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Dustin, 1/12/26

I don’t know that I’ve really commented on the “Dustin (the character)’s second-best friend is an eight-year-old child” aspect of Dustin (the comic strip), but it’s not one I particularly enjoy, mostly because the kid himself is not very interesting as a character. I guess he’s fine when he gives Dustin someone to riff off of, or as fine as any of the other Dustin nobodies, but he doesn’t merit his own individual strips where he’s the focus, and he definitely shouldn’t be doing “I hate Mondays” jokes. That is Garfield territory, Kid Whose Name I Don’t Know And Have Run Out Of Ways To Avoid Mentioning That Fact, and while Garfield’s legal team may be currently distracted, they’re not going to take this kind of thing lying down.

Gil Thorp, 1/12/26

Lest you think that Gil’s ex is motivated by anti-heterosexual sentiment, today’s strip reveals that Coach Gerards is also seething with rage over Gil’s happy relationship. This union is going to roil the Valley Conference into levels of feverish competition that haven’t been seen in decades, to the extent that I suspect that maybe Gil is doing it to boost the athletic department’s budget.

Wizard of Id, 1/12/26

With jokes like “the King as ADHD” and “hey, how about that emo music,” someone is clearly trying to drag the Wizard of Id kicking and screaming into, if not the present, then at least the ’00s. I’m not sure this is a particularly good idea, honestly, and I’d like to think that the setup line is just emerging anonymously from the left side of panel one because all the regular characters refused to deliver it.

Dennis the Menace, 1/12/26

Man, look at Margaret’s face! She does know it, she knows it’s an aspect of her personality that people find off-putting and that’s why she has a hard time making real friends, but she just can’t help it and it’s eating her up inside!

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Wizard of Id, 1/8/26

The syndicated newspaper comics are, among other things, your #1 source for gender stereotypes so out of date that everyone has pretty much forgotten them, like “women love to drag their husbands to the opera even though men find opera boring.” Usually your source for these gags is The Lockhorns, where it’s at least vaguely realistic because they live a mere hour from Lincoln Center via the Long Island Railroad; I suppose you might think the Wizard of Id’s pseudo-medieval setting also makes it a good candidate for opera gags, if you were a philistine who didn’t know that opera originated in the 1600s and didn’t truly flower into the oft-parodied art form we see here until the baroque era. Anyway, this lady has a rare talent that she’s chosen to share with the world, and maybe it makes me a gender traitor, but I feel that she does not deserve to experience the painful and horrifying ideal of transformation into a bird, right here and now, at the height of her career.

Gearhead Gertie, 1/8/26

There was in fact a big NASCAR lawsuit settlement recently, and I’m gonna be real with you, I read some of that article I just linked to but couldn’t really follow what it was about and tapped out around halfway through. I don’t feel too bad about that, though, because I read enough to know that the dispute in hand was between the league and team owners and had nothing to do with anything that might get free tickets to fans, so apparently I understood it better than NASCAR superfan Gearhead Gertie.

Dennis the Menace, 1/8/26

I guess Mr. Wilson is supposed to be hinting darkly that Dennis may someday move on from childish menacing and become some sort of evil dictator or criminal mastermind and menace the whole world, but I think he’s letting his endless antagonism with the boy cloud his judgement. Dennis is actually pretty dumb, and I’ve seen no indication that he has the intention or the ability to better himself. It might still be annoying living next door to him when he’s an adult, but I think most of us will be safe.

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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.”