles walking into an oil change place and thinking it’s his optometrist’s office, which is almost certainly in an entirely different location, is not necessarily a sign that his vision is failing. He should probably take a comprehensive cognitive functions test, however.

Crankshaft, 9/28/25

This one … this one seems even more serious, to be honest. But Crankshaft is pretty sanguine about it. Let’s just take all these pills at random times and let the miracle of the human body take its course. See what happens. He’ll be behind the wheel of a schoolbus full of children when it all goes down, by the way.