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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

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Dick Tracy, 9/17/26

An aspect of this rapidly concluding Dick Tracy plot that I kind of lost interest in early was that Sam Catchem was sexually coerced into going undercover into the seedy world of online gaming to track down Widescreen’s gang. The looming question, of course, is whether he’d get a taste for these newfangled “video games” in the process. Turns out nope! Widescreen is dead and he’s logging out forever. It’s back to wholesome pursuits for Sam, like curling up on the couch with a copy of Derby Dugan: The Geebus Years.

Gil Thorp, 9/17/26

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the bleachers of the Valley Conference, Beth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. We’re just getting started.”

Mary Worth, 9/17/26

“I heard that Ian Cameron spends more time with Mary Worth than with his own wife … doing I don’t know what! … Nelly said something that sounded like ‘segs,’ maybe, but it wasn’t a word I recognized. But supposedly that’s what she and Ian are doing!”

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Shoe, 9/16/26

More than 20 years ago, I had the idea that it would be fun to start a blog sharing my opinions about Wilbur Weston’s sex life with the world, and mostly it’s been OK, but I have to say that I also have from the get go felt compelled to share the news that the characters in Shoe are birds, which has led me to explain a surprising number of times that a bird is outfitted with a cloaca rather than an anal sphincter, and thus just kind of poops whenever its bowels fill up enough and doesn’t have control over the process like me or (hopefully) you. The Perfesser is a fishhawk and thus an obligate carnivore, but his compatriots of vegan species must be doing truly horrifying things to their digestive system if this is the sort of thing he’s writing about in his column.

Mary Worth, 9/16/26

Speaking of the sex lives of the Weston family, how’s Dawn, who has been established as secretly pining for Tommy, doing with that whole situation? Well, she’s reached whatever the stage of secret pining is where you go bowling with your love object and his girlfriend. Look, she’s even wearing a bowling shirt! She’s really into this! Anyway, her reward for this is to learn from Tommy that Mary Worth and Ian Cameron have successfully initiated the sort of secret cheating affair that she yearns for but can’t have, which has to hurt. Note that Tommy is whispering in panel two: Obviously he wouldn’t tell Brandy this, she’s way too good for this kind of gossip.

Dick Tracy, 9/16/26

It’s no “eaten alive by rats,” but “bleeding out from a gunshot wound to the neck while your wraparound sunglasses display a BSOD” is pretty hardcore, not gonna lie. I certainly hope Widescreen custom-programmed the embedded processor in those glasses himself to keep track of his vital signs in order to deliver a final bit he would never see; if these are just some off-the-shelf smart glasses from Meta or something, I will lose respect for him as a hacker.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 9/16/26

Sorry, there’ll be no crime or kidnapping fun in Rex Morgan, M.D., this week, but there will be drama, in the form of Rex finally being unable to escape the conclusion that his sons are pretty stupid. Remember, one of these kids is Rex and June’s biological child and the other is adopted, so we’re really gonna settle some nature vs. nurture questions here in ways that will not reflect well on our protagonist.