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Rex Morgan, M.D., 8/3/25

Cody may not be a blood relative to Truck, but they do have stuff in common: they’re both musicians, and they’re both aficionados of the sitting-based lifestyle. The difference is that Truck likes to sit on park benches, contemplating his troubles, whereas Cody sits in his not-stepmother’s diner, sponging off the free wi-fi while he dicks around on his laptop. Really makes you think about society these days!

Curtis, 8/3/25

Hey, remember when Curtis and Barry got expelled from their church congregation, for the sin of tomfoolery? Well, Barry has taken the opportunity to explore the sacred texts of the dharmic religions, and has been meditating on the nature of the soul and the possible purposes of the cycle of eternal rebirth. Curtis, meanwhile, has done exactly zero spiritual seeking. “It’s summer!” he declares. “We don’t hafta meditate on the nature of anything!”

Six Chix, 8/3/25

I was going to get mad about this strip, which seems to propose a world where dogs walk on their hind legs and contemplate art but can’t read, but then I realized that this is probably a ceci n’est pas une arf type conversation. Surely nobody drinking red wine at an art opening could be anything less than a sophisticated intellectual! I’m sorry I doubted you, dogs!

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Beetle Bailey, 7/29/25

There’s a lot of Beetle Baileys where the joke is that Sarge has beaten Beetle into an undifferentiated mass of broken limbs and shattered organs for some minor infraction, but for my money this one is much, much funnier. Just imagine Sarge going red-faced with rage over this extremely sub-par bit of wordplay, grabbing Beetle by the shoulders and huffing and puffing a bit as the two of them grapple, and then stalking off, leaving Beetle with his uniform hiked partway over his head as we see here, unhurt but also humiliated. All the while Killer stood absolutely still, watching the whole thing go down and hoping he isn’t next.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 7/29/25

I took Snuffy’s whispering in the first panel as a sign that he wanted to go easy on Horace, either because he genuinely didn’t want to hurt the man’s feelings or because he knew that any perceived slight could lead to violence in Hootin’ Holler’s clan-based culture. But it turns out he’s willing to take some risks! Congrats to Snuffy Smith for producing a strip that actually subverted my expectations, for the first time [checks notes] ever???

Curtis, 7/29/25

Curtis has gotten a summer job helping take care of a semi-comatose old woman who turns out to have telekinetic powers, which I think is a pretty normal sentence to write, and the plot hasn’t risen to the interest level necessary for me to blog about it, until today. Static snow is, of course, an artifact of the age before the transition to digital TV in 2009, which now gives it a sort of old-timey spookiness, and it has always been foreign to smartphones and similar devices. A video taken on your phone that’s just been deleted is a mild mystery; a video taken on your phone that’s been replaced with static snow is deeply unsettling, and Curtis, as an aficionado of the horror genre, should hopefully recognize the truly terrifying situation in which he’s found himself now.

Heathcliff, 7/29/25

One thing I love about Heathcliff doing elaborate bits in Heathcliff is how everyone else seems to view them mostly with gentle bemusement, even the very elaborate ones. I’m not sure if Heathcliff built this stadium, a project that would’ve cost tens of millions of dollars and taken years, or if he merely somehow managed to gain control of an existing facility by agreement or force, but either way there would’ve been a lot of steps leading up to this moment, which presumably Grandpa and Iggy watched with their hands in their pockets, mostly in silence, before finally remarking, “Ah, yeah, this looks like an opening ceremony of some sort.”

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Garfield, 3/21/25

Not sure if the implication here is that flies go into some kind of suspended animation over the winter upon being frozen then reawaken in the spring (only to be eaten by spiders), or if this particular spider has been stashing fly corpses outside all winter and can now enjoy eating them after the spring thaw. Either one is honestly pretty distasteful, and also scientifically inaccurate!

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/21/25

Remember, while Tater is the Smifs’ biological child, Jughaid is their nephew, which makes it all the more disturbing that he refers to the family mule as “Aunt Sukey.” Are we to understand that he considers Sukey to be a sibling to one of his caregivers? Or, worse, do Sukey, Snuffy, and Loweezy constitute a throuple?

Curtis, 3/21/25

I’m sorry, Greg, but your tween son asking to use your credit card to buy an umbrella as a gift for his wealthy crush is a perfectly insane scenario! What child would even think of such a thing? The fact that it’s an expensive fancy English umbrella is the least of what’s going on here! I declare this whole situation to be not very reasonable at all, actually.