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Curtis, 11/30/22

Curtis may have been a little late in celebrating Charles Schulz’s 100th birthday, but it’s making up for lost time with a whole week of beloved Peanuts character Franklin tutoring the strip’s education-resistent title character. They’re going to the always reliable joke of “this art style’s specific stylizations would look baffling and grotesque in the context of another art style with a different set of stylizations, were characters from the two universes to coexist.” Curtis may be focused on Franklin’s huge mouth, but I’m more weirded out by his mohawk. I guess if you 3D-modeled Franklin based on the original drawings, you’d come to the conclusion that he had a mohawk, but I don’t think he had a mohawk.

Mary Worth, 11/30/22

Oh, that mysterious figure from Zak’s past? You’d better believe it’s his beloved baby sitter, the one who made him the delicious rice-gravy slurry that to this day serves as an erotic Proustian madeleine! I think it’s very funny that in the last few days in this strip characters have spent a lot of time blissfully thinking about how Zak and Iris’s age gap isn’t problematic at all, and now suddenly we’re barreling full-speed towards “WHICH SUBSTITUE MOMMY WILL WIN?????” territory.

Beetle Bailey 11/30/22

I was pretty mad at Beetle’s response in the first panel when I read it, to be honest. Why does it have to have something to do with you, Beetle? Why can’t your girlfriend just tell you something interesting about her workplace and her day, huh? But then in the second panel it quickly becomes clear that their relationship is in fact wholly transactional, which frankly is a real downer.

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Beetle Bailey, 10/14/22

There’s a lot to potentially get hung up on here — Otto has a date, Otto and his date are talking rather than using thought balloons, Otto’s date was an award-winning Broadway actress and he’s only learning this now, Otto’s date won a “Bony” that’s literally a bone — but the thing I’m choosing to get hung up on is that Otto’s date is named “Marley”. Is this a Marley and Me reference? Is Marley here supposed to be a golden retriever? Marley in Marley and Me was a male dog, by the way, just putting that out there.

Hi and Lois, 10/14/22

I was about to write something mean about this, but you know what? By having a couple teen musicians sitting around talking about how cool classic rock icons who all died as a result of substance abuse were, this is officially the most realistic depiction of teenagers in the entire history of Hi and Lois. My only note is that they’d probably throw Kurt Cobain in there too.

Curtis, 10/14/22

Here’s today’s Curtis, in which Curtis and Barry imagine what their mother would look like with a big ass. Enjoy your weekend!

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Judge Parker, 9/21/22

Oh, sorry, it seems the Judge Parker brain trust has heard your little diatribes about how Judge Parker is boring now because it’s all about its characters processing their mundane emotions in baffling and erratic ways. Well, that’s why we’re abruptly shifting gears and bringing back Steve the wounded special forces warrior to introduce this hard-hitting new storyline about the judge that replaced Judge Randy Parker, who cracked down on meth and fentanyl traffic … and whose whole family just got murdered. Or, sorry, assassinated. Assassinated! Will I be cancelled as a soft-on-crime lib if I point out that assassination is a kind of murder?

Funky Winkerbean, 9/21/22

Speaking of murder, I guess the Funky Winkerbean brain trust noticed they hadn’t pulled any grim shit since Bull Bushka drove off a cliff back in 2019. Well, here you go, you ghouls: Darrin and Jessica tracked down a real weirdo who hoards memorabilia from the TV station that employed Jessica’s father, John Darling, including the gun that a guy dressed as a plant used to kill him! Look at how Jessica and her husband are recoiling in shock at the casual way this guy identifies his ghastly trophy! Are you happy now, you sickos? Are you happy???

Curtis, 9/21/22

I appreciate the long game Greg is playing here — making an elaborate show of enjoying Curtis’s favorite music before cruelly lowering the boom in the final panel. I assume, like a master chess player, he anticipated multiple potential third-panel conversational gambits from his son, and had a sick burn in his back pocket for all of them.

Shoe, 9/21/22

Far be it for me to call a comic strip about talking birds who wear (some) clothes “realistic,” but I do think that its portrayal of life at a small-town newspaper has a certain truth to it, in the sense that it depicts a publication run with almost no employees, which almost nobody reads, and the few remaining editors can just use it to pursue their own personal gripes and vendettas as they kill time waiting for a hedge fund to buy them and immediately shut them down.