Post Content

Mary Worth, 12/4/25

“Good lord, Josh,” you’re almost certainly saying, “it’s been days since the first unpleasant Ian-Sunny encounter and you haven’t kept us updated, what is going on?????” Well, Ian has beaten a tactical retreat to the shower, where he is fuming, fuming at his humiliation. This oddball is going to grandstand like never before! The stakes could not be higher!

Gearhead Gertie, 12/4/25

Gertie marital dysfunction watch: Gertie’s husband, learning about a new venue for NASCAR racing, has preemptively compromised on their next vacation, hoping to combine some of the racing action his wife loves with a relaxing beach day of the sort that you’d think would appeal to just about anybody. “No,” says Gertie. “Fuck you. That’s not how this works. You know that’s not how this works.”

Daddy Daze, 12/4/25

I can never really figure out to what extent the conversations between the Daddy Daze baby and the Daddy Daze daddy are supposed to be “real,” and I guess that question can be extended to basically anything you see happening in the strip. Still, I feel like “your pre-verbal, non-walking baby is roaming the house in the middle of the night” is a scenario where you get out of bed and put them back in their crib, rather than just going back to sleep? I dunno, I’m not a parent, maybe the conventional wisdom has changed on this.

Pluggers, 12/4/25

You’re a plugger if you get invited to the sort of social events whose cancellation you’re notified about via a formal notice delivered by the U.S. Postal Service.

Post Content

Daddy Daze, 4/28/25

One of my favorite little linguistic quirks is the existence of true homonyms: when two separate words with different meanings and different origins evolve in a language until they happen to be pronounced and spelled the same way. That’s what’s going on here with the word funk, or more accurately the two words funk(s): the “be in a bad mood” word derives from a Scottish and Northern English word of uncertain but possibly Flemish origin that means “become afraid,” whereas the “music to put you in good mood” word derives in slang from the sense (still in use today) of a funk as a bad smell, which in turn comes to English via French from the Latin verb for putting off smoke, fumigare. This is the sort of information I would convey to my baby, if I lived alone with my baby and had very little contact with the outside world and it drove me to a state of madness in which I believed that my baby’s incoherent babbling noises constituted meaningful attempts to communicate that only I could understand.

Andy Capp, 4/28/25

Nice try, Andy Capp. You think you can slip this kind of blatant falsehood past us because we’re dumb Americans who don’t know any better? We may be dumb but we do have access to Wikipedia, which informs us that the parliamentary constituency of Runcorn and Helsby has been vacant for nearly six weeks now. Sadly, the by-election to fill the seat is this Thursday, so it’s too late for Andy to throw his iconic hat into the ring. The sitting MP resigned because he got caught on camera repeatedly punching a man in the street, so it sounds like the locals would’ve been open to Andy’s whole vibe, frankly.

Crankshaft, 4/28/25

Remember “the burnings,” the apocalyptic event in the near-future of the Funkyverse that wiped out most printed literature? Well, it turns out Lilian invented them, as part of her cozy mystery series. And yet we know that her building-code-violating above-the-garage store survived them, which certainly is interesting in light of this new revelation, although we can at least take solace in the fact that she’ll eventually be replaced by a robot.

Heathcliff, 4/28/25

Heathcliff is finally starting a cult! And, you know what, good for him.

Post Content

Blondie, 3/15/25

You gotta imagine that, when you’re talking to Dagwood Bumstead, there’s always a danger that he’s going to stare off into the distance, licking his lips, as he descends into a food-driven fugue state. It’s probably pretty off-putting and it’s honestly surprising that more people don’t just avoid him. Certainly his mailman has no real professional obligation to interact with him as much as he does!

Daddy Daze, 3/15/25

The central mystery of Daddy Daze is, I suppose, whether the Daddy Daze baby actually communicates with the Daddy Daze daddy in an elaborate language of “ba”s that the Daddy Daze daddy can understand, or if literally every strip we see is just the Daddy Daze daddy doing an elaborate series of bits with a baby who is too young to consent to participate in them. But the secondary mystery is undoubtedly “Why are the “Daddy Daze daddy and the infrequently seen Daddy Daze mommy no longer together, despite the fact that they had a baby together quite recently?” Today, the answer is clearly that, whether the baby is a willing participant or not, a life with the Daddy Daze daddy is obviously a life spent subject to endless bits, and such a life is to be avoided at all costs.

Judge Parker, 3/15/25

Aw, isn’t that nice? Randy is sad about his sister going to prison, so his trained CIA assassin wife is helping him cope by cutting off his oxygen supply, sending him off to a peaceful sleep, possibly forever.