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Crock, 12/21/25

I kind of like the worldbuilding in today’s Crock, which implies that Magi simply spontaneously generate in desert climes, and can be instinctively attracted to your location by any large star-shaped object. I feel less affection for the final panel, though. Look at those faces: our heroes from the legion are definitely going to kill the Magi, right? Kill them, and possibly eat them?

Dennis the Menace, 12/21/25

This young woman’s “What are you doing here?” is a wholly appropriate expression of surprise. If Dennis’s parents allow him to just roam the neighborhood unsupervised, why do they bother to hire babysitters at all?

Mary Worth, 12/21/25

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And I will definitely set a woman’s parrot against her husband. I cannot emphasize enough that I did not come to bring peace to the households of woman-man-parrot triads. Please do not use the occasion of my birth to give others false hope that parrots and husbands can live in harmony with one another, because they very much cannot.”

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Crock, 12/19/25

The sentence that most bothers me here is “It’s me again,” implying that we’re seeing another installment in a long-running drama between Crock and the … guy? … who’s calling him on the phone. At first I thought this was the same salesperson who annoyed him at dinner last month by calling during dinner and trying to sell him a banking credit card; but while on the surface the dialogue in panel one seems like it could be from someone hawking storm windows, it’s a wildly unprofessional sales pitch, and frankly sounds more like someone who’s only heard about sex second- or even third-hand initiating an obscene phone call. Anyway, Crock’s comeback is not as withering as he seems to think it is, and certainly doesn’t merit an entire panel dedicated to the triumphant slamming down of the phone in its wake.

Mary Worth, 12/19/25

This is honestly a fascinating exchange: Ian has gone fully mad, convinced that Sunny is no mere mechanical repeater of sounds but rather a fully fluent user of the English language, which makes the question of where he learned specific terms irrelevant, and that’s good for Toby, whose “Uh, maybe he heard it from [tries desperately to think of TV shows that have swear words] PBS” gambit is truly one of the least plausible things I’ve ever seen someone in this strip come up with, which is really saying something.

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Crock, 11/26/25

So, how old were you when you learned that “stuffing” an animal actually meant that you strip its skin off and fit it over an animal-shaped taxidermy form — a mannequin, basically? I was well into adulthood, and it was recent enough that I’m still a little freaked out about it. In this scenario, I guess this means either that Yarnell was for some reason skinned and then mounted on a prone form that fit into a coffin, which seems kind of pointless, or that he was skinned and mounted on a form in some heroic pose which is being displayed elsewhere, and currently his skinless corpse is the main event at an open casket funeral, which is much more horrifying and would explain Captain Poulet’s expression. It’s also possible that I’m misinterpreting the joke and actually Crock is simply going to force his men to eat Yarnell for Thanksgiving, a holiday that the French do not celebrate.

Shoe, 11/26/25

Holy crap! Shoe finally did it! It finally acknowledged that its characters are birds! And it did it with a slam on all us mammals out here reading it. “Can you imagine having hair?” thinks the Perfesser. “Grotesque.”

Dennis the Menace, 11/26/25

Hey, did you know that at any moment Dennis might just show up at your house and passive-aggressively ask to shit in there? That’s … pretty menacing, honestly.

Marvin, 11/26/25

“Oh, so they’re doing bathroom jokes in Dennis the Menace now, huh? Well, I guess it’s time for us to do strips about Marvin puking everywhere. I don’t like it either, but we’ve got a reputation to maintain.”