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Judge Parker, 4/4/26

So I guess I haven’t fully spelled out what’s been going in on Judge Parker over the past few weeks: Bogdan, Randy’s lovable prison pal, showed up at the Parker manse with Randy’s proof of life video, in which Randy said he would return home at some future undetermined time, which was nice of him, but then Bogdan got weirdly aggressive about wanting to see Charlotte, so the Parkers kicked him out, and afterwards I guess he just started lurking around the vast Spencer horse ranch until he caught sight of her, but unfortunately he didn’t do it particularly subtly, which led to Neddy punching him directly in the throat. Now, Bogdan has always seemed nice, so maybe this will turn out to have all been a big misunderstanding, but for now, I’m presenting this strip to you, because when an old man gets punched in the throat in a syndicated newspaper comic, I will talk about it on my blog. That’s the joshreads dot com promise.

Dennis the Menace, 4/4/26

I get that Alice is supposed to be holding a baking pan of some sort, but personally I think the “Ha ha, it’s menacing that Dennis doesn’t know the phrase ‘square meal’ is a metaphor” joke is undermined a bit when we see that his mother is preparing a meal that is in fact literally square, or at least rectangular. Anyway, I’m not sure what prompted Henry to wear a white suit today, but since dinner appears to be some kind of brown glop, I think he’s going to live to regret it.

Blondie, 4/4/26

You keep forgetting that, Herb? You keep forgetting what’s literally the defining characteristic of your supposed best friend? Wow. Wow.

Gil Thorp, 4/4/26

“Is it golf? Wait, no, we just determined that it’s not golf. Well, I guess I’m going to have to keep watching you through these binoculars until I figure it out.”

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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.