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Herb and Jamaal, 10/29/25

One of my personal crosses to bear is that I cannot just go along with it when comics deliberately, and for “humorous” effect, conflate fire hydrants with toilets in ways that imply that they don’t actually understand why and how dogs pee on fire hydrants. But at least the strips I’ve complained about to this point involve whimsically anthropomorphized animals. Herb and Jamaal, by contrast, is about humans, who should know better, which is why I find this strip particularly puzzling. Is this supposed to be some kind of dog pee joke? Does Herb not realize that the water that comes out of a fire hose is the exact same water that comes out of a fire hydrant — that indeed fire hydrants exist entirely to supply water to hoses? Does Herb think that the water coming out of a hydrant is infected with dog pee, somehow? Is he visualizing someone putting their mouths right on a fire hydrant, the way you’re not supposed to put your mouth on a drinking fountain, but a lot of people do anyway? There’s a lot to think about here, and none of it pleasant.

Crock, 10/29/25

Oh, does the syndicated newspaper comic strip Crock want us to think it’s silly that this Legionnaire has some jokes about buzzards to tell? Well, if that’s so, why does the syndicated newspaper comic strip Crock tell jokes about buzzards all the time? Heh heh, I’ve now caught this strip in an act of hypocrisy from which there is surely no coming back.

Dustin, 10/29/25

Ha ha, fellas! You know how sometimes you can’t tell whether or not you can get horny anymore, because you hate your wife so much? This sure is relatable content, for guys!

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Crock, 9/29/25

The point of this joke is of course that it’s annoying when a telemarketer (perhaps one offering you a “banking credit card”) interrupts you while you eat dinner, and what if someone a little less bound by social convention than you were to say something that might truly shock and discomfit said telemarketer? Wouldn’t that give you a delightful little thrill? Unfortunately, I feel the whole scenario is undermined by the fact that Crock is in fact depicted as a cruel tyrant who does deserve to face justice for his many crimes. Sadly, that day has never come, for every wrong he commits he commits in the name of the French imperial project, and even when the Fourth Republic collapses in the wake of that project’s failure, no French prosecutor will ever bring charges against him.

Hi and Lois, 9/29/25

I love how stricken everyone’s facial expressions are here! Oh no Dot has somehow learned about feminism somebody call the fuckin police

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Crock, 9/24/25

In my freshman year of college, there was an outbreak of E. coli at various Jack in the Boxes that killed four children, and a friend of mine who had worked at McDonald’s told me something I have never forgotten, which was that (at the time, anyway) they never taught fast food workers how to tell if a burger was cooked properly, but instead just taught them to put it on a bun when the timer rang. “If that timer went haywire and started ringing early, I would have definitely been serving people raw hamburgers,” he said. It was enough to keep me off fast food hamburgers for life, though for some entirely fake reason the flash-fried breaded chicken products seem safe to me. Anyway, my point is, I was using this news peg to play my fun “what year is this Crock rerun from?” game and was going to triumphantly announce that it was 1993, but then I saw that it actually had a 1997 copyright date, which means that even upon its original publication it was four years out of date.

Luann, 9/24/25

So Gunther and his girlfriend Bets are doing some sort of fundraiser for animal adoption with their cosplay group and are of course cosplaying appropriately. At first I was going to come in hot and absolutely furious at how much more work she had put into her costume than he did, but then I remembered the last time Gunther engaged in sexy, elaborate cosplay it was fucking horrifying, so I think he should actually be discouraged from applying any more effort to this whole thing than he’s doing now.

Rhymes With Orange, 9/24/25

Have you guys seen how much mortuary services cost? If my funeral were botched in such a disgraceful fashion, I would certainly hope that one of my loved ones would speak up on behalf of my dignity and the dignity of those gathered to mourn, rather than just cracking wise.

Mary Worth, 9/24/25

If there’s one thing I hope to have established in 20 years of blogging, it’s that joshreads dot com is your number one website for finding out if today’s comics pages feature Mary Worth, a psychic child, and a guy dressed sort of like an old lighthouse keeper screaming in terror as their hot air balloon crashes into a pine forest. If you’re wondering, today is, at long last, that day.