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Mary Worth, 3/23/26

One of my favorite books of the last 10 years is Because Internet, which focuses on how the internet has changed language use but has a lot to say about online culture in general. An insight from the book that I think about a lot is that there are identifiable “generations” of internet users that are determined by when people first got online and don’t necessarily map onto people’s calendar ages. A lot of Gen Xers and elder Millennials first got online in college in the 1990s, for instance, while their boomer parents might not have gained extensive experience with the internet for another 10 or 15 years.

One of the biggest internet generational divides in my opinion is whether you consider the computer or the phone to be your primary device, and one way I think it shows up is how you prefer to make large payments. Speaking as a fiftysomething, I’m fine with using Venmo to split a restaurant bill, but am constantly amazed and a little discomfited by contractors who want me to use Zelle to send them four-figure sums of money — I should be sitting down in front of a real physical keyboard to do that! Now, these are mostly young people, of course, but clearly Harvey is one of those older guys who worked in some high-compensation, ascot-forward industry and was able to coast to retirement with his personal assistant taking care of all the computer stuff, only truly getting online in his dotage, with zero defenses built up. So why shouldn’t he send two hundred thousand American dollars to Trixie by tapping on the screen of his Samsung Galaxy S22 phone? After all, that’s the very device on which he met her in the first place, and the Vanguard app makes it so easy!

Dennis the Menace, 3/23/26

OK, sure, in real life we know that this is an example of the syndicate colorist just charging in with the paint fill tool without actually reading the caption, but I’d like to think that Dennis’s grandpa is sitting there watching some revisionist post-1975 Western in color and absolutely seething about it. That’s why Dennis is telling Gina this: because he knows if she makes the mistake of asking the old man what he’s watching, she’ll get an earful about how he doesn’t tune into a cowboy movie for a bunch of moral ambiguity or whatever.

Slylock Fox, 3/23/26

I know that this multispecies society of sapient animals is still finding its footing, and maybe they haven’t gotten their education system really organized yet, but the fact that Kolton Kangaroo is so ignorant of marsupial reproductive biology is frankly embarrassing. Honestly if he doesn’t understand how capable of movement his own child is, he deserves to be a victim of whatever kind of scam Shady is pulling on him here.

Beetle Bailey, 3/23/26

Here’s today’s Beetle Bailey! It’s about how the title character was having a pretty good day … until his commanding officer showed up to beat the shit out of him. Honestly a surprising number of Beetle Bailey strips are about this!

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Dennis the Menace, 2/27/26

I’m not here to tell the Dennis the Menace creative team how to do their job, but … oh, wait, I am here to do that! That’s literally my job! Anyway, this joke is fine, but it absolutely should’ve run in mid-December, not February. And probably Dennis should’ve looked gleeful, not, as he does here, mournful, as if he’s been forced by circumstances beyond his control to paste some poor sap with a snowball against his will.

Mary Worth, 2/27/26

Several commenters have speculated that Harvey is being catfished and this would just be a tired retread of the “Estelle gets catfished by Arthur Z” plotline from five years ago. One thing that could spice that up a little is to bring AI into the picture, and Mary’s boldfaced “unreal” hints pretty broadly that this is the direction we’re going. The only question is whether “Trixie” is a fully autonomous bot, perhaps an escapee from the Moltbook project, or just a cartoonish avatar that Arthur Z whipped up with OpenAI’s free tier image generation capabilities, since using stock photos is now passé in the eldergrift biz.

Blondie, 2/27/26

Look, Dagwood, I don’t know what you think “freestyle” means, but whatever you’re doing with your legs isn’t it. It isn’t anything we want to see, either. This is a family newspaper, damn it.

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Mary Worth, 2/23/26

Yes Yes! YES!!! We did it, we endured the parrot storyline and its aftermath and have been rewarded by a near-forgotten Mary Worth plot-shifting staple: a pool party! And this pool party features an exciting new character: a dapper widower whose year-long period of mourning is now over so it’s once again legal for him to speak to a woman. “I wonder how he’s doing,” Toby says idly. “I wonder what he thinks about parrots. I wonder if he has more money than, say, an English professor at a second-tier state university. I mean, you don’t go around wearing an ascot in public because you’re poor.”

Dennis the Menace, 2/23/26

I feel like Dennis the Menace may be spending too much time on Dennis insulting his mother’s cooking and harassing his elderly neighbor and not enough time exploring the reasons why the Mitchells are apparently bouncing from denomination to denomination. It seems like Alice in particular is on a spiritual journey and Henry is getting sick of it. “Look, I don’t care if we’re Presbyterians or Unitarian Universalists or snake-handlers or whatever,” he told her, “but I’m not coming until you settle on one.”

Pluggers, 2/23/26

There’s a lot to think about here. My initial instinct was that this plugger had to be at home — pluggers don’t work in front of a computer, they have real blue-collar jobs that involve, like, tools or something — and so this plugger has come home from a hard day’s work and is exemplifying proper life-work balance by dozing off while reading the headlines on Yahoo! News. But then I began to suspect that, in our fallen, post-industrial age, even a plugger’s professional life is dominated by the glow of a screen, and so this plugger is supposed to be “working” and after eight hours of this will head home to watch sports from his recliner, where he’ll also fall asleep. Which interpretation is correct? Sound off in the comments!