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Blondie, 9/21/25

Comics Time is a damn complicated thing. Dagwood and Blondie are both relatively young parents of teenagers, which caused some of you to push back on my contention last week that “Blondie in the year 2025 is your go-to for the pettiest boomer gripes about everyday suburban life imaginable,” given that, going by age alone, the Bumsteads are, like the Lockhorns, Millennials. The thing is, though, that their every word and deed proves that they are not Millennials, but rather exude powerful boomer energy and just happen to be drawn as if they’re 40. If you need more evidence of that, take today’s strip, in which, based on the way Dagwood is holding his phone, I assume he has its speaker set at maximum volume and he’s forcing all these other people at the airport to listen to the conversation he’s having with his boss about yet another nephew who’s stealing his whole bit.

Crock, 9/21/25

Imagine a crazed terrorist bomber running straight for you and yelling “It’s kibosh time!” This may be the first time I’ve ever laughed at something in Crock that I’m reasonably sure is supposed to be funny. It’s not the punchline, of course, but baby steps I guess.

Dennis the Menace, 9/21/25

“Working from home? That sure would be a hassle if your kid was notorious menace Dennis Mitchell. You’d probably prefer not to do it.” –The Dennis the Menace creative team a full five and a half years after the COVID lockdowns led to an unprecedented explosion in remote work, apparently

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Pluggers, 9/15/25

A friend of mine in Baltimore, widely known for always looking younger than she was, when asked for her secret said, “Never make a noise when you bend over to pick something up,” something I think about all the time as I hit increasingly pluggerish ages and inevitably make noises when I bend over to pick things up. Anyway, today’s Pluggers is on this theme, but I like the way they’ve taken the suggestion and turned it into a little story about a woman who’s just trying to enjoy a football game but instead has to watch her husband drop dead as he attempts to get out of a chair.

Crock, 9/15/25

The thing about using the rule of three when you’re writing a joke is that while it’s true that the first two of the three should be similar enough to form a pattern, they shouldn’t literally be the exact same thing. Maybe my standards are too high, but I think if you’re doing a comic about how the French Foreign Legion is full of nefarious criminals, you should be aware of at least one other crime over and above jewel thievery!

Judge Parker, 9/15/25

“Anyway, just like Pilate, I’m washing my hands of him. He was the good guy in that story, right? It would’ve been more dramatic to do this right in front of Alan, obviously, but we were at a restaurant and trying to get him to go into the bathroom at the same time as me would’ve been weird.”

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Crock, 9/1/25

Even if you hate Crock with a passion, you don’t read it every day for 20+ years without learning a little something about its character dynamics, though if you’re me and you’re notoriously terrible with names, you do manage to not learn some of the names of those characters. I wanna say this woman’s name is … Fatima? We’re going to go with that, although she doesn’t make the Wikipedia list of characters, and while I normally am quite dubious about the utility of Google’s AI answers, based on its “In the comic strip Crock, there is no ‘pretty girl’ character” response to me, I have to admit it may be getting better at parsing visual input. Anyway, the point of (let’s call her) Fatima here is that she’s supposed to be pretty, and also that she’s a foil for Grossie, who is supposed to not be pretty, and who she hangs out with a lot and routinely insults. You can tell that she’s not supposed to be pretty because they named her “Grossie,” and I think it’s telling that Fatima (?) abbreviates Maggot’s equally vile name to the cuter “Mag,” whereas Grossie gets no similarly softened nickname.

Anyway, speaking of character dynamics, I get that Fatima (??) has to be talking to some third party for this joke to work, but it’s kind of weird that she’s having drinks with Captain Poulet, right? It’s like running into your English teacher and your shop teacher hanging out together outside of work. Sure, it sort of makes sense that they know each other, but you’ve never seen them interact and it feels wrong, somehow.

Blondie, 9/1/25

As AI becomes integrated into every feature of human life and we begin to worry about who’s really calling the shots, a new question arises: Which of our fellow biological humans will go quisling when the clankers take over? Well, the team behind Blondie seems to be making tentative moves in that direction, and sad as it is, it makes a sort of sense: if anyone serves as a model for “humans don’t really desire autonomy and would be satisfied to simply have their needs met by industrially produced foods and material goods,” it’s the characters in this strip. Once a robot figures out how to make a giant sandwich, it’s curtains for the human race!

Slylock Fox, 9/1/25

Um, actually, we know that those are Reeky’s pants he left behind because a janky thrift store with magic eight balls and VHS tapes displayed on the floor would never sell torn-up jeans; those are fashionable garments that can only be found in high-end boutiques.