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Dick Tracy, 10/14/26

Dick Tracy has a new artist, longtime Tracy superfan Howie Noel, and I am here to report that, in this house, we are now Howie Noel superfans, as this week has reliably delivered panel after panel of real fucked-up shit, which I mean in the most complimentary possible sense. A detective with a neanderthal-level brow ridge and free-flowing beads of sweat. A weird pinheaded nurse in an archaic outfit. A tiny man the size of a ventriloquist’s dummy, or possibly just an actual ventriloquist’s dummy that the nurse is operating. The tiny man/dummy has unpleasantly long fingernails, by the way. A+ all around!

Mary Worth, 10/14/26

OK, so, Toby is still crashing out over the entirely not real Ian/Mary rumors, but let’s look on the bright side for her: artistically, she’s moved on from her “hideous grey animal-shaped blobs” period to her “mawkish painted animal figurines” period, which should be more marketable if nothing else.

Beetle Bailey, 10/14/26

Look, I know that General Halftrack’s coffee tastes can’t possibly be what anyone would call sophisticated, but I refuse to believe that even the most skilled practitioner could make anything in that circa 1975 Mr. Coffee machine that would live up to the name “barista.”

Hi and Lois, 10/14/26

Oh, so Chip isn’t competent to babysit when Hi’s just trying to get some work done at the office, but he’s perfectly capable of doing so when Lois is horny, huh? Interesting. Interesting.

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Dennis the Menace, 10/5/26

Part of being a sophisticated textual critic such as myself is that you have to be able to distinguish between “something I dislike” and “something that is executed poorly.” So, for instance, you know that on principle I dislike the “Dennis insults his mother’s cooking” Dennis the Menace panels. But if you’re going to do it, having Dennis stare ahead, dead-eyed and drooling, and saying “This tastes like shit, mom, it tastes like food that’s just been lying around until it goes bad” is a pretty good execution.

Dick Tracy, 10/5/26

Big news, everyone! A new Dick Tracy storyline is starting today, and the very first strip is a guy falling down the stairs and dying! Or at least I assume? He actually looks pretty much the same in the air as he does on the ground, so maybe he’s fine and just shaped like that.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 10/5/26

For too long, the Baby Boomers and retro-hipster Gen Xers of Glenwood have only been able to express their toxic nostalgia through dedication to roots country music. But soon they’ll also be able to enjoy older films that have been largely forgotten by the mainstream cineaste community for presumably good reason, thanks to Mae Mae’s carefully invested movie earnings and/or Glenwood’s rock-bottom real estate prices!

Crankshaft, 10/5/26

“As a matter of fact, some prescription medications, especially generics, are manufactured in China. It’s somewhat more common, however, for the chemical raw materials to be produced in China while the drug formulation happens in India. Just another facet of our globalized era, where different countries with different prevailing labor costs and specific know-how end up specializing in different segments of the supply chain. I know that’s not a ‘punchline’ per se but I thought you might find it interesting!”

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/21/26

The Comics Curmudgeon has been, in one sense, an experiment to see what writing a blog about newspaper comic strips for 20-plus years does to the human brain, and I’m here to testify that the results are … let’s say, mixed? Like, for instance, last night I literally had a dream that the end of the scam twins storyline in Rex Morgan, M.D., was revealed to be the swan song for the strip as a whole, and I woke up quite bereft! But thank goodness this was just a product of my fevered mind, and instead we’ve got a new adventure brewing, involving … a retired cartoonist working on some commissions? Pass. Hard pass. Glad it’s still happening, but we’ll be skipping this one.

Dick Tracy, 9/21/26

I thought this fellow was holding up his index finger in panel two in a “So you see…” sense, indicating impending exposition in which he would explain at length how Vio routed the money he stole from Ubusoft. But I guess he’s just pointing at that floating, indecipherable text (?) box on his monitor because it contains the explanation, somehow, which is honestly a real relief to me because now I don’t have to even briefly pretend I’m going to try to understand how it all worked.

Garfield, 9/21/26

Not to speak ill of another representative of the mid-to-late ’00s newspaper comics blog milieu from which I myself emerged, but I always thought the idea behind Garfield Minus Garfield was a little off. To me, the funny twist is not imagining that Garfield doesn’t exist, but that to Jon he’s an ordinary cat whose thought balloons are outside of his ability to experience. That really works with today’s strip, where as a cat owner he might be thinking, “Huh, my cat, who obviously does not speak or think in complete English sentences, does seem to be unusually dramatic and despondent on Mondays. Weird! Also not sure where he got that coffee mug from.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 9/21/26

Sorry, this strip doesn’t work for me at all. Nobody in Hootin’ Holler knows what a “citrus fruit” is, and if you tried to explain it to them they’d have you executed for witchcraft.

Intelligent Life, 9/21/26

Jesus Christ, you two, the Borg aren’t “AI,” they’re cybernetically enhanced biological intelligence, and Picard famously defended the citizenship rights of his AI friend in court, how are you such incredible losers but also not even good at being sci-fi geeks