Post Content

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!

Post Content

Marvin, 2/12/26

A thing about Marvin is that over the years it has strayed further and further from the one thing that made it unique — a comic strip? about a baby? — and made Marvin more of a generic child of indeterminate age who goes to school and speaks in complete sentences. In order to “get back to its roots,” the strip is doing a flashback sequence to show us what Marvin was like when he was really a baby, like a really tiny young baby, and it turns out what he was like was infested by vermin.

Dennis the Menace, 2/12/26

You guys know I am not a fan of the “Dennis insults his mother’s cooking” Dennis the Menaces, but I gotta say I kind of enjoy this one, because (1) Dennis’s insult is fairly silly and actually the sort of thing a small child might say, and (2) we get a reaction panel showing us that Dennis is realizing how extremely sick of his shit his parents are.

Post Content

Dennis the Menace, 2/3/26

OK, this is, no joke, some significant menacing here. First of all, this guy has never appeared in the strip before, so I assume Dennis is in the yard, unaccompanied by a parent or guardian, of an adult who is a total stranger to him. And check out that fence! That’s a serious fence this five-year-old kid scaled, presumably with pockets full of rocks, which he is now spookily skipping across a pool belonging to, as noted, someone he’s never met in his life. Kudos to you, Dennis, this time! You’re really freaking me out!

Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/3/26

Man, I love Rex’s grim expression here in panel two. It’s pretty clear that “Jimmy” is a mistake for Johnny and not Michael, but it’s very important that he know for certain whether this embarrassing failure of an appendix to maintain structural integrity happened inside the torso of his biological son or his adopted son, so he can start figuring out whose genes to blame.

Herb and Jamaal, 2/3/26

Normally, actually prestigious restaurant awards are driven by their own institutional investigation and decision making processes — you don’t send in an “application” that gets “declined” or anything, you just wake up one day and find out that they gave the award to your hated rival. Still, I’d like to believe that the Michelin Guide made an exception for Herb and Jamaal and sent them a personal note in the mail telling them to eat shit.